Script To Screen: “A Serious Man”

Leave it to the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) to come up with a denouement in their 2009 movie A Serious Man that resolves virtually nothing and leaves the audience with a sense of impending doom.

Plot Summary: Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern mathematics teacher, watches his life unravel over multiple sudden incidents. Though seeking meaning and answers amidst his turmoils, he seems to keep sinking.

Here is the scene from the script:

Here is the scene from the movie:

There are two significant editorial differences between the script and the screen. Can you spot them? Why do you think the Coens decided to make those choices?

I love this movie and although it did very little business, I believe it is one of the Coen’s best films, much of it an homage to their youth in Minnesota, but wrapped in a modern day parable a la Job from the Old Testament. If you haven’t seen A Serious Man, put it on your watch list.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.