Iron Man 2

Paramount Pictures

Gaudy, of course, as any tentpole usually is, the Iron Man sequel is not entirely a departure from what made the first film an affable-enough adventure. But it’s not like its tumescence is better. It’s that cliché you’ve come to expect about air conditioner season: each movie is out to out-do the predecessor (here with a wink or 80), to allow you a couple of no-brainer hours, to be the best ride possible indoors. This isn’t to say Iron Man 2 is a mere displeasing diversion. Rather, as with any macho machine aiming to get spent, unless you really get a kick out of consequence-free explosions and bad puns, all the faux-irony (the real armor?) just gets heavy. The action scenes are all a beat or three too long, the jokes are just above that lowest common denominator range, and its presence as a product is transparent, no matter attempts at the self-aware bet-hedging—in fact, all those nods at the audience wind up like tics. For a film full of “confidence,” it sure seems to desire approval, just like its hero. What’s crazy is just how much its audience will, in fact, eat this swill with a smile and bankroll untold expanding universes.

At the very least, there’s Mickey Rourke, who seems not just acting in a different movie but from another planet altogether. The film is canny enough to set him up as an alien apart—he’s a tattoo canvas caricature from Moscow named Ivan Vanko out to avenge his dead and disgraced dad armed with whips and rocket science, or some kind of close physics—but Rourke doesn’t seem interested in the plot. His Vanko is meat with a grin, moving slowly even in violence, covered in “a story” of ink we don’t get to learn and masked into his “bad guy” slot all too easily by those gold teeth and white highlights in his sometimes-top-knotted-mane. It’s as grotesque a character as Randy, The Wrestler, but that’s only because everything else in this film is so cleanly garish, so glinting. So Rourke dominates by default. He doesn’t even need to annunciate his fake Russian, let alone his goofy accented English. He’s got that face and that body, everything bulging without looking fat or strong, or ballooned, and every scene he’s in becomes interesting if only to see how he’ll sit in a chair or on a bed or if he’ll smirk.

Paramount Pictures

The other scenes aren’t “boring,” per se, but they only work as much as they do thanks to the “yes, please, paycheck” cast of charmers who are all better than this for any litany of reasons. Robert Downey Jr. can play himself better than anybody, as he proved in round one, even if he’s wearing awful suits and awful facial hair. Gweneth Paltrow looks her best in this franchise, but worse here for all her pouting; she was allowed to flirt in the first film. Don Cheadle can emote better than anybody (his countenance is the pathetic appeal) but he’s just angry here, or self-satisfied. Sam Rockwell can dance, and make funny faces seem almost serious, but he’s a mother of invention and clearly shilling for himself (the only other bit of self-reflexivity in design beyond Rourke’s interloper). And Scarlett Johansson’s got a body, and a face, but she doesn’t seem to know how to use either: her big fight scene hides her forever-stone features all too well in its legible choreography so you only see it as a punchline (after each encounter), which might be synonymous with “money shot” for all I know.

Despite its nomination, the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man has little chance of winning the Best Picture Academy Award. And not simply because James Cameron’s Avatar is an unstoppable media force snowballing, like Titanic, towards an armload of gold. More so because it is possibly the most nihilistic film I’ve ever seen. Put otherwise, A Serious Man is one thwarted attempt after another to find meaning in a world designed precisely to stymie such pursuits. Events just pile up, often with terrible consequences, but the Coen Brothers are moving further and further from cause and effect storytelling.

In the Coens’ world, things, good and bad and otherwise, just happen. A Serious Man is the most unrelenting version yet of this vision of theirs. It’s often hilarious, but ultimately heavy. The jokes (if we can even call them that) come from the absurdity of feeling alone, or put upon in a merciless world. It’s the Book of Job by way of Kafka’s The Trial with a dash of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love” to lighten things up.

The film begins with Larry’s son not listening in Hebrew class. Well, he’s listening but not to his Hebrew teachers’ voice; he’s got that Airplane anthem blaring on his personal portable radio. Next we see Larry getting a physical, getting his ear checked out. The bulk of the film is one confrontation after another with Larry left out of any conversation. People, like his son or his wife, just talk at him. Even Larry’s rabbis don’t hear him; they offer little help, practically nothing

After we learn that Larry’s doctor wants to go over the test results again, the film ends with Jefferson Airplane song still blaring while a tornado approaches on the horizon. This mirror of the opening, moving between father and son, closes the film the way you’d close a circle. It suggests only one endgame, one desolate destination: we are at the mercy of the world, slaves to its cruelty, and then we die. And here’s where the Kafka comes in. As with Joseph K. in The Trial, Larry has no knowledge of the rules because the rules were always already set and everything and everybody conspires to obscure them from him, or offer answers that don’t help. Like Kafka’s story, A Serious Man is a film about the difficulty for anyone to understand let alone control the laws of the world. Again, things just happen.

So it’s easy to see why people grate at A Serious Man as only ever a bit of condescension about a boob milquetoast. Its torrent of misfortune, after all, is ceaseless. And the whole picture, as a circle, as some circuit of unending hurdles, points at a forgone conclusion: the grave. What’s more, in this limited life Larry leads that’s one tribulation after another, death is a relief. The terror isn’t that Larry could swing out of the doldrums and won’t have that opportunity but that this world, overrun by adversities (such as a tornado), continues — that his son, now technically a man in the eyes of his faith, will have untold woes ahead whether he likes it or not — and that if there is a meaning to find, it’s only ever within your head. Or maybe a pop song.

What makes A Serious Man so much more despairing than the Coens’ No Country For Old Men, which won Best Picture for who knows what reason, is that its mortal coil is wound tighter. Where No Country had the luxury of retirement, of throwing in the towel by choice, as Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell does, A Serious Man ’s serious man, Larry, can only hope things end before they get worse, as they always seem to with him.