A Serious Man, the newest offering from Joel and Ethan Coen, comes out today, and Cinema Blend recently caught up with the pair to chat with them about the unusual comedy.
Its story takes place in a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis during 1967 and involves a professor who undergoes an existential crisis when his wife contemplates ditching him for another man and his children steal money for marijuana and plastic surgery. The movie apparently weaves together themes of Jewish life in the Midwest with the changing social landscape of the late 60s. The soundtrack, which contains both religious and secular music, plays a large part in communicating the atmosphere, as Joel highlighted in the conversation.
We thought it would be interesting to do something set in 1967 in that community, because that was such an interesting point in our own childhood. And part of it came from thinking about the music of that period, the combination of Jewish liturgical music and cantorial music and Jefferson Airplane. Just a bunch of different things.
The brothers also mentioned that they wanted to get across the different feel of the Jewish communities of the Midwest as compared to those of New York or Los Angeles. Along those lines, they used a cast of mostly local unknowns. As Ethan pointed out, they also occassionally needed advisors.
We didn't do any research per se. Once the script was written and we actually started making the movie, there were a couple of people who were our Jew technical advisors, helping us with the language and the liturgical stuff for the service or whatever. And of course, we got a raft of translators for the Yiddish beginning of the movie. A raft of dueling Yiddishists. Everyone had an opinion about what form of Yiddish we should use.
The Coens also discussed their own upbringing amongst these Jewish communities, reminiscing about their Bar Mitzvahs, among other experiences. When asked about whether the movie will help audiences understand this particular Jewish experience, they said that their goal wasn't about understanding, but about getting the specificity right so that details could provide a successful backdrop for the story.