Arts & Entertainment
Get 'Serious'
With A Serious Man, Oscar-winning film-
makers the Coen Brothers unveil their
most Jewish and personal project.
Naomi Pfefferman
Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.
A
bout a decade ago, Joel and
Ethan Coen, the brilliant
and iconoclastic filmmak-
ers of Fargo and the Oscar-winning No
Country for Old Men, sat down with
this reporter to answer questions about
growing up Jewish in St. Louis Park,
Minn., where they amused themselves
during the bleak winters by making Super
8 films.
The Coen brothers are notorious for
their ironic and glib responses to personal
questions, but during that interview at a
Los Angeles hotel they seemed to express
genuine affection for their Orthodox
maternal grandparents and remembered
hearing the Yiddish language spoken by
elders. They also spoke fondly of a sister
who went off to become a physician in
Israel.
Over the years, they have expressed
their Jewish identification through a pre-
ponderance of unusual Jewish characters:
the Clifford Odets-like playwright battling
writer's block in Barton Fink, for one,
and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), the
crazed Vietnam veteran turned security
expert who says he is "Shomer Shabbos"
in The Big Lebowski.
But, eventually, the Coens said, they
hoped to make a film that would directly
hearken back to the Jewish community of
their childhood, where they learned Hebrew
at the Talmud Torah school in St. Louis
Park in the late 1960s. It took the broth-
ers nine more years to make that movie,
A Serious Man, which they shot in 2008
after sweeping the Academy Awards with
No Country for Old Men, and which will
open Oct. 2 in limited release. The story
takes place in a Midwestern suburb in
1967, the same year Joel Coen became a bar
mitzvah, but expands beyond it to become
a haunting meditation on the nature of
human suffering, God and the universe —
while combining the slapstick of Raising
Arizona with the nihilism of No Country
for Old Men.
The black comedy opens with a quote
from the sage Rashi, which looms large
on a black screen: "Accept with simplicity
Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
New Flicks
Opening Friday, Oct. 2, are
Zombieland and Invention of Lying.
The former is a horror flick with
a lot of tongue-in-cheek comedy. A
plague turns most of the people in
the world into zombies.
A cowardly guy (Jesse Eisenberg,
25) joins up with a seasoned zombie
killer (Woody Harrelson) on a long
trip to a place where they think they
will be safe. Along the way, they
meet up with two young girls (Emma
Stone and Abigail Breslin), who also
are survivors.
Eisenberg, who co-starred
earlier this year in the indie hit
Adventureland, is starting to build a
strong movie career.
The first-time director is Ruben
Fleischer. I was amused by his name
in the context of a movie about
flesh-eating zombies. His first name
reminds me of the famous meaty
44
October 1 • 2009
deli sandwich,
and his last name
essentially means
"meaty" in Yiddish.
Lying is a comedy
that takes place in
an alternate real-
ity in which lying
Ruben
– even the concept
Fleischer
of a lie – does not
exist. Ricky Gervais plays a loser
who suddenly develops the ability
to lie and lies his way to fame and
fortune. Still, he is unable to lie his
way into the heart of the woman he
loves (Jennifer Garner).
Co-stars include
Jeffrey Tambor,
65, Jonah Hill, 25,
Christopher Guest,
61, and Rob Lowe,
45.
Lowe isn't Jewish,
but his wife is; his
Christopher
children are being
Guest
raised Jewish. Last
year, Lowe was sued
)
Aaron Wolff, left, as Danny Gopnik and Michael Stuhlbarg as Danny's father, Larry
Gopnik, in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man
everything that happens to you," and then
proceeds with an eerie fable set in a shtetl,
performed entirely in Yiddish by actors flu-
ent in the mamaloshen (mother tongue).
In this prologue, a beaming man returns
home on a snowy night and marvels to his
wife about the good luck he experienced
when his cart overturned on the Lublin
road. He was stuck until a droshky (open
cart) approached, and its driver, a Torah
scholar (played by the Yiddish theater
by two former nannies who claimed
he sexually harassed them. He coun-
ter-sued, claiming extortion. Part of
the nannies' case was thrown out by
the court and, last May, both sides
quietly dropped their respective
suits.
The Small
Screen
HBO's Bored to
Death, a come-
dic series about
Jonathan Ames, a
Brooklyn novelist
who moonlights as
Jonathan
an unlicensed pri-
Ames
vate detective, pre-
miered on Sept.18.
Practically in the first scene,
Ames is identified as Jewish. This
is true-to-life, in that the series'
creator/writer is real-life Brooklyn
writer Jonathan Ames, who is in
fact Jewish. Ames, 45, writes novels
and comic memoirs. He also appears
in clubs and bars telling funny first-
veteran Fyvush Finkel) who once studied
under "the Zohar reb in Krakow," helped
him with the needed repairs, allowing him
to resume his travels.
The husband chatters on, oblivious to the
frightened look on his wife's face until she
intones, "God has cursed us." Apparently
this scholar died of typhus at a friend's
home three years earlier."You talked to a
dybbuk," she says, whereupon an ominous
knock sounds at the front door.
person stories. His tales include
accounts of two boxing matches
he has fought under the name the
"Herring Wonder."
Jason Schwartzman, 29, who
plays Ames in Bored, is the son of
a Jewish father and a non-Jewish
mother (actress Talia Coppola Shire).
He was raised secular. (You can read
a lot of Ames' work on his Web site,
jonathanames.com .
Sacha Baron
Cohen (Borat, Bruno)
will guest star as an
Israeli tour guide on
an episode of The
Simpsons.
Cohen, 37, will
provide the voice for
Sacha Baron
an angry but funny
Cohen
guide who meets the
Simpsons clan on a
church-led trip to the Holy Land.
The episode, titled "The Greatest
Story Ever D'ohed," is tentatively
scheduled to air March 28 (Palm
Sunday).