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A Serious Man follows Larry Gopnik, a physics professor whose life is in a state of extreme uncertainty. He may or may not be getting divorced. He may or may not be getting tenure. He may or may not be getting sued by a kid who may or may not have given him a bribe, which he may or may not accept. And throughout it all, he doesn't really even seem to know what he wants. If anything, he wants to know why all this is happening to him. He asks three rabbis, and the information they give him only increases his confusion. Is God responsible? Are everyday trials tests of faith? By the end of the movie, you may or may not find yourself asking: Who cares?
The movie is a bit of a paradox, in that it is simultaneously interesting and boring. How so? It's interesting at an intellectual level, but it's rarely emotionally engaging: The sort of movie that's more fun to discuss at a party than to actually watch.
The Meaning of Life?
A Serious Man addresses the four key evolutionary themes, but in an unusual way. As many movies do, A Serious Man pits Getting Along against Getting the Girl, Getting Ahead, and Getting the Bad Guy. Most movies, however, start out with a character obsessed with one of the latter goals, and that character eventually learns that Getting Along is more important than personal gain (e.g., Han Solo, Buzz Lightyear, Wikus from District Nine). Larry Gopnik does little to pursue Getting the Girl, Getting the Bad Guy or Getting Ahead -- he puts up little fight when his wife wants to leave him, he never so much as speaks badly of the slimeball who's wrecking his marriage, and when asked by his department chair whether he wants to submit any publications to support his tenure, he just says "I haven't done anything." A Serious Man depicts Larry as a person who wants to get along, but it piles on more and more reasons for you to think "Buddy, you've got to look out for yourself."
A Serious Man doesn't really provide answers relevant to the four usual themes, but instead focuses on a very serious question: Why do people hold religious beliefs? Several evolutionary psychologists, such as Pascal Boyer and Ara Norenzayan, have suggested that religious beliefs may be byproducts of cognitive mechanisms that normally serve other functions. Our ancestors got benefits from asking causal questions about how nature works, or from analyzing when and why other people might punish them for misdeeds. Perhaps they misapplied the same logical processes to events like tornadoes or earthquakes -- trying to determine whether these events were punishments from a supernatural human-like figure (i.e., a god).
Larry Gopnik seems to be a relevant case study: he wants to know why his life is going so badly, and he wonders if God is responsible. Larry goes to talk to one rabbi, then another, and gets only confusing and irrelevant advice. When he demands to see the head rabbi, he is denied, because although the old cleric appears to be sitting around and staring blankly -- his secretary says he is "thinking." In the end, the Coen Brothers seem to be saying that life is merely one random absurd event after another, and that religious beliefs are ridiculous.
However, like Dawkins' book God Delusion, the movie A Serious Man may not give religion a completely fair shake. There is another side to the evolutionary psychology of religion. Besides exploiting people's cognitive mechanisms with questionable dogma, religious groups serve practical functions -- inspiring people to form reciprocal relationships, helping them avoid cheating in ways that might get them tarred and feathered, providing social support for families, forming self-protective alliances against enemy groups, and even helping them find and keep mates (see, for example, the recent research by Azim Shariff, Jason Weeden, David Sloan Wilson, Dominic Johnson and Jesse Bering, which we reference below). A Serious Man only shows one side of the believer's trade-offs, the part dissected in Dawkins' God Delusion, without capturing any of the functional side of the picture.
How Serious a Contender?
So far, we've reviewed six best picture nominees: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, District 9, Up, Up in the Air, and A Serious Man (links to those reviews below). Looking back over these films, nearly all feature characters taking big actions in pursuit of important goals. In Avatar and District 9, the main characters must decide whether to betray their own people to defend an alien race. The characters in The Hurt Locker risk life and limb to save strangers, over and over again. In Up, Carl Frederickson flies his balloon-powered house to South America to fulfill his deceased wife's dream, and then lets the house go to save his friend. Even George Clooney's character in Up in the Air dramatically walks out in the middle of an important speech to chase down the woman with whom he has fallen in love.
These people show how we should act, either as paragons of virtue performing feats of heroism, or as cautionary tales about going down a road to ruin. Larry Gopnik is neither. He never really makes a dramatic move, until the last scene, and the result is as confusing as the rest of the movie. We suppose that's the point, but while it's interesting it's hardly satisfying.
If we were rating A Serious Man in the context of movies in general, we would give it a B - although it's disjointed and doesn't have any clear resolution, it did give us an interesting take on Jewish culture in the American suburbs, and it got us thinking about some big issues. Throw in the odd and quirky characters, and some good chuckles, and maybe it's a B+. But in the context of 10 strong contenders for Best Picture, we can't justify giving this one more than a C.
Evolutionary Grade:
Ambulating Anthropoid
Bouncing Bonobo
Crawling Crayfish -- √dtk √dlk
Dozing Drosophila
Extinct Eukaryote
Coauthored by Douglas T. Kenrick
Links to our other reviewers of Best Picture nominees
Avatar 3D: Evolutionary Psychology goes to Hollywood
Evolutionary Psychology and the Oscar Race II: The Hurt Locker
For a psychological lift on Valentine's Day, Watch UP
Modern technology as intimacy's enemy: Are we all "Up in the Air?"
Two kinds of bad guys: District 9 and human prejudice.
Related readings (these continue on next page)
Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2004). Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27:713-770.
Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 119-124.
Johnson, D., & Bering, J. (2006). Hand of God, mind of man: Punishment and cognition in the evolution of cooperation. Evolutionary Psychology, 4, 219-233.
Shariff, A. F., & Norenzayan, A. (2007). God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game.Psychological Science,18, 803-809.
Weeden, J., Cohen, A.B., & Kenrick, D.T. (2008). Religious attendance as reproductive support. Evolution & Human Behavior, 29, 327-334.
Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
