The actor:	Michael Stuhlbarg
The character:	Larry Gopnik
The film:	A Serious Man
The line:	“Sy Ableman?”

At some time in his life, each man is going to have to answer some important questions which will go on to define who he is for decades to come. Am I leaving a mark on the world which will be felt positively after I’m gone? Have I lived with integrity? Do I spend too much time at the office and not enough time with my children? Sy Ableman?

Kidding aside: Larry Gopnik, 20th Century Job, a professor in late ’60s Minnesota whose personal infrastructure collapses with the fiery suddenness of I-95, is first troubled here. He has troubles, but everyone has troubles. He’s seeking tenure, and there’s a student trying to bribe him to bring up a grade. His weird brother is going through a weird enough time in his life that his weirdness is noteworthy again. His family life is vacant. (Amusingly, whenever I come back to this movie, I’m struck more by the gaps in his relationships with his vestigial children than by the clearer issue with his wife.) These are not problems you or I would want, but the odds that you have worse problems than these are pretty high.

The supports really begin to quiver when he’s sitting across the kitchen table from his wife, Judy, and he’s forced to stare at one of these problems for more than a few seconds at a time. The first moment that Larry realizes that one of these troubles is going to not just linger but sting is here, when the math professor puts two and two together. A man has to reckon with the idea that today is the first day of the rest of your life. Larry Gopnik has to reckon with the likelihood that his future years will not be spent in St. Louis Park, but in Hell. His first words upon arrival to the rest of his life are not directed to God or to the Devil, to prophets or family, but whatever spirit gives breath to our total confusion. Not the confusion of a person who’s been conked on the head and can’t see straight, but the confusion of someone who was sure that his eyeglasses were sufficient but now finds, with new lenses, that he had acclimated to blurs.

The Coens, who are logging their final quote of this project and now officially take up ten percent of all available spots, are accused of misanthropy (and specifically “misanthropy,” I dunno what makes critics choose that specific word so often) with great frequency. Bad things just happen to people and the Coens seem apathetic or worse to those circumstances. I hope that in writing about three separate quotes from No Country for Old Men, I’ve made a convincing case that while they write inhuman or indifferent characters, the films themselves have a profound positive attention to morality.

Take this moment where Larry Gopnik discovers perdition in Hennepin County. “Sy Ableman?” is one of the funniest lines in any movie from this century, regardless of national origin or genre. It’s not funny because of what’s happening to Larry. (“Larry, don’t be a child,” Judy says. “You haven’t ‘done’ anything. I haven’t ‘done’ anything.”) It’s funny because the situation is totally ludicrous. Too often, reasoned critics of a political figure or a policy or a faction will deride it as “illogical” or “irrational” rather than saying “I disagree with the premise of this figure/policy/faction.” This does a disservice to “illogical,” because true illogic is what’s happening at the Gopnik residence this night. Larry has no capacity to make Sy Ableman make sense any more than Michael Bluth can make sense of Ann Veal. The mind does not reel so much as shut down entirely, leaving the cracking voice refuse of “Sy Ableman?” behind.