Pun Salad

Not a bad movie to watch around Passover! And it's from the Coen Brothers. Nominated for two Oscars (Best Movie and Best Original Screenplay), it didn't win, but still…

Other than the brief opening, a little Yiddish fable set in (roughly) centuries-ago Eastern Europe, the movie is set in 1967 and an anonymous Minneapolis suburb. The hero—although maybe not the title character—is Larry Gopnik, a physics professor, family man, observant Jew, and an all-around decent guy. What could go wrong?

Well, you might want to brush up on the Book of Job. Just hitting the high points here: Larry's wife is cheating on him, and wants a divorce. His son is a both a potty-mouth and a pothead. His daughter is a potty-mouth and an airhead, a stereotypical Princess in the making. His deadbeat brother has moved in, whose life is centered around (1) a bizarre work of crackpot math, and (2) draining a pesky sebaceous cyst on the back of his neck. One neighbor views him with contempt tinged with hostility; the other is a beautiful and mysterious woman who sunbathes nude in her backyard. (Oh yeah, you might aslo want to brush up on the Second Book of Samuel.) At work, he's up for tenure, the tenure committee is getting anonymous accusations of moral turpitude, his students are bored, and a flunking Asian student attempts to bribe him for a good grade.

Also: the Columbia Record Club is on his ass. You don't want that.

The movie is very darkly funny, and (frankly) one of the reasons it works so well is its immersion in 1967 Midwestern Jewish culture. There are a lot of unknowns in the cast, but also a bunch of actors you've probably seen before (George Wyner, Richard Kind, even Fyvush Finkel in a small role). A special treat was Simon Helberg as a very young, green, Rabbi—hey, that's Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory. Everybody's wonderful.

Something I learned: Jews, when consternated, are as likely as Christians to exclaim Jesus Christ! I'm still working on the theological implications of that: do they think they're avoiding a Third Commandment foul when they do that? (Or Second, if you number them that way?) If so, does it work?