A Serious Man’s Woman: Sari Lennick

“A Serious Man” is not only the best movie of the year so far, it’s also the funniest. I counted at least five deep belly laughs when I saw it, a number even “The Hangover” would envy.

The laugh to minute ratio is a little surprising given the nature of the movie’s storyline. Based on the “Book of Job” (yes, that “Book of Job”) and set in Minnesota in the late sixties, “A Serious Man” follows a physics professor whose marriage is falling apart. Sharp-witted but loving, it somehow manages to wring laughs out of the professor’s ensuing existential crisis.

There’s a lot of (deserved) buzz surrounding the Michael Stuhlbarg’s performance as the throughly mixed up professor, so I thought I’d use my small space in the blogosphere to sing the praises of Sari Lennick, the actress who plays his wife, Judith.

Like her husband, Judith is unhappy. Unlike her husband, Judith isn’t going to take it lying down. In her opening scene, she announces to Larry that she’s leaving him for a man they know from their temple. Shocked that his wife has been swept off her feet by a bald man and his creepy self-actualization speeches, Larry tells Judith he needs sometime to comprehend what’s just happened. Frustrated, Judith storms from the room, bringing new meaning to the word insensitive.

It’s a tough scene and a tough role. In the hands of the wrong actress, it could very easily land in “Everybody Loves Raymond” territory. Luckily for the movie, Lennick never lets the part get away from her. She manages to find shades of gray even when she’s at her broadest. When she reaches for her husband’s hand at their son Bar Mitzvah and then whispers in his ear that her lover always liked him, we laugh, not at her or her husband but at how hypocritical all human beings can be.

This is Lennick’s first onscreen role. Up to now, her work has been in theater. A lot of theater actors have trouble adjusting when they first start working on film. Unused to the micro-eye of the camera, they can’t stop playing to the back of the house. Lennick’s performance is exaggerated, but she seems to have an instinctual knack from pulling back from the overacting brink at just the right moment, right before we start cringing.

At only her first time at bat, Lennick proves herself to be seriously good.