Best of Ever, Vol. I: Cursed Men

A SERIOUS MAN (2009) (A) - The Coen brothers, at the height of their powers, find the perfect mix of black comedy and pathos in this story of an everyday mensch struggling in the evolving cultural landscape of the pscychedelic '60s to keep family and career on track. Michael Stuhlbarg is sublime as the perpetually flustered Larry Gopnik, whose wife is leaving him for their friend, whose son is a useless stoner, and whose exchange student is trying to bribe him.

Even by Coen standards, this cast of characters is quirky yet oddly compelling. The humor is as dark and devastating as you can get without crossing over to mawkish or macabre. Larry, for much of the film, awaits a doctor's diagnosis. Meantime, he must share a hotel room with his disgusting brother Arthur (Richard Kind) while trying to shake from his mind the image of his hippie-chick neighbor Mrs. Samsky (a scene-stealing Amy Landecker).

You get the feeling that the Coens are vetting their own childhoods through adolescent Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), who dodges a bully on his way from school every day, talks trash with his buddies, gets high at his bar mitzvah, and shudders in the presence of the ancient, mysterious rabbi who confiscates his transistor radio (Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" plays a pivotal role on the soundtrack).

There's just too much to unpack here in a capsule review. But Stuhlbarg's hectored schmuck is so riddled with layer upon layer of guilt and longing and displacement that even Larry Gopnik would not know whether to laugh or cry at the trivialized travails of Job he is put through. This is easily on of the Coens' best films (see our 2016 ranking at the end of this link) that only grows more touching with each viewing.

FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) (A) - Devastating doesn't get any more smart and cool than this landmark 1970 film from Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers. This eviscerating family drama centers around Nicholson's Bobby Dupea, a former piano prodigy slumming it as an oil-rig worker, wasting his life going on drunk romps with a buddy and shacking up with a floozy waitress girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), who has a fondness for Tammy Wynette weepers on the record player.

When he learns that his father is dying, Bobby is convinced by his sister, Partita (Lois Smith), to return to the family's country estate in Washington State. Bobby plies his charms on his affable brother Carl's fiancee, Catherine Van Oost (a deliriously attractive Susan Anspach), who toys with the psychologically screwed-up Bobby with the skills of a feral cat -- all while Rayette cools her heels in a rundown motel outside of town. The final scene might rip your heart out if you're not prepared for a demonstration of the cruelty of the human contition.

Brutal doesn't begin to describe the emotional depths that Nicholson explores in this ultimate character study of the American male. Rafelson co-wrote this with Carole Eastman (credited as Adrien Joyce).

This film is inexorably of its time -- the early years of the American New Wave when the boomers were replacing the postwar generations. If you don't get weak in the legs upon seeing Karen Black (curled up in a bathroom sink like a kitten to apply her makeup) or Susan Anspach, well, then, you went through adolescence at a different time than I did, and I hope you've got others to fill that gap. Look also for Fannie Flagg, Tony Basil and Sally Struthers in cameos.

BONUS TRACKS
You haven't lived until you've seen a 90-year-old riff on the opening lyrics of a Jefferson Airplane song: "When the truth is found ... to be lies ... and all hope ... within you dies ... then vhut?!"



Nicholson's Bobby bangs out a raggedy version of Chopin's Fantasie in F minor on a piano perched on the back of a pickup truck sitting in traffic: