A Serious Man (5 page)

Larry cocks his head
.

He gravely shakes his head
.

A hand lays it onto a slowly spinning vinyl record
.

Through scratches and pops, an unaccompanied tenor starts a mournful
Hebrew chant
.

Close on the sleeve
:

RABBI YOUSSELE ROSENBLATT
CHANTS YOUR HAFTORAH PORTION
VOLUME 12

Rabbi Youssele wears a caftan and a felt hat and has sad eyes that
peer out, like an owl in foliage, from the dark beard that covers most
of the rest of his face
.

Wider, on Danny, in his bedroom, evening. He lifts the tone arm on
the portable turntable
.

He chants the passage
.

He drops the tone arm at the same place; Rabbi Youssele chants the
passage again
.

Danny listens, eyes narrowed. He lifts the tone arm and chants the
passage again
.

He replays the passage again but before he can lift the tone arm to
echo it once more, his door bursts open. Rabbi Youssele continues to
chant
.

We hear the thunk of the front door opening. Danny stands, calling:

Larry is entering with his briefcase. As he stows it in the foyer closet
Danny’s voice continues, off:

Judith emerges from the kitchen
.

Danny emerges from the hall
.

Sarah enters
.

She hits Danny on the back of the head
.

Larry sits in a reclining chair in the living room, head back, listening
to Sidor Belarsky on the hi-fi. From somewhere, a hiss-sucking sound,
and the sound of a pencil busily scratching paper
.

We cut to the writing: Uncle Arthur sits scribbling into a spiral notebook,
his free hand holding the end of a length of surgical tubing against the
back of his neck. The tube leads to a Water Pik-like appliance on an
end table next to him – the source of the sucking sound
.

After listening to the music for a long beat, Larry speaks into space:

Uncle Arthur does not look up from his scribbling
.

Larry continues to stare at the ceiling
.

Still without looking up:

Long beat. Music. Scribbling
.

More scribbling
.

The doorbell chimes
.

Larry enters, glances through the front door’s head-height window,
and – freezes, one hand arrested on its way to the doorknob
.

His point-
of-
view: framed by the window, yellowly lit by the stoop
light, a human head. A middle-aged man, a few years older than
Larry. A fleshy face with droopy hangdog features, a five-
o’clock
shadow, and sad Harold Bloom eyes
.

Larry opens the door
.

Sy enters, thrusts out a hand. His voice vibrates with a warm, sad
empathy
:

He is a heavy-set man wearing a short-sleeved shirt that his belly tents
out in front of him. In his left hand he holds a bottle of wine
.

He shakes his head
.

He is leading him into the kitchen but Sy, oblivious to surroundings,
ploughs on with the conversation, arresting both men in the narrow
space between kitchen sink and stove, invading Larry’s space
.

He shakes his head
.

Sy startles him with an unexpected hug
.

He finishes the hug off with a couple of thumps on the back.

We are dutch on a slit of a view through a cracked-open frosted
window: the Hebrew school parking lot
.

The last couple of student-filled buses are rolling out of the lot. It is late
afternoon
.

A reverse shows Danny in a stall, standing on a toilet seat, angling his
head to peer out a bathroom window opened at the top
.

The bathroom outside the stall: Ronnie Nudell leans against a sink
waiting, taking a long draw from a joint
.

Danny emerges from the stall. Ronnie Nudell offers the joint:

The bathroom door cracks open and Danny peeks out
.

His point-
of-
view: the empty hallway ending in a T with another
hallway. A janitor crosses the far perpendicular hall, pushing a broom.
He disappears. His echoing footsteps recede
.

Danny and Ronnie emerge from the bathroom
.

The photo-portrait on the wall of Mar Turchik’s office is lit by late-day
sun
.

We hear a scraping sound
.

Wider: Ronnie Nudell looks over Danny’s shoulder as Danny, hunched
at Mar Turchik’s desk, jiggles the end of a bent hanger in the keyhole
of the top-center drawer. The hanger turns
.

The boys open the drawer. In it: squirt guns, marbles set to rolling
by the opening of the drawer, a comic book, a
Playboy
magazine,
a slingshot, a small bundle of firecrackers. Hands rifle the gewgaws:
no radio
.

We are behind the two boys, who sit side-
by-
side in the last pew of the
empty sanctuary, gazing off. The stained-glass windows further weaken
anemic late-day light. In deference to the location, the boys wear
yarmulkas
.

A long hold on their still backs
.

At length, some movement in Danny’s back, his head dips, and we hear
him sucking on a joint. He holds it, exhales, and passes it wordlessly
to Ronnie Nudell
.

We pull Danny, eyes red-rimmed, walking along the street, still wearing
his yarmulka. It is dusk
.

The front door of a house just behind Danny opens. A husky, shaggy-
haired youth emerges on the run
.

The sound has alerted Danny. Seeing Mike Fagle, he too runs. He
reaches up and grabs his yarmulka and clutches it in one of his
pumping fists
.

Pursued and pursuer both run wordlessly, panting, feet pounding
.

Mike Fagle is closing. But Danny is already cutting across the
Brandts’ front yard, approaching his own. He plunges into the house
and slams the door
.

Mike Fagle draws up, panting, gazing hungrily at the house
.

A shockingly blue sky hung with picture-perfect clouds
.

The top of an aluminum extension ladder swings in from the bottom
of the frame and comes toward us
.

We cut side-on as the ladder clunks against an eave
.

The ladder starts vibrating to the rhythmic clung of someone climbing
.

Hands enter. Larry’s head enters
.

He climbs onto the roof
.

He takes a couple of hunched steps in from the edge before cautiously
straightening, making sure of his balance. He looks around
.

His point-
of-
view toward the front: an unfamiliarly high perspective
on the street and the neighboring houses, almost maplike. Very
peaceful. Wind gently waves the trees
.

Larry gingerly walks up to the aerial at the peak of the roof. He
straddles the peak and, reacting to a rhythmic popping noise, looks
down toward the back
.

Foreshortened Mr. Brandt and Mitch are playing catch in their back
yard. With each toss the ball pops, alternately in father’s mitt and son’s
.

Precariously balanced, Larry reaches up for the aerial. He tentatively
touches it. He grasps it. He twists the aerial
.

Something strange: as it rotates the aerial creaks – a high whine like
the hum sounded from the rim of a wineglass
.

Faintly, under the wineglass sound, and clouded by static, a ringing
tenor sings in an unfamiliar modality. Cantorial music
.

Larry drops his hand. Inertia keeps the aerial rotating slowly till it
dies, the sound drifting away into the sibilant shushing of trees
.

Larry reaches out again to turn the aerial. The same crystal hum …
cantorial singing … and now, layering in, the theme from F Troop
.

Music. Crystal hum. Wind
.

Larry’s look travels: his point-
of-
view pans slowly off the steep angle
on the neighbors’ game of catch, travels across his own backyard, and
brings in the white fence that encloses the patio of the neighbor on the
other side
.

On the enclosed patio a woman reclines on a lawn chaise of nylon
bands woven over an aluminum frame. She is on her back, eyes closed
against the sun. She is naked
.

Larry reacts to the naked woman: startled at first, he moves to hide
behind the peak of the roof. But as he realises that the sun keeps the
woman’s eyes closed he relaxes, continu ing to stare
.