Film

The title of the Coens’ latest is as much of a joke as Intolerable Cruelty, since detractors have never seen the brothers as serious men. Never mind that their mockery of their characters tends to be overstated, as if Marge or the Dude weren’t affectionate creations; A Serious Man is the first film to address their worldview head-on. It says that life is unpredictable, that enlightenment is rare and that—as the Rashi quote that begins the movie suggests—even the gravest of circumstances should be met with humor (and maybe pot smoke). It turns out those yuks were a coping mechanism.

Set in a predominantly Jewish Minneapolis suburb in the late ’60s, Serious Man finds physics professor Larry Gopnik (a superbly nervous Stuhlbarg) simultaneously contending with divorce, a tenure battle, a troubled brother and a disgruntled student—and that’s just to start. (The Coens even taunt him with the soundtrack; Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” becomes his anthem.) Devoted to mathematical rationality, Larry seeks answers for his escalating tsuris (troubles), but three differently unhelpful rabbis provide him with none.

Opening with a shtetl parable that establishes the theme of uncertainty from the start, Serious Man has the intransigent quality of a Talmudic story. Presumably those complaining about the broadness of the Jewish caricatures would have less trouble seeing this story on the Yiddish stage. But as bleak as the comedy gets, the Coens clearly feel for this character, who resembles their economics-professor father. Autobiography or fiction, Serious Man is the Coens’ most brazen enigma since Barton Fink—and their most personal farce to date.