Serious Men

NaBloPoMo 19: After I turned in the grant application Tuesday, M. treated me to dinner and a movie, order reversed. We saw A Serious Man at the Coolidge, the latest from the Coen brothers, who are perhaps M.'s favorite American filmmakers and who are high on my list as well. Set at the beginning of the 1960s, ASM recounts the travails of a middle-American Jewish physics professor (up for tenure) over the course of a few rough weeks. He was a seriously overwhelmed man. The movie was funny, but not uproariously so, and I'll admit that I probably didn't fully catch what deeper message it tried to convey, though I think that was the intended effect, a kind of meta-joke. I have to say that I (sometimes? often? I'm not sure of the frequency) can have a difficult time with Jewish humor, in that I get the joke at a sort of intellectual level, but the punchline or the irony or whatever simply doesn't arouse the right kind of belly laugh in me, though I recognize that the comedic situation is indeed funny enough to deserve that kind of response. I sometimes have the nagging (sometimes not just nagging but directly confrontational) feeling that I'm witness to an inside joke that, not being Jewish myself, I don't really have permission to be party to, and that even if I did, my inexperience with Jewish culture would preclude me from really getting the joke in its fullness. I'm usually left a little bit dissatisfied in a manner that seems intrinsic and inevitable; even the magnificent Portnoy's Complaint left me with the uneasy sense of ineluctably missing something. Whatever -- it was a good movie. Go see it.



This evening I finished watching Smiley's People; M. lost interest about two-thirds of the way in, so I viewed the last hour alone. The plot is somewhat difficult to follow and requires a fair level of familiarity with the tropes the spy novel; there is at least one scene in which the twists and turns are recounted point by point for the benefit of the bewildered audience, yet the next events are hard to fathom unless one apprehends the peculiar logic of Cold War espionage gamesmanship. George Smiley, Alec Guinness's character, is an admirable enigma, full of meaningful silences. He is definitely a serious man, rational, unflappable, dedicated to the craft of the spy trade, and surrounded by dilettantes. I liked him, and overall I liked the film. Too bad M. missed the big payoff at the end: the appearance of Captain Picard. (Final advice: read the novels before watching the movie, but do watch the movie.)