I Am a Serious Man -New Film

This new and totally absorbing film by the Coen brothers is replete with their customary stylistic idiosyncrasies, gentle yet farcical humour and off beat quirky characters through which they stunningly pull off an incisive and culturally accurate film. Based on elements of their own upbringing, set in a mid west Jewish American middle class suburb in the late sixties, the narrative of the film throws up a series of unpredictable yet believable circumstances, as it depicts a tsunami of familial and personal crises that engulf its main protagonist.

The unerring precision with which the Coen’s portray this passage of history, its claustrophobic banality and simmering unspoken emotional tension, induces in the viewer a state of suspended horror even nausea, at the grating awkwardness of everything it portrays.

The area where the film scores its greatest successes lies in the riveting portrayal of a huge variety of Jewish characters played, by an assumedly all Jewish cast. These actors vividly bring to life the tensions of the time through not expressing them. This is conveyed magnificently and simply through the acutely precise body language through which each actor imparts the alienation and mute isolation of the times as well as the characters from one another. As a subtle contrast to this stifling tone, the film refers at times obliquely and at others more directly to the countercultural seismic shifts occurring outside the perimeters of this enclosed world.

Ultimately bleak, the film traces the travails of Larry Gopnick, Physics Professor as he is sideswiped by a completely unexpected separation and possible divorce, blackmailed out of the family home and cringingly patronised by his wife’s intended new husband and bribed and blackmailed by a student potentially undermining an impending offer of tenure. Understandably he descends into a state of anguish, from which not one single acquaintance is able to assuage his deepening gloom. In desperation he seeks out two of three local Rabbis only to be offered glib platitudes or meaningless obscurantism.

The film within its own parameters is a triumph of convincing pathos, humour and whilst not nostalgic, an affectionate backward look at a very a specific time and place of a cultural rite of passage.

However stepping outside the Coen brothers’ milieu and seeing through, the artistic oeuvre that they inhabit, it is possible to discern certain cultural assumptions upon which the film is based. These presuppositions pervade the fabric of the film and render the overall message and content of the film a portrayal of a lost and nihilistically bereft humanity.

Whilst perfectly capturing the emptiness and isolation of modernity, the knowing almost sneering, poking of fun at human eccentricity, the nonexistence of any sense of underlying meaning or purpose in the lives of those portrayed, guarantee this movie carries the Coen’s typical filmic emotional undertow –their pervasive signature note of human futility and purposelessness. Whilst this film is not as much overt homage to the death drive as ‘No Country for Old Men’, ‘A Serious Man’ its ultimate longer term affect is to reduce art to smug irony.

The International

I went to see this film on Sunday at the Holloway Odeon; and I have to say it was more than disappointing. The key characters fulfill their stereotypical roles with Clive Owen appearing as if by rote angry, unkempt, brutalised, horrified and angry again, as with Naomi Watts who is sorely under utilised as the female lead, conforming religiously to genre type. This was not the actors' but the writers fault, the producers of Bourne and Bond at times, overcome incredulity, through audacity and stunning action, however the International fails to deliver on all of these fronts.

Despite the topicality of the subject matter, essentially the storyline failed to engage me enough to suspend disbelief in the lead characters. A summary of the plot is as follows;

Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) are determined to bring to justice one of the world's most powerful banks, the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC). Uncovering illegal activities including money laundering, arms trading, and the destabilization of governments, Salinger and Whitman's investigation takes them from Berlin to Milan, where the IBBC assassinates an Italian prime ministerial candidate. (from wikipedia)

What attracted my to see this film was the stunning look of the trailers and the production values implicit in such ravishing appearances. The scenery and the backdrops are mainly breathtaking, particularly the scene featuring the Italian arms factory and shots of the precipitous cliff edge route away from the site. Additionally the building and location shoots are visually poetic, their imposing immenseness conjuring up resonances of feudal castles and palaces of a more mythological era.

Armin Muelher-Stahl is very credible and skilfully underplays his role as an ex Stasi Head of Security for IBBC and his character allows some (shock!) moral complexity to enter into the film. Furthermore Ulrich Thomsen a Jonas Skarssen , the president of IBBC plays the head of the evil empire as a normal businessman, coldly calculating the best way to further the banks financial goals without any hint of sadism or megalomania, whether these portrayals are down to superior acting or better drawn characters it is hard to tell.

These positive points aside it leaves me wishing for more nuanced ambivalent portraits of the ‘good guys’. Who in the International are so preposterously always doing the right thing, that the evil banks employees, partially steal the show and demonstrate to some degree the motivations that caused the current economic crisis.