A Serious Man (2009)

Larry Gopnik, the mild-mannered protagonist of Joel and Ethan Coens’ A Serious Man, is in a doozy of an existential crisis. His wife is leaving him for another man. He is being financially and psychologically squeezed by his self-absorbed children. And just as this college physics professor is on the cusp of receiving tenure, Larry’s colleagues start receiving anonymous letters accusing him of the most God-awful things. “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” reads an epigraph in the film’s open — words of wisdom from 10th century Rabbi Rashi — but good God, that’s a lot of everything for Larry.

Did I mention that A Serious Man is a comedy?

The rap on the Coen brothers has long been that the indisputably gifted filmmakers have a sadistic streak when it comes to their characters. That criticism is unlikely to be dispelled by A Serious Man, a comedy dark enough to require a night-light. But in this deeply personal film, the brothers make no apologies for their preoccupation with human suffering. In a movie that is so much steeped in the Jewish experience, it’s hard to be otherwise.

We are in a Minnesota town in 1967, where Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry is a good-natured mensch under assault. His son (Aaron Wolff) is more concerned about paying his weed dealer than preparing for his impending bar mitzvah. Larry’s daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing money from her dad for a nose job. Larry’s deadbeat brother (Richard Kind) sleeps on the couch and has no interest in finding a job.

Most painful of all, Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick) has announced she wants a divorce so she can marry a patronizing widower, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Amid such misery, Larry’s sole respite is an attractive neighbor (Amy Landecker) who likes to sunbathe topless.

The filmmaking on display is meticulous. One gets the sense that every camera shot and actorly gesture are the result of painstaking deliberation. While that aesthetic might sound oppressive, such precision feels wholly appropriate here as an approximation of Larry’s growing fatalism.

Brilliant and uproariously funny, A Serious Man earns its place alongside Coen classics Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink. But A Serious Man feels more intimate — not surprising given that the brothers grew up in the Minnesota of the 1960s. It makes sense, then, that A Serious Man also achieves a remarkable sense of place and time. Every detail, no matter how seemingly innocuous, seems perfect.

It helps that the Coens have assembled a cast of terrific and largely unknown (at the time) actors. Stuhlbarg has an affable humanity that keeps Larry from dissolving into parody. And Melamed, with his velvety condescension, is devastatingly funny.

Some viewers, I suspect, will size up A Serious Man as the product of moviemakers who see the universe as bleak, disorderly and scary.

It would be a fair observation.

“Why does He make us feel the questions if He’s not going to give us any answers?” Larry asks a rabbi.

But it seems to this reviewer that the Coens are suggesting that such answers are a little outside the pay grade of mere mortals. Perhaps the answers are everywhere, even in the lyrics of a Jefferson Airplane song that makes an appearance on the soundtrack.

Or perhaps not. 

“You have to see these things as an expression of God’s will,” a rabbi tells Larry. “You don’t have to like it.”

Thankfully, Joel and Ethan Coen know how to make futility a helluva lot of fun.