Could Tarot Have Saved Larry Gopnik?

I just saw the Coen Brothers' new movie, "A Serious Man," and really didn't like it. Adding to my dislike was the strong sense that Joel and Ethan Coen didn't want me to like it. I'm not sure what drove them to make this movie; it seems to be a kind of exorcism, a purging of long-supressed cranky feelings around their identity as Jews and as filmmakers. Or, maybe they see it as a dark comedy and a character study, and that's it. But it made me truly uncomfortable, and I think that would make them happy.

There's been a trend over the last decade or so toward comedy that is built on the discomfort and embarrassment of both its characters and its audience. "The Office" uses this technique to generate its uneasy humor; so do Sacha Baron Cohen's movies. Paul Thomas Anderson also enjoys generating huge amounts of unreleased emotion onscreen, seeing how much tension his characters and viewers can take before they/we combust.

"A Serious Man" is about Larry Gopnik, played by the amazing Michael Stuhlbarg, a theater actor who's now branching out into film. Larry seems profoundly disconnected from his own life. He's a Jew living in late-1960s-midwestern suburbia, but his relationship to his faith is unclear. On the one hand, he seems absorbed into a Jewish community that includes his family, various rabbis, a lawyer, a dentist, and the foxy bored housewife next door. On the other hand, his son is preparing for his bar mitzvah, apparently with little or no contribution on Larry's part, and we never really understand whether Larry is observant, pretending to be a believer, or is unsure of his own faith.

Larry's wife dumps him early in the film, kicking off an extreme inner and outer crisis (even the weather is affected, a la Paul Thomas Anderson — remember the rain of frogs in "Magnolia"?). But Larry is deeply passive on all levels as his life dissolves into chaos. He is able to do little to fight back against the forces around him, and maybe within him as well. As Stuhlbarg plays him, Larry is almost a Willy Loman type: a guy who thinks that just going along, being a good, normal person, should be enough to ensure that his life won't go completely to hell. Like Willy, he is wrong.

I wasn't sure what the Coens were getting at here. Are they saying that there are no answers to life's big questions, no matter how hard we look, so we should just go with the flow? That doesn't seem to pay off for Larry. Are they telling us that to live without faith in anything will produce an unrooted and spiritually empty existence, but that to have faith in anything is pointless? Not that there has to be a lesson for viewers, but I was left feeling like something was missing — the heart of the story seems to have been bloodlessly excised.

Anyway, I was wondering if Larry could have benefited from a little tarot in his life. If I were the next-door neighbor, and I offered him a reading instead of a joint, what would have happened? Would he have been able to see his way out of the cage he had constructed for himself? Probably not. As Larry runs from rabbi to rabbi looking for answers, it becomes clear that his spiritual quest comes too little too late. Even the High Priestess would have slammed her book of secrets in his face!

Stuhlbarg, as it happens, looks (in this role) eerily like my grandad, also an emotionally repressed Jew, who died (to the best of my knowledge) encased in a shell of cynicism about human nature. I'm trying to picture myself reading tarot for Grandad Lou. Would he have let me? Would he have laughed at me? I'll never know.