Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) watches his life fall apart around him. His wife wants a ritual divorce so she can be together with Sy Abelman. His son sees him as only useful for fixing the TV aerial so the kid can watch F Troop (I've seen F Troop on Nick at Nite, the kid ain't missing much). He's got a student trying to bribe him for a better grade on the midterm, then threatening to sue him for defamation of character for accusing him of offering a bribe, and a lot of other crap.
And Gopnik can't figure out why all of this is happening to him, or what he's supposed to do about it. He tries talking to not one but three rabbis, which doesn't seem to help. He has no control over his life, things are being done to it completely beyond his grasp or without his input. People guide him to and fro, manipulate his emotions while trying to claim they aren't doing that, and he just sort of drifts with it. His resistance is token. I spent most of the movie waiting to see if he'd snap and just let everything loose at once.
The movie opens over a century earlier, and introduces the idea of a dybbuk, a spirit possessing a corpse and potentially cursing people. I don't know if we're meant to think that's what's happening here, or just people will use anything as an excuse for why things are going wrong. Maybe that family was cursed because they invited a dybbuk in for soup. Or maybe they're cursed because they stabbed an old man because they thought he was a dybbuk. Or maybe he was a dybbuk, and they'd have been fine if they just gave him some soup and hospitality. You can never tell with the mythological creatures, whether you can kill them with kindness. Or there is no curse, but it makes a convenient excuse for why their lives sucked going forward.
If there's a higher power doing all this, they're never going to give Larry or us the answers as to why. Even if they do, there's not shit you can do about it if they have that kind of power. I mean, he may very well be hopelessly doomed because of vast forces beyond his ken, but since he can't know, he might as well proceed as though he can do something. I'm not sure that's where the movie is going with it, though to be honest I was starting to check out in the last 20 minutes because I was getting frustrated with it.
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3 comments:
Oh F Troop...I do remember it well. Did you know that Larry Storch, actually played the Duc d'Alencon, opposite Glenda Jackson, in Elizabeth R?
And did an excellent job of it!
No I didn't, mostly because I'd never heard of Elizabeth R. But yeah, he was in a lot of stuff, which I wouldn't have expected. He's even in The Great Race, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.
I had forgotten about The Great Race! One of my favorite movies.
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