Serious Man [Original Score]

Photographer: Wilson Webb.
Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen's film A Serious Man is a black comedy about the Job-like travails of a Jewish college professor, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlberg), living in a Midwestern suburb in 1967, which may help explain why this soundtrack album combines composer Carter Burwell's short, poignant cues with songs from Jefferson Airplane's hit 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow and a track by the Yiddish performer Sidor Belarsky. Gopnik's son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is studying desultorily for his bar mitzvah while listening to a transistor radio that seems to play only one song, Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," and that song's opening lyric couplet, "When the truth is found to be lies/Don't you know the joy within you dies," is, in essence the theme of the movie. The delicate Jefferson Airplane ballads "Comin' Back to Me" and "Today" are more in tune with Burwell's restrained music, however, and also feature prominently. Given the film's offbeat tone, a listen to the album doesn't give much of a sense of what it's about, although Burwell's music is typically affecting. (He is the Coens' in-house composer, in addition to working extensively with others.) Among Gopnik's many problems in the movie is that he is being hounded by the Columbia Record Club for nonpayment of its charges, including one for the 1970 Santana LP Abraxas. Given the surreal quality of the plot, it's hard to say whether that is a deliberate error or an unintended anachronism. Couldn't Larry just point out that he can't be expected to pay for an album that won't be released for another three years? ~ William Ruhlmann