Coming Soon
DOUBLE FEATURE: A SERIOUS MAN + CRACKING UP
2009 + 1983
Director
Coen Brothers
Jerry Lewis
Starring
Michael Stuhlbarg
Jerry Lewis
Runtime
106 + 83 minutes
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Two very important looks at American Jewish masculinity in the late twentieth century. Either one of these films alone poses many deep questions. Together, they may contain all the secrets of the universe.
A SERIOUS MAN
The Coen Brothers’ most personal film is a very funny piece of miserabilism about an angst-ridden Jewish professor seeking the answers to life's questions and getting a metaphysical pie in the face. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor at a 1960s university, but his life is coming apart at the seams. His wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him, his jobless brother (Richard Kind) has moved in, and someone is trying to sabotage his chances for tenure. Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis, but whether anyone can help him overcome his many afflictions remains to be seen. Has God abandoned Larry? Has God abandoned us all? We’ll let you know.
CRACKING UP aka SMORGASBORD
Jerry Lewis’s final directorial feature, from 1983, lives up to its title in ways that seem painfully intentional. Jerry stars as the nebbishy Warren Nefron, whose bleak identity is defined by the opening scenes, in which he tries and fails to commit suicide. (The attempts run throughout the film, in set pieces that are among Jerry's best ever.) In despair, Warren sees a psychiatrist whose lame and craven methods only deepen his abyss. The comic tragedy is a bourgeois nightmare: out of work, alone, unloved, physically defenseless, spiritually unmoored, clinically clumsy, devoid of charm, Warren is condemned to life with nothing but the weight of his dark memories. And it’s an absolute lock on any hypothetical Beacon ‘top five funniest films of all time’ list.
“The story of the film is not only impossible to narrate, it is, like poetry, impossible to sum up. It is disjointed, like the first Lewis films, but it is disjointed like any story that obeys the logic of the signifier (and not literary or psychological plausibility). CRACKING UP is a mechanical bachelor, happy to simply and energetically emit signals. It calls out no one. An example? The French translation of the title (“T’es fou, Jerry!”: Jerry, you’re mad!) says it all. But that is still someone – an intimate – observing this state of madness. Whereas CRACKING UP *is* madness.” - Serge Daney, Cahier du Cinema
A SERIOUS MAN
The Coen Brothers’ most personal film is a very funny piece of miserabilism about an angst-ridden Jewish professor seeking the answers to life's questions and getting a metaphysical pie in the face. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor at a 1960s university, but his life is coming apart at the seams. His wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him, his jobless brother (Richard Kind) has moved in, and someone is trying to sabotage his chances for tenure. Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis, but whether anyone can help him overcome his many afflictions remains to be seen. Has God abandoned Larry? Has God abandoned us all? We’ll let you know.
CRACKING UP aka SMORGASBORD
Jerry Lewis’s final directorial feature, from 1983, lives up to its title in ways that seem painfully intentional. Jerry stars as the nebbishy Warren Nefron, whose bleak identity is defined by the opening scenes, in which he tries and fails to commit suicide. (The attempts run throughout the film, in set pieces that are among Jerry's best ever.) In despair, Warren sees a psychiatrist whose lame and craven methods only deepen his abyss. The comic tragedy is a bourgeois nightmare: out of work, alone, unloved, physically defenseless, spiritually unmoored, clinically clumsy, devoid of charm, Warren is condemned to life with nothing but the weight of his dark memories. And it’s an absolute lock on any hypothetical Beacon ‘top five funniest films of all time’ list.
“The story of the film is not only impossible to narrate, it is, like poetry, impossible to sum up. It is disjointed, like the first Lewis films, but it is disjointed like any story that obeys the logic of the signifier (and not literary or psychological plausibility). CRACKING UP is a mechanical bachelor, happy to simply and energetically emit signals. It calls out no one. An example? The French translation of the title (“T’es fou, Jerry!”: Jerry, you’re mad!) says it all. But that is still someone – an intimate – observing this state of madness. Whereas CRACKING UP *is* madness.” - Serge Daney, Cahier du Cinema