The Road and A Serious Man

I've been knee deep in grading finals research papers, so this is the first post in quite awhile. During the last week I treadmilled my way through two seemingly disparate works: The Coen Bros. A Serious Man and Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. What brought the two together for me (other than the happenstance of choosing them on the same week) was the ending of each. And Cormac McCarthy, in a way, since he also wrote the novel that the Coen's based their last (and better) movie on. Each left me in a state of befuddlement, wondering what was going to happen next. I generally like works that end this way, as they send me back to the texts and ask me to keep thinking about what I've read. Still, I think one ended much more successfully than the other.

I really wanted to like A Serious Man. The Coen's have made some of my favorite movies, including the best American movie of the 00's (No Country for Old Men), the best movie ever based on Homer (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou), and my favorite movie of the last 20 years (The Big Lebowski). Like those other movies, there is subtle, bent, and occasionally slapstick humor in A Serious Man; but it all comes in the last half an hour. The movie felt like a a story where the storyteller takes so long to get to the punchline that you lose interest. The best moments are wonderful (Grace Slick as the oracle of wisdom? The incongruous opening scene?), but I was left, like Gertrude, wanting "more matter and less art." Very much a retelling of the Job story, this one suffers because we're not sure why the universe wants the main character to suffer. I never liked the Job story anyway--god's got nothing better to do than screw with a poor schmuck because of a bet with the devil? Works better with rich guys in Trading Places that with divine beings. Back to the movie. Best moment: finding out the consequence of changing a student grade. The movie looks great, takes forever to develop, and leaves you wondering wtf? when a tornado comes along at the end to conveniently undo everything. Or not. Too much like an inside joke or a story that doesn't come together, and you know it's storyteller's fault that it didn't come together.

McCarthy's novel also leaves the reader wondering just what the ending suggests. After wandering around in a post-apocalyptic world made palatable only because of the father/son relationship, the novel ends by asking us to consider if our point of view had been wrong all along. Would the boy have been better without his father? Should they have stayed moving on the road? Who does the boy meet at the end? I don't like most modern fiction, but I have enjoyed rediscovering McCarthy. I'd read All the Pretty Horses years ago, and when No Country came out I worked my way through most of his novels. Good stuff. The typical cliches are that his prose is uncompromising, and his vision poetic and mythic. I won't disagree with the cliches here. Good stuff. Not Faulkner, but he's leaps and bounds above most of the rest of the modern shite I've read lately. I can't imagine making a good movie out of it (too much interior monologue, not enough action) and am sure they mucked it up, but I've got it on the Netflix Queue and will be treadmilling with it soon. Unless of course the world blows up and I'm left to get my exercise by running away from cannibals and the scarred detritus of our world.