A Serious Man (12 page)

His point-
of-
view: a wooden plank is just being slid into place over his
head to bring on black. The bang of hammer on nailhead. In the
black:

We hear the chanting of kaddish and the sound of dirt hitting the top
of the coffin. It drums a steady rhythm. Grace Slick’s voice enters:
“Somebody to Love”. Another voice fills the break in the vocals just
before the chorus:

On the chorus downbeat, a crescent moon pops into the black. Mr.
Brandt traverses the sky, pushing his lawnmower. A cow flies the
opposite way. Stars twinkle. Sy Able man walks across the sky dressed
like a shtetl elder, a bindlestick over one shoulder
.

Larry bolts upright in bed
.

Sudden quiet
.

Uncle Arthur is snoring in the tatty motel room’s other bed
.

A title:

He stands looking down in low shot. Overhead is cheap Johnson-
Armstrong dropped ceiling
.

Reverse shows an elderly Eastern European woman seated behind a
desk, looking up at Larry
.

He lapses into silence, staring at the secretary
.

She stares inscrutably back
.

After a moment she rises, goes to the door behind her, opens it, shuffles
into the dimness of an inner office decorated with arcana, Judaic and
otherwise
.

Larry cranes to see past her. Her own body and the weak light
preclude a good view of the figure in the depths of the room. But one
can see that the man is old and bent, motionless behind a bare desk
.

Murmured voices in Hebrew
.

Larry waits
.

The murmuring ends
.

The old woman turns and shuffles back. She closes the door on the
motionless rabbi and sits creakily behind her own desk
.

As she starts shuffling papers:

Larry, asleep in bed
.

Weeping, soft, suppressed
.

Larry stirs. He opens his eyes
.

After a groggy beat he reacts to the weeping. He looks over
.

Arthur is a dim mound on the next bed. His weeping continues
.

For no reason Larry continues to keep his voice to a whisper:

No answer
.

Shockingly loud, the scream is hard to interpret
.

Arthur flings off his bedclothes, leaps from the bed and runs to the
door. In boxer shorts and undershirt, he flings the door open and runs
outside
.

Larry leaps from his bed, also in his underwear
.

He goes to the door but pauses, peering cautiously out. Satisfied that
the courtyard is deserted, he plunges into it
.

The courtyard/parking lot is hard lit by ghastly mercury vapor lights.
The motel pool, surrounded by chain-link fence, has been drained. Its
white concrete interior is cracked and weedy
.

Uncle Arthur is hunched weeping in a corner of the pool enclosure
.

He opens the creaking gate and scurries over to Arthur.

Arthur is suddenly angry. His voice slaps off the concrete:

He resumes weeping
.

Arthur weeps
.

Larry and Arthur are driving. In the windshield through which we
look at them, the reflections of towering conifers stream by. It seems to
be a glorious day
.

Both men peer out
.

He nods at the road ahead
.

A signpost, the old-fashioned kind with wooden fingers pointing the
different directions, has one finger indicating the way to “Canada
”.

We tip off the sign as Larry’s car passes and recedes. There is a canoe
strapped to its roof
.

Beautiful, wooded, remote
.

The car is parked at water’s edge, having backed down a two-track
lane worn through the undergrowth. Larry and Arthur are lowering
their canoe into the water
.

He straightens. Arthur straightens. Larry hugs him.

They separate and Larry pulls a white envelope from his pocket and
gives it to Arthur.

Arthur looks into the envelope
.

Arthur climbs into the canoe
.

He pushes the boat off. Arthur twists to look back. As he drifts away:

Larry waves
.

Arthur waves bravely back, then turns to pick up the paddle. A couple
of strokes and he turns back with a last thought
.

A lingering look from Arthur, and then he turns back to paddle
.

A gunshot
.

Blood spurts from the back of Uncle Arthur’s neck
.

He slumps forward, dead
.

Larry looks wildly around. He sees:

Mr. Brandt and Mitch in their camo fatigues, hard to pick out in the
foliage. They are looking toward the canoe, Mitch just lowering his
rifle
.

Mr. Brandt’s look swings into the lens. He points at us
:

Mitch swings his rifle up at us
.

He fires
.

Gasping awake in the motel room
.

He looks around
.

It is dawn
.

Arthur sits on the edge of his bed in his underwear, staring slackjawed
into space, vacant-eyed, drained
.

Larry gazes around the room, waiting for things to fall into place
.

Finally, blearily:

Arthur responds in a flat, empty voice:

Larry blinks sleep away
.

After a beat:

Another beat
.

Arthur heaves a deep sigh
.

Day. A two-urinal, two-stall men’s room of old tile and yellowed
fixtures
.

We are low. One of the stall doors is closed. Under it we see the dress
shoes and dress-pant cuffs of two young men standing inside
.

We hear a long sucking inhale
.

A loudly projected echoing male voice:

Danny, seated in the front pew with his parents and sister and Uncle
Arthur, rises and walks along the lip of the bema. His eyes are wide
and red-rimmed
.

The prelapped voice was his call to the Torah. All eyes in the
congregation, which fills the large sanctuary, are on him
.

In great echoing silence he walks to the steps on the right side of the
bema and climbs
.

The right-side lectern is surrounded by a gaggle of old Jewish men
.

They busy themselves with the preparation of the pair of scrolls resting
on the lectern, rolling them, pausing, rolling some more, muttering
prayers, kissing the scrolls by means of their tsitsit. They pay Danny
no attention
.

Danny takes his place centered behind the lectern. His chin comes up
to the bottom of the reading platform
.

Men continue to mutter prayers around him. A pair of hands appears
on his shoulders from behind. Danny looks down at the strange hands.
They pull him back
.

A foot drags a small riser out from under the lectern
.

Hands push Danny up onto the riser
.

We boom up on the Torah scrolls, still being busily rolled
.

Beyond it, a sea of faces
.

The yad – a molded tin pointer – is thrust into Danny’s hand. The
non-pointing end has a red silken tassel
.

Danny looks at the bouncing tassel. He looks at the little pointing
finger, the business end of the yad
.

Men mutter around him, each a different prayer. They dip and doven
.

Danny watches as his own hand points the yad down at the scroll
.

The scroll is a swarm of Hebrew letters. Danny squints
.

One voice separates from the murmurs around him. It chants,
insistently, in a sotto-voce falsetto:

Danny stares at the end of the yad against the parchment scroll
.

Someone’s hand enters and moves the yad to the correct spot in the
text
.

The prompting voice again:

Danny looks up from the scrolls
.

In the congregation Ronnie Nudell sits squished between his parents.
He returns Danny’s red-rimmed slackjawed stare
.

The insistent voice:

Danny looks over
.

From the surrounding scrum the prompter nods at him. He looks
somewhat like Cantor Youssele Rosenblatt.

Danny looks back down at the scroll. A hand enters to tap a pointing
finger where the yad points
.