Toronto » Actor Michael Stuhlbarg took a long pause - 14 seconds - when he asked what detail in Joel and Ethan Coen's script of "A Serious Man" helped him latch onto his character.
"Strangely, the first thing that comes to my mind" - pause - "is the pauses," Stuhlbarg said. "It's in between his words, almost. Those moments of bafflement."
In "A Serious Man" (which opens today in Salt Lake City, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas), Stuhlbarg's character, physics professor Larry Gopnik, has a lot to be baffled about. He's a devout Jew living in suburban Minneapolis in the 1960s, a time defined here by conflicting pop-culture forces, the safe comedy of "F Troop" and the psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane.
Larry's seemingly content life is soon beset with problems: His wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces she is leaving him for a family friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Malamed); his troubled brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has moved in; a student is offering him a bribe; his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) whines about money, and his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) seems disinterested in studying for his upcoming bar mitzvah.
Joel Coen -- speaking at a roundtable interview during last month's Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie screened -- describes Larry as "a character you kind of want to kick in the ass a little bit, because he's a doormat, you know?"
Larry is "a very passive character," Joel Coen added, "and those are very difficult to play. You have to keep the audience interested and engaged in your character throughout the entire movie. It's a very hard trick to pull off." (Both Coens compared the challenge to that faced by Billy Bob Thornton in the Coens' 2001 noir thriller "The Man Who Wasn't There.")
"You have to be confident as an actor to just let it be what it is," Ethan Coen added.
Apparently, you have to be confident just to survive the grueling audition process. When Stuhlbarg -- a New York theater actor who once worked with Joel's wife, Frances McDormand, in a theater workshop -- first read for the Coens, it was for a relatively minor role in the film's prologue.
"I never would have found myself in the leading role in a Coen brothers movie," Stuhlbarg said, adding he was happy "about getting a chance to get in the room with those guys."
Months after his first reading, the Coens called him to read for the roles of Larry and Arthur. Months after that, one of the Coens called to say "you're going to get one of these parts." It was only six weeks before filming that Joel finally told him he'd be playing Larry. "I was just glad to have an answer at that point," the actor said.
"Michael had sort of a soulfulness that you're engaged in and want to watch throughout the whole movie. He makes [Larry] human in a really soulful, deep way," Joel Coen said.
Kind, possibly the best-known face in the cast after years on TV's "Spin City" and a slew of other comic roles, first read for the role of Larry's lawyer (a role ultimately played by Adam Arkin) before landing the role of Arthur. "They approached everybody," Kind said. "If your nose was just a little bit larger than the average goy, you got seen."
The Coens stress "A Serious Man" is not autobiographical in its story, but is in the details. The Coens grew up in St. Louis Park, a predominately Jewish suburb of Minneapolis. (It's also where Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman grew up.) The Coens' father, like Larry, was also a professor, although the Coens' dad taught economics.
The script was in the works before the Coens won Oscars for "No Country For Old Men," but having the words "Academy Award winners" before their names didn't hurt getting it made. "It wouldn't be an easy movie to get financed on the heels of a number of movies that had lost money," Joel Coen said.
Through all of his travails, Larry tries to find answers through his faith -- but finds his rabbis either too remote or too clueless to help.
When asked if Larry's story parallels the biblical story of Job, Ethan Coen said "it never occurred to us, maybe because the Job story is a story of a man's faith being tested -- and this isn't that."
Though "A Serious Man" is set in a Jewish community, Stuhlbarg said the film "asks more about faith than it does about Judaism, and all of our individual relationships with a greater power."
