I finally got around to seeing the Coen Brothers’ latest film, A Serious Man, and it wouldn’t be fair to say I was disappointed. One person had already told me how much she hated it, and even the best reviews were somewhat ambivalent. The idea that the Coens were going to try and tackle, or even graze,  some big topics (the existence of God, the meaning of life, the appeal of F Troop) filled me with trepidation. But The Big Lebowski is about as deep as I like my movies, and it’s three-word credo, “The Dude abides,” is about as close to profound as I expect in a comedy. 

So the overall misanthropy of A Serious Man didn’t really surprise me (honestly, could any of those actors have been made to look any uglier?) and I was ready to give the Coens a free pass on their own version of Jewish self-loathing; Philip Roth went a long way with that, after all, and came out on the other side to become a writer who does deal with some universal truths, and sometimes truthfully. But I did not expect them to mess up on the pop stuff. 

A Serious Man is set in 1967, and the story of the trials of college professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, who carries the film about as well as any one man could) culminates with his son’s bar mitzvah. One of the many plagues that visits the long-suffering dad is in the form of a Columbia Record Club salesman who wants him to  pay for the records his son ordered without his dad’s permission. It’s all meant to be a sort of anti-climax when the guy finally gets him on the phone (Gopnik has much bigger worries) but then the salesman mentions that the one of records is Santana’s Abraxas. Which was released in September 1970.

Verisimilitude is one thing (for that matter, how does the kid seem to have the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow recorded in his transistor radio? did he possess the prototype of the Walkman? did he travel through time to get the first iPod?). But the film’s loving attention to other period detail (from the color of the family’s walls, to their clothes, cars and glasses) makes you wonder what the Coens are trying to signal with this anomaly — that it’s just a fantasy, anyway? that they’re in charge and can switch historical details at will? that they just liked the sound of the “Abraxas,” a multifaceted god in Gnostic mythology that Carlos Santana plucked from the pages of Hermann Hesse’s Demian? 

The last possibility might imply that the Coens are trying to Tell Us Something, after all, about the film’s big questions. But I think that gives them too much credit. The fact that they chose to have a venerated rabbi quote the lyrics of Darby Slick’s “Somebody to Love” as if they contained profundities is insulting enough. (And how come the rabbi knows the names of everyone in the band except the drummer?) The anomaly of referencing an album that would not be recorded for another three years to me just implies that they don’t care enough about their audience, let alone the meaning of life, to try and be consistent. Which might be forgivable if it was funny.