This film is a real gem; intelligent, moving and muted. There is something very quiet and subdued about the humour in this black comedy that heightens the tragedy at its core. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is pitifully helpless as his unremarkable life crumbles before him; his wife is leaving him, his professional reputation is being sabotaged, his children are emotionally detached and he can only experience happiness in fantasised encounters with a sexy neighbour.
The bleakness of his situation is heightened by the clever manipulation of cinematic convention. The audience craves a happy ending and the film repeatedly depicts episodes in which Larry’s various problems are solved, albeit in ways that are always verging on the ridiculous, only to reveal that these are merely bad dreams. Things keep getting worse, and our expectations are at last subverted when a film that we think can only conclude when Larry’s problems are solved finally ends with a tornado and a personal catastrophe far more disturbing than anything that has gone before.
Just like Larry the insecure Jew, searching for the answers to the questions God poses and finding nothing, the audience finds no comfort or meaning in his demise. The tone of the film is not one of despair, though, rather one of amusing irreverence. The film begins with a vignette: a Jewish couple from generations ago are visited by what the wife believes to be a dybbuk in the form of a deceased friend; she stabs the demon but is met with a torrent of human blood and is cursed. Is it this curse which is acting upon Larry? Is his religiosity as ridiculous as the myth of the dybbuk? We walk away from this film experiencing an existential crisis as immediate as Larry’s – do we really only have superstition to fall back on when we search for meaning in the minutiae of our lives? There really is no better way to be entertained on a Wednesday evening.
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