A negative review from David Denby in THE NEW YORKER...

At the conclusion of their new movie, “A Serious Man,” the Coen brothers pull off a neat little joke. The picture is devoted to the travails of an unhappy Midwestern Jewish family—a real menagerie—in the sixties, and, in the end titles, the Coens have inserted, after the names of hardworking laboratories, the words “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” Very good; first rate, in fact. But I’m not sure it’s true. I know of at least two Jews who were harmed—Ethan and Joel Coen. “A Serious Man,” like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through. The movie is a deadpan farce with a schlemiel Job as a hero—Professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physicist at a local university, whose life, in 1967, is falling apart. Gopnik’s wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for a sanctimonious bastard (Fred Melamed) who covers his aggressions against Larry with limp-pawed caresses and offers of “understanding.” Larry’s kids are thieving brats, and his hapless, sick, whining brother (Richard Kind) camps on the living-room couch and refuses to look for work. There’s more, much more, a series of mishaps, sordid betrayals, and weird coincidences, but Larry, a sweet guy and “a serious man”—upright, a good teacher, a father—won’t hit back. Occasionally, his eyebrows fluttering like street signs in a hurricane, he stands up for himself, but he won’t take a shot at anyone, or try to control anyone, verbally or any other way. He won’t even sleep with the dragon-eyed but sexy and highly available woman next door who sunbathes naked.

The Coens begin mysteriously, with what feels like a Yiddish folktale. Long ago, in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe, an elderly man, supposedly dead, wanders into the house of a married couple. The wife is sure that he’s a dybbuk—a spirit possessing a human’s body—and she sticks a knife in his chest. The troubles surrounding Larry Gopnik in suburban Minnesota many generations later can only be seen as the revenge of “Hashem”—the word that Conservative Jews in this Midwestern community use to name God. (If that Old Country dybbuk was not God himself, he must have been in God’s employ.) One model for the tale is obvious: acting on his wager with Satan, God drives Job to despair. Yet Job, risking his life, questions his tormentor, and Larry does not. The Coens created him that way; they explicitly celebrate “simplicity” and resignation. But a schlep and a weeper is a hero impossible to stay interested in.

The Coens themselves grew up in a suburban area outside Minneapolis. Like Larry’s pot-smoking son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), they were kids in the sixties, when rock and roll and drugs kicked holes in the conformist patterns of American middle-class life. They may be remembering that repressive time and its breakup—assuaging old hurts, settling old scores. Bored to death as a Hebrew teacher drones on, Danny, transistor radio plugged into his ear, listens to Grace Slick raising the roof in “Somebody to Love,” which certainly feels like a primal memory of entrapment and liberation. That song, plus dope and “F Troop” on TV, is all that keeps Danny going.

He and his family live on a featureless, sun-bleached suburban street where each house is fronted by a boxy patch of grass. It’s the suburban nightmare that keeps showing up in ambitious American movies as the banality of evil itself. The low ceilings, the schlocky décor are meant to be of a piece with the endless family bickering and emotional blackmail—satirically enhanced signs of mediocre, soul-punishing middle-class taste, Jewish division. As always, the Coens shape their visual scheme into mocking juxtapositions: sudden, startling shifts of perspective; intrusive closeups of ears and mouths; scenes that end abruptly, with cuts arriving like a guillotine’s blade. The brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins uses super-hard focus and solid colors, and when Larry, perched on his roof, tries to straighten out the TV aerial, he looks like a forlorn figure in a nineties hyperrealist painting. Instead of paintings meant to look like photographs, the Coens give us photographs that look like paintings, and there’s a touch of the uncanny in the hard-edged look, as if Hashem had isolated and withered Larry with his gaze. As a piece of moviemaking craft, “A Serious Man” is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable.

What happens in Minnesota has none of the warmth and expansiveness of a folktale, either traditional or modern. (Isaac Bashevis Singer would have been disgusted by the hero’s backing away from the babe next door.) The Coens’ humor is distant, dry, and shrivelling, and they make the people in “A Serious Man” so drably unappealing that you begin to wonder what kind of disgust the brothers are working off. Whatever indignities the Coens suffered as teens, they have hardly been hampered by those memories as adults. Philip Roth’s collection of stories “Goodbye, Columbus,” which tore into the timidity and prohibitions of middle-class American Jewish life, came out in 1959, when Ethan Coen was two and Joel five. The Coens’ laughter is not exactly fresh. Dozens of popular comics in the past half century have worked in the same satiric vein.

Larry applies to a series of local rabbis for help, and the rabbis, vain of their wisdom, either miss the point of his troubles or tell elaborate parables that illuminate nothing; they have no idea why Hashem is pursuing this man. And who is Hashem, anyway? I suppose one might say that all filmmakers, distributing rewards and punishments, come close to playing God. Surely the arbitrary and ruthless Coens are the only deity in sight. Larry Gopnik may teach the uncertainty principle in his class, but his own fate is sealed in advance, and we’re not surprised when, at the end, the apocalypse arrives in a dark whirl. Judging from “A Serious Man,” one can only say, without blasphemy, that the cinematic Hashem is a malevolent son of a bitch.

A positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...

The fourteenth feature of Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man is the first that seems vaguely personal, which means just outside their ultracontrolled comfort zone: I got the feeling they had little idea what they would end up with when they sat down to write. Is it a comedy? A tragedy? It’s right on the border, a broad Jewish joke that morphs into a jeremiad, a tale of woe—that keeps you wondering if the punch line, when it comes, will make you laugh or want to kill yourself, or both.

In 1967 in suburban Minneapolis, a Jewish physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is the image of stability: His son (Aaron Wolff) is about to be bar mitzvahed, his college is on the verge of granting him tenure. But things begin to get strange, even David Lynchian. His slobby, hapless brother (Richard Kind) moves into his house and spends a lot of time draining a sebaceous cyst. An envelope of money appears on his desk, ostensibly (but can he be sure?) a bribe from a Korean student who failed a test. Anonymous letters denigrating his character appear in his colleagues’ mailboxes. Then his wife (Sari Lennick) breaks the news that she has become close with an older man, a widower named Sy (Fred Melamed), and asks for a Jewish divorce, a “get.” Burly, obsequious Sy enfolds Larry in a hug and rumbles, “Such a thing, such a thing … We’re gonna be fine.” Fine is what Larry will never be. God—or is it the Coens?—is starting to have some fun at his expense.

Stuhlbarg is a stage actor who has been in few films, and his face is so ordinary and indistinct behind his glasses it’s hard to get a read on him. Is he meant to be a funny zhlub, like a young Eugene Levy? You wait for cues that never come: His visage only tightens, his lips pressing together from the effort not to scream. Stricken, Larry sits at a lake beside a friend (a luminous Katherine Borowitz) in leg braces. She says, “It’s not always easy, deciphering what God is trying to tell you,” and directs him to seek out the stories of his people handed down for thousands of years. The first rabbi he approaches, an earnest young assistant, advises Larry to appreciate the beauties of God’s creation and gestures out the window to a remarkably forgettable parking lot. The second, middle-aged rabbi, relates a parable called the “goy’s teeth” that will be savored for millennia by stoned rabbinical students, and adds that God owes us nothing—that the obligation goes the other way. There is a third, ancient rabbi whose words you’ll have to hear for yourself. But science is no more soothing than religion. After filling a titanic blackboard from top to bottom to illustrate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Larry utters a line that will enter the lexicon: “Even if you can’t figure it out, you’re still responsible for it on the midterm.”

A Serious Man is the Coens’ true follow-up to their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men—a Jewish take on the question of cosmic injustice. As in No Country, no one sees the entire picture—except, perhaps, the Almighty, who is, if He exists, a crueler jokester than even the makers of Blood Simple and Burn After Reading. The vision is mordant and absurdist—but not nihilistic. The Coens open with a quote from Rashi: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” The lesson of Larry Gopnik is how to lose gracefully.

It’s fascinating that the Coens, who’ve been working their way through movie tropes since 1984, have used Cormac McCarthy as a springboard to their own childhood. A Serious Man is an artistic leap, although it’s far from perfect. Some of their work is mannered, like the kids’ over-orchestrated cussing, the cartoon-shrew wife, and the fleshy close-ups. (Jews are earthy and have ear hair, we know.) But I love how the Coens bring out the unnatural perspectives of sixties suburbia—the hard, canted lines of lawns and fences and ticky-tack houses. On the roof, trying to adjust the antenna so his son can watch F Troop, Larry watches his hostile Gentile deer-hunting neighbors on one side and a naked housewife smoking a joint on the other, while the scrambled sounds of his era waft up from the TV.

Initially, the Coens conceived of the film as having two protagonists, the father and the son (in 1967, Ethan and Joel were 10 and 13 respectively), but drifted toward Larry as they wrote. That might account for why the film’s most uproarious epiphany—a Bar Mitzvah seen through the haze of marijuana—is the boy’s and not his father’s. But the various perspectives gel. A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film.

A positive review from MSNBC...

By Alonso Duralde
Film critic

If Philip Roth and Franz Kafka sat down to write an adaptation of the Book of Job, the result might be something like “A Serious Man,” the thought-provoking new film from Joel and Ethan Coen. Viewers are advised to go out for coffee afterward to discuss just what happened and why and what it all means.

Set in the 1960s, the film examines faith and religion, crime and punishment, and the very notion that a supreme being might actually be paying close enough attention to lay down some Old Testament smiting when we step out of line. And no matter what your own thoughts are on the subject, you’ll be fascinated by what the Coens have to say.

Physics professor Larry Gopnik (stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg) is, to say the least, not having an easy time of it. The head of his tenure committee keeps making oblique statements that could be interpreted as encouraging or as terrible. Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) wants to leave him and is asking for a get, an official Jewish divorce, so that she can marry their friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) in the church. She also wants Larry to move out of the house and into the local motel while they work things out.

Larry’s brother Arthur (Richard Kind) spends his days on some combination of mathematics and Jewish mysticism right out of “Pi,” but keeps using it to gamble illegally. As for Larry’s children, daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) does nothing but complain about Uncle Arthur locking himself in the bathroom all day to drain his cyst, while son Danny (Aaron Wolff) smokes pot on the sly, preps for his upcoming bar mitzvah, and nags his father to fix the TV aerial so he can watch “F Troop.”

Oh, and Larry’s Korean student Clive (David Kang), refuses to accept the fact that he’s failing Larry’s class and insists on bribing the professor for a better grade. And Larry’s neighbor, a scary-looking hunting enthusiast, has plans to build a deck that would come right up to Larry’s dismal suburban property.

It’s no wonder that Larry is plagued with dreams, some about the crushing forces of the universe, others about sexy Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), the nude sun-bather next door.

At first, Larry’s inertia and unwillingness to speak up for himself can be frustrating, but the Coens have created a fascinating Everyman; at some point in “A Serious Man,” one begins to wonder just how many coals they can rain down on their poor protagonist’s head before he finally snaps.

It’s hard to talk about where, exactly, “A Serious Man” fits into the Coens’ filmography, mainly because their movies often feel like a series of deviations with no norm. The movie is probably one of their most humane — so often the characters in the brothers’ films feel like chess pieces that move the plot along (“No Country for Old Men”) or buffoons to which an audience may feel superior (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”), but the Coens seem to have real affection for Larry and his existential crises. Masterfully played by Stuhlbarg, Larry Gopnik may be the Coens’ most three-dimensional character. (To paraphrase Patton Oswalt’s recent CD title, his weakness is strong.)

Wisely using a cast of screen unknowns — Kind and Adam Arkin are about the only familiar faces here — the Coens completely submerge us into this world and keep the plot as unpredictable as possible; when characters aren’t being played by movie stars, suddenly anything can happen to them.

So when things finally go the way they go, you won’t have seen them coming. And you’ll talk about the ending — and the Eastern Europe–set prologue, and Danny’s meeting with the rabbi, and so many other moments from “A Serious Man” — for years to come.

Ella Taylor - LA Weekly/Village Voice - is definitely thumbs down:


For Serious Man, Coen Brothers Aim Trademark Contempt at Themselves
Self-hating or just everyone-hating?
By Ella Taylor
published: September 29, 2009
Wilson Webb

Details:
A Serious Man
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Focus Features
Opens September 2
The Yiddish shtetl shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen's new movie—a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be a Dybbuk—is pretty clumsy, but at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might have become, if it wasn't buried beneath an avalanche of Ugly Jew iconography.

Set in 1967, in a Midwestern Jewish neighborhood with a strong resemblance to the one the Coens grew up in, A Serious Man is crowded with fat Jews, aggressive Jews, passive-aggressive Jews, traitor Jews, loser Jews, shyster-Jews, emo-Jews, Jews who slurp their chicken soup, and—passing as sages—a clutch of yellow-teethed, know-nothing rabbis. At their center is the beleaguered academic Larry Gopnik (played by the excellent stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg), a decent geek clinging desperately to his rapidly shredding status quo. Larry's wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), a stout matron with all her discontent lodged in her curled lip, announces that she's leaving him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a stuffed-shirt widower given to inflicting mandatory hugs on those he screws over. Larry's daughter (Jessica McManus) is filching money from Dad's wallet to pay for a nose job (now there's a novel gag); his son (Aaron Wolff) is strung out on television, Jefferson Airplane, and God knows what else while nominally preparing for his bar mitzvah; and Larry's chronically unemployed brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), sleeps on his couch. Meanwhile, just so you know that the Coens are equal-opportunity practitioners of the ethnic slur, Larry, who is up for tenure, is being set up by a Korean graduate student who talks funny and is unhappy with his failing grade. To cap it all, Larry's pneumatic pothead of a neighbor (Amy Landecker), the sole looker in sight and therefore probably a shiksa, provokes the only pro-active behavior timid Larry is ever likely to take—in his dreams.

By way of plot, Larry suffers buckets of abuse from this crew, then seeks spiritual guidance where none is forthcoming until, either by accident or grand design, his life seems to get better all by itself.

If this were it, the movie would be no more than another dreary exercise in Coen Brothers sadism. But the visual impact of all these warty, unappetizing Jews (even the movie's obligatory anti-Semite looks handsome by comparison) carries A Serious Man into the realm of the truly vicious. The production notes are larded with the Coen Brothers' disclaiming protestations of affection for their hapless characters, but make no mistake: We're being invited to share in their disgust.

And God help the rube who can't take the joke.

I try not to second-guess my colleagues, but would this desire to be hip be why I'm hearing comparisons to Philip Roth, one of the world's least self-hating Jews if you read him right? Would this be why, in a poll conducted by Indiewire at this year's Toronto Film Festival, critics—among them many Jews—voted A Serious Man their best film? They're entitled, but I worry (especially given the indifferent shrug with which the North American film fraternity greeted British director Ken Loach's vile comments earlier this summer that, in light of Gaza, a rise in anti-Semitism is "understandable") about what ancient anxieties lie behind the endorsement of a movie that dumps on Jews and Judaism with such ferocity.

In a fleeting gesture toward the sublime, Larry is seen frantically scribbling mathematical formulae on a blackboard for his students. The camera pulls away to reveal the entire board covered in figures and symbols that strive to master the uncertainty principle, which happens to be generating extreme emotional weather for the troubled prof on the home front. When man makes plans and they fizzle, is that God or the Devil laughing, or the randomness of a world without meaning? A Serious Man might have shown us at our funniest, most abject, and most endearing, when we look in vain for answers to our common hurts and losses. As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry." Is A Serious Man a work of Jewish self-loathing? Hard to tell, if only because—aside from Fargo's Marge Gunderson, one of the great creations of American cinema—just about every character the Coens create is meant to affirm their own superiority.

An A- review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Owen Gleiberman

Joel and Ethan Coen aren't generally accused of making personal films, and they have never dealt explicitly with their Jewish heritage. So A Serious Man, their remarkable new movie, is very much a landmark in the Coen canon. It's set in 1967 in an amusingly flat and nondescript Midwestern city (very much, the Coens have claimed in interviews, like the Minnesota town in which they grew up), and it's about a fractious, scrambling, and deeply anxious Jewish family, in particular the perpetually rattled physics-professor father, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose life is coming apart at the cheaply tailored seams. He's a bespectacled, clean-cut Tevye with the shpilkes spilling out of him, only in this case there's a faulty TV antenna instead of a fiddler on the roof.

Working with affectionate mockery, the Coens take the cinder-block-synagogue banality of American Jewish life in 1967 and make it look as archly exotic as the loopy Scandinavian-American winterscape of Fargo. The grotty tract homes dotted with tchotchkes, the loafing uncle (Richard Kind) who's filling a notebook with a brilliant/crazy physics manifesto, the 12-year-old son (Aaron Wolff) who listens to Jefferson Airplane — a magic pipeline to the outside world — on his transistor radio in Hebrew school: It's all 
 presented like sociological science fiction. Yet there's a grand joke at the heart of A Serious Man. It's that the Jews of the postwar era believed they'd achieved assimilation into the American mainstream, but in their habits and talk, in their unwieldy last names (which the Coens use as wicked punchlines), and in their compulsion to see consumerist America as a place that didn't make sense, they were assimilated everywhere but in their own heads.

Larry's life is a series of catastrophes. 
 His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sleazy widower (Fred Melamed); his son, on the eve of his bar mitzvah, is interested only in F Troop; and Larry's upcoming tenure hearing looks like a disaster. The driving question of A Serious Man is this: Are the problems that define Larry somehow karmic creations of his inability to deal with them? He's trying to be a mensch, but all the people around him seem happier by reducing their Jewish heritage to a kind of cultural version of obsessive-compulsive disorder. A Serious Man isn't perfect — I'm still grappling with the powerfully offbeat ending — but it's cathartic to see the Coens finally show you a bit of who they are, or at least where they came from. A–

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A ***1/2 out of **** review from THE ASSOCIATED PRESS...

Seriously funny troubles abound in `Serious Man'

By CHRISTY LEMIRE (AP) – 22 hours ago

LOS ANGELES — It's hard to put a finger on exactly what a Coen brothers movie is. That's part of the great allure of them.

As writers and directors, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen don't just keep pumping out the same movie over and over, as so many filmmakers do. From the comic antics of "Raising Arizona" to the noir of "The Man Who Wasn't There," the goofballs of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" to the outlaws of "No Country for Old Men," they're all strikingly different. They surprise us.

But there are some thematic threads that frequently run though them, which get tangled together in what is the Coens' most thoughtful and personal film, "A Serious Man."

Basically the point here is that the universe is random, it gives you insurmountable challenges, and there's nothing you can do about it. The concepts of justice and karma are irrelevant: Things happen to people whether their behavior is good or bad, and you can question them all you like, but good luck finding any answers.

You could invoke "The Big Lebowski" in trying to explain this philosophy: They're nihilists. But the Coens are clearly having a little fun in making life so difficult for the nebbishy Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor raising his family in a predominately Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in 1967, a place and time inspired by the Coens' childhood.

Larry tries to do the right thing at home and at work — tries to be a serious man — but out of nowhere one day, the problems start piling up until they reach an absurd level.

His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), informs him that she's leaving him for a longtime friend of theirs, the smarmy widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), has been getting into trouble at Hebrew school as he prepares for his bar mitzvah. Daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is stealing cash from his wallet to save up for a nose job. And his unemployed brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), who's been sleeping on the couch, spends his days doodling gibberish equations in a notebook and draining the cyst in his neck.

Meanwhile, Larry is up for tenure at the university, which his boss assures him is imminent even as he drops passive-aggressive hints that there's a letter-writing campaign against him. And then there is the sizable bribe that an intense Korean student has offered him to change a failing grade.

Watching and wondering how and when he'll snap provides dark humor, yes — we're glad we're not this poor guy — but also a mounting sense of unease, and it should provoke lengthy and serious debate about the nature of faith. Everyone keeps telling Larry to see a rabbi to help solve his troubles; Larry visits several, but they only provide rambling anecdotes and cryptic bits of advice.

Visually, the mixture of flawless period detail in the production design and dreamlike cinematography from the great Roger Deakins, the Coens' frequent collaborator, heightens the feeling of surrealism as we travel with Larry through one weird day after another.

Theater veteran Stuhlbarg, a Tony Award nominee, betrays nothing in his plain, stoic visage; he trudges through no matter what, and yet he makes us long for everything to turn out all right. By comparison, Melamed is wonderfully expressive as the magnanimous homewrecker. Early on, Sy enters Larry's house, hugs him tight and assures him, "Larry we're gonna be fine."

Probably not — not in the Coens' hands. But even if it's not immediately clear what they have in mind for their characters, they'll keep you thinking about them long afterward.

"A Serious Man," a Focus Features release, is rated R for language, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence. Running time: 105 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

A positive review from Rex Reed in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER...

Growing up going to Hebrew school every day and synagogue every Saturday may not be a prerequisite to overcome the bleak confusion of A Serious Man, but my guess is that it sure would help. This is the new one from the quirky Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who shift from comedy to drama with uneven results, and work easily with big stars or nobodies. This time it’s the latter (not even a guest appearance by Brad Pitt), as they return to their hometown of Minneapolis in 1967 and the setting of Fargo to tell the depressingly sluggish story of a nebbishy Jew named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who goes through the perils of Job in the stressed-out weeks before his son’s bar mitzvah. It’s a farce like the dreadful The Big Lebowski, with a confusing and maddeningly unsatisfactory ending like No Country for Old Men. Not one of their best films, but because of its sincerity and the parsing away of sentiment and pretension, it is, in many ways, one of their most likable.

A Serious Man is also one of their most personal. The Coens have never struck me as religious people dedicated to the rudiments of liturgy. (Joel has been married since 1984 to Frances McDormand, who is about as Jewish as Donald O’Connor.) But they know the territory, and appear driven to cynicism about it when anyone mentions the words Talmud or Torah. A lengthy prologue that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie shows a gnarled, impoverished couple in a grim Slavic country that looks like a set from Fiddler on the Roof who open their door in a snowstorm to a neighbor feared to be a dybbuk. The wife stabs him and turns him back out into the cold, inviting a curse that threatens to plague them forever. Cut to the cookie-cutter suburbs of 1960s Minnesota and the endless travails of the Gopnik family.

Larry Gopnik is a math teacher nobody understands, struggling to become a mensch, and failing miserably. His students are bored; his wife divorces him for an aging, bloviated hippie; his pious campus associates pass him by for promotion; his son steals from his wallet and smokes pot in Hebrew school; his daughter can’t get into the only bathroom in the house because his unwelcome, unemployed brother—who is turning into a permanent house guest—always locks himself in to drain his disgusting cysts. Gopnik’s rabbi ignores him; his colleagues patronize him; the deer-hunting redneck next door encroaches on his property to build a boat shed; and the father of an Asian student who bribed him to get a better grade now sues him for defamation. The poor man is rendered homeless and forced to move to a motel. At times, the audience needs the patience of Job to endure the stream of humiliations and torments visited upon Gopnik. The Coens lodge their tongues firmly in their cheeks, addressing the clichés and rituals of Judaism with contemporary skepticism, and equating the complex tenets of the Jewish faith with the problems in Gopnik’s life. Gopnik consults a series of incompetent rabbis (one of them is so obsessed with Jefferson Airplane he substitutes their rock tunes for scripture) who do nothing but complicate his life and give him idiotic advice. Add mortage foreclosures, a wrecked car, footing the bill for his wife’s lover’s funeral and his brother’s arrest for sodomy, and Gopnik is at the end of his rope. Taking stock of what he’s got, he comes up with bubkes. You may need Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish to understand half of the dialogue, but patience pays off. I found the usual moral center in Coen brothers films missing in action, but while I related to practically none of the suffering personally (my Jewish friends call it “the story of my life”), I must admit I laughed out loud.

As Gopnik loses faith and questions the existence of God and the meaning of life, A Serious Man substitutes a comic sense of life’s absurdities for any ethical wisdom grounded in theology, and the movie turns both suicidally sobering and funny as hell, often at the same time. But eventually it falls into the universal Coen brothers abyss—a most unsatisfactory ending that leaves you bewildered and angry. Just when Gopnik’s life is back on the rails and there’s a brief sign of a happy finale, more life-altering calamities come raining down—a hurricane sweeps down on Minnesota and the cancer doctor calls and … but no more spoilers. Clearly the Gopniks are victims of preordained fate, descendants of the crones in the opening scene, and the dybbuk’s curse will go on forever. The Coens never know how to end their movies; remember how the final scene wrecked No Country for Old Men? They always leave you infuriated and dangling. Everyone is just as miserable in the finale as they were in the beginning. A Serious Man may be their most religious film yet, but there is nothing spiritual about it.

Tony Scott, NYTimes, very favorable

Near the end he makes a point that makes sense as someone who loves Barton Fink - which is about a world the Coens know.

Scott says because this film is set in the type of community the know and come from, their attitude makes sense. For me, it is their condescension towards outside communities, particularly lower middle class ones, that has made most of their films so unbearable to me.

So who knows, maybe I'll think that this is the best film of the year...

Calls to God: Always a Busy Signal

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 2, 2009

Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, “A Serious Man,” some details have been changed. He’s called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son’s bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.



At work, Larry specializes in topics like Schrödinger’s Paradox and the Heisenberg Principle — complex and esoteric ideas that can be summarized by the layman, more or less, as “God knows.” Because we can’t. Though if he does, he isn’t saying much.



Larry, played with poignant, brow-furrowed deadpan by Michael Stuhlbarg, does not exactly fear the divinity whom he, like other devout Jews, calls Hashem (“the name” in Hebrew). It’s more that he’s puzzled, beleaguered, perplexed. What does God want from us? What should we expect from him? As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries, Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.



“How odd of God” goes an old bit of doggerel “to choose the Jews.” And how perversely fitting that Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and directed “A Serious Man,” should elect to examine the deep peculiarity and calamitous consequences of this choice. The vein of fatalistic, skeptical humor that runs through so many of their movies has frequently had a Jewish inflection, both cultural and metaphysical. Here, that inheritance, glancingly present in movies like “Barton Fink” and “The Big Lebowski,” is, so to speak, the whole megillah.



“A Serious Man” begins with a narrow-screen, Yiddish-language dramatization of an ersatz folk tale about a tzadik (Fyvush Finkel) who may or may not be a dybbuk. (A righteous man who might be a ghost. You see how much is lost in translation?)



The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.) Their insistence on the fundamental absence of a controlling order in the universe is matched among American filmmakers only by Woody Allen. The crucial difference is that the Coens are compulsive, rigorous formalists, as if they were trying in the same gesture to expose, and compensate for, the meaninglessness of life.



So a question put before the congregation by “A Serious Man” is whether it makes the case for atheism or looks at the world from a divine point of view. Are the Coens mocking God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game? What’s the difference?



The philosophical conundrums in “A Serious Man” can be posed only in jest — or, at least, in the cultural tradition of Ashkenazic Judaism that stretches from the shtetls of Poland to the comedy clubs of the Catskills, that is how they tend to be posed. But a deep anxiety lurks beneath the jokes, and though “A Serious Man” is written and structured like a farce, it is shot (by Roger Deakins), scored (by Carter Burwell) and edited (by the Coens’ pseudonymous golem Roderick Jaynes) like a horror movie.



Everything that happens to Larry takes on a sinister cast. A student (David Kang) protests an “unjust” grade and tries to bribe him. Someone is sending letters to the tenure committee smearing Larry’s good name, while the Columbia Record Club peppers him with dunning calls. His brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), at work on a mad mystico-mathematical text that will unlock the secrets of the cosmos, has moved into Larry’s ranch-style house, taking his physical and mental health issues with him.



And in that house there is sibling warfare (between the bar mitzvah boy, played by Aaron Wolff, and his older sister, played by Jessica McManus), poor reception on the television and, all of a sudden, a collapsed marriage. Larry’s wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), has taken up with an older widower named Sy Ableman (the splendidly unctuous Fred Melamed) — allegory, anyone? — who pompously lays claim to the movie’s title role.



Forget plot summary, though. “A Serious Man,” like “No Country for Old Men” and “Burn After Reading,” is fundamentally a shaggy dog story. But while it is funnier than either of those movies, it also has more gravity to it. This is not just because it represents something of a homecoming for the brothers, who grew up in the heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the 1960s. They are hardly the kind to be sentimental about the old neighborhood. But in that milieu their smart-alecky nihilism feels authentic rather than arch — you understand, maybe for the first time, where they are coming from.



“A Serious Man” continues their nonsequential, decade-by-decade, movie-guided tour of American history. And, as usual, a lot of history is left off screen: the ’60s is pot, the Jefferson Airplane and a slight shift in attitudes toward what Judith calls “whoopsie-doopsie.” But if they are diffident about the politics of the time — or perhaps just cleverly oblique —their sociological sense is unusually acute, if also exaggerated. Apart from a Korean student and an unfriendly neighbor, Larry lives surrounded by his own kind: lawyers, dentists, doctors, colleagues, a too-friendly neighbor. His world is a suburban shtetl on the edge of the prairie.



And the local details are, in the end, incidental. “A Serious Man” is, like its biblical source, a distilled, hyperbolic account of the human condition. The punch line is a little different, but you know the joke. And it’s on you, of course.

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Quite favorable LA Times review as well:

latimes.com
MOVIE REVIEW
'A Serious Man'
Joel and Ethan Coen make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, which turns out to be one of their most universal as well.
By KENNETH TURAN

Film Critic

October 2, 2009

"If not now, when?" the Jewish sage Hillel famously asked, and with "A Serious Man" the Coen brothers have answered.

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.

Set in a very specific time and place -- the Jewish community in suburban Minneapolis circa 1967 -- that closely echoes the Coens' own background, "A Serious Man" is a memory piece re-imagined through the darkest possible lens.

Yet the more the man of the title suffers the torments of Job, the more he tries to deal with the unknowability of the usual willfully absurd and decidedly hostile Coen universe, the more we're encouraged to wonder if this isn't just the tiniest bit funny. And the more real the pain becomes, the more, in a quintessentially Jewish way, laughter becomes our only serious option.

The serious man in question is Larry Gopnik (Tony-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg), a university professor who's up for tenure in physics. Married with two children and the standard suburban house, he's always tried to live up to expectations, tried to be the best person he can, so he's totally unprepared when every aspect of his life begins to collapse in a slow-motion riot.

First, his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), tells him out of the blue that she's leaving the marriage for, of all people, the whale-like Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), an acquaintance as unctuous as he is pompous. Which is very.

At the university, a persistent South Korean student (David Kang) is trying every method, moral and otherwise, to improve his grade. The chairman of the tenure committee is getting anonymous letters assailing Gopnik's alleged moral turpitude. And the man himself keeps getting dunning phone calls from a record club he's never heard of.

Meanwhile, Gopnik's children, the marijuana-smoking, Jefferson-Airplane-listening, about-to-be-bar-mitzvahed Danny (Aaron Wolff) and his frantic sister, Sarah (Jessica McManus), are too self-involved to be much help. And his visiting brother, Arthur (a fearless Richard Kind), spends much of his time draining a sebaceous cyst on his neck and is even more of a wreck than Larry is.

Outside the house, things in Gopnik's bleak prairie subdivision are not an improvement. His possibly anti-Semitic neighbor (Peter Breitmayer) is encroaching on his property, and the willingness of the comely Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker) to sunbathe in the nude is more disorienting than anything else. It gets so bad that Gopnik's only dubious relaxation is listening to bass Sidor Belarsky's ultra-lugubrious rendition of a Yiddish song called "The Miller's Tears."

As his woes increase biblically, Gopnik tries with increasing desperation to find out why this is happening to him. He consults a divorce attorney (Adam Arkin) and not one but three rabbis, and he hears a fantastical story about a Hebrew cry for help engraved on a goy's teeth, only to come to fear that what he guessed all along might be the case: It's not always easy to find out what God is trying to tell us.

On one level -- actually, on many levels -- "A Serious Man" is not exactly a happy story, but one of the things that makes it as involving as it is is the formidible filmmaking skill the Coens have honed in more than 25 years of collaboration.

Doing their own editing (under the longtime pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) and working with such regulars as cinematographer Roger Deakins, costume designer Mary Zophres, composer Carter Burwell, co-casting director Ellen Chenoweth and production designer Jess Gonchor, the Coens have so exactly made the film they envisioned that it is hard not to be drawn in. Working largely with unfamiliar actors, their trademark blurring of the line between serious and comic has never been as artfully done as it is here.

More than that, his mountain of woes notwithstanding, Larry Gopnik just might be the most out-and-out normal person ever to be put at the center of a Coen brothers film, and his everyman status helps explain one of the film's apparent paradoxes: its ability to be both intensely Jewish and speak to everyone.

On the one hand, "A Serious Man" is rife with specific Jewish references, like the great cantor Yossele Rosenblatt. It starts with a quote from Rashi and a Yiddish-language parable set in Eastern Europe starring the veteran Fyvush Finkel as someone who may or may not be a dybbuk and ends with the classic credit line, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture."

Yet it's impossible to watch Larry Gopnik's travails without feeling that they will speak to everyone who's been battered and blindsided by life's tormenting crises and wonders why. By being so site-specific, the Coens have broadened their reach and expanded their touch.

"I've tried to be a serious man. I've tried to do right," Gopnik laments more than once. Haven't we all, this unexpected film, at once comic and haunting, asks. Haven't we all?

A ***1/2 out of **** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are getting personal. They shot their new film in suburban Minnesota, where they grew up as sons of Jewish academics. But if you're expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don't know the Coens, and A Serious Man is no country for you. This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

Front and center is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor who's getting **** from every side. Unsigned letters to the dean question his ethics and threaten his tenure. His son, Danny (the excellent Aaron Wolff), days away from his bar mitzvah, is lost in a pot daze. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is obsessed with getting a nose job. His unemployed brother, Arthur (a wonderfully kinky Richard Kind), is crashing on his couch. And his wife, Judith (a pitch-perfect Sari Lennick), is leaving him for slimy, silver-tongued Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a serious man.

Larry is being tested like Job, with the Coens playing God and lobbing bolts at him, including a Jew-hating neighbor and a nude lady sunbather who stirs his libido. Larry's divorce lawyer (a deadpan Adam Arkin) warns him to expect the worst. So Larry seeks counsel and comfort from multiple rabbis, who deliver silence or cryptic bromides. Grace Slick, on the radio, gets closer to the point, singing, "When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies/Don't you want somebody to love."

Indeed. No doubt the Coens will grin at accusations of stereotyping, self-loathing and box-office suicide. They march to their own mischievous drummer. Larry keeps asking, "Why me?" and stage actor Stuhlbarg, Tony-nominated for The Pillowman, is outstanding at showing the humanity that keeps the question urgent. Larry gets the worst of both worlds, sacred and secular. The film starts with a Yiddish-language prologue, set a century ago in Poland, in which a couple open their door to find a needy neighbor who may be a dybbuk (demon) in disguise. Larry is similarly bedeviled. But that sound you hear in this profane spellbinder is the Coens — chuckling in the dark.

A **** review from Lou Lumenick in THE NEW YORK POST...

JOEL and Ethan Coen mine their adolescences in the mid-1960s Midwest and strike blackly comic Jewish gold with one of their finest films, “A Serious Man.”

The title refers to Larry Gopnik, a hapless physics professor (brilliantly played by stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg) whose Job-like family woes are mounting by the moment.

His bored wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), is leaving him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), the kind of sanctimonious blowhard macher who gives you a bear hug even as he’s planting a knife between your shoulder blades.

Larry’s daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), spends half her life in the only bathroom of their split-level and swipes money from dad’s wallet for a nose job.

And their pot-smoking son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is much, much less interested in his impending bar mitzvah than eluding his dealer, listening to Jefferson Airplane and demanding that Dad adjust the rooftop antenna so Danny can watch “F Troop” on TV.

Larry's woes don't stop at work, where's he's up for tenure just as a Korean student is trying to bribe him and the tenure committee is receiving anonymous letters making sexual allegations about our hero.

And oy, the tsuris keeps coming.

There's the possibly shiksa temptress and the vaguely menacing, gun-owning goy in the neighboring tract houses -- not to mention Larry's unemployed brother (Richard Kind, excellent), who follows Larry from the couch to the motel where poor Larry is exiled by Judith and Sy.

Larry consults with three rabbis to explain why these plagues have been visited upon him.

One offers him a bizarrely hilarious story about a gentile with mysterious engravings on the inside of his teeth. This is about as helpful as the ersatz folk tale (in subtitled Yiddish) that the Coens have devised as a prologue, wherein an old woman in a shtetl stabs a rabbi she has decided is possessed by a dybbuk (the soul of a dead person).

Though the Coens flirt with caricature, there are some serious questions about faith and Judaism underlying their sadistic fun. The film conveys a vivid sense of time and place, and much of the excellently chosen cast are semi-professional locals recruited from the filming locations in Minnesota.

Beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins ("No Country for Old Men"), "A Serious Man" may not have the starry casts of the Coens' more recent films, but it has plenty of heart and soul.

It's a movie mitzvah.

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A negative review from Joe Morgenstern in the WALL STREET JOURNAL...

'A Serious Man'

"A Serious Man," written and directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, asks the most serious of questions—what does God want of us? I would add a question that isn't so serious, though it isn't frivolous either. What do the Coen brothers want of us? More specifically, what do they want us to think of the repellent people in this pitilessly bleak movie?

Watch a clip form the new movie "A Serious Man" starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, and Adam Arkin. Video courtesy of Focus Features.

The time is the mid-1960s, the place is an unnamed suburb in the Midwest, where the brothers grew up, and the milieu, like the one that nurtured them, is middle-class Jewish. The hero, a high-school physics teacher named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), fills his blackboard with calculations that could pass for explications of Kabbalah. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, he declares, "means we can never know what's going on."

Larry has a sinking sense of what's going on. His wife despises him, and plans to leave him for an odious—though supposedly serious—man named Sy; someone has maligned him in anonymous messages to his school's tenure committee; the family of a student who tried to bribe him is taking him to court for defamation; and his own kids are driving him crazy. What he doesn't know, and what the film posits as unknowable, is why he, like a latter-day Job, is so sorely tried, and how he might become a genuinely serious man in God's eyes. (A wonderfully strange preface, set in a Polish shtetl and played in subtitled Yiddish, addresses the difficulty of knowing what to do when a dybbuk crosses your path.)

All of this is mysterious, provocative and, occasionally, very funny—several shaggy-rabbi sequences lead to a memorable scene involving a cryptic sage, played by Alan Mandell, and the wisdom of Jefferson Airplane. But the mystery that prompted my question is posed by the movie's dominant tone.

As in so many of their earlier films, the Coen brothers create comic caricatures with broad performances, grotesque traits—Larry's brother has a sebaceous cyst that never stops draining—and leering, wide-angle shots that invade their characters' personal space. (I've often felt they're invading my space too.) This time, though, there are differences. Their movie is strongly, if not literally, autobiographical, and their caricatures range from dislikable through despicable, with not a smidgeon of humanity to redeem them. Are we meant to loathe these people too, or did the filmmakers fall victim to their customary technique? If the latter, what a miscalculation. If the former—if "A Serious Man" reflects the brothers' feelings about their roots as well as their god—then some of those earlier films may have been more misanthropic than we knew.

A ***1/2 out of **** review from USA TODAY...

By Claudia Puig

After spending a quarter-century making intriguingly edgy, smart films that have little to do with their own experience, the Coen brothers have gone back to their roots. And getting personal suits them.

Like their best films, A Serious Man is a dark comedy with a pervasive sense of unease. But the milieu harks back to the Coens' childhood. And while the atmosphere — with its painstaking attention to details of the era — may be familiar to those who grew up in the '60s and '70s, the story is wholly original.

A Serious Man is a wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film. Underlying the grim humor are serious questions about faith, family, mortality and misfortune.

The year is 1967, and Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a Midwestern college professor, a decent, hardworking father and husband whose life unravels when his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), announces she's leaving him for their smarmy acquaintance Sy (Fred Melamed). Shortly thereafter, his oddball live-in brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), gets in trouble with the law.

Larry is focused on attaining tenure, but also grappling with a disgruntled student and a threatened lawsuit. His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is preparing for his bar mitzvah but seems far more interested in smoking pot and amassing a collection of the latest rock records. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is reduced to sitcom caricature, hellbent on getting a nose job.

But Larry is a righteous man for whom we instantly feel sympathy. Beset by a mountain of problems, he consults those who he hopes can help him — rabbis, a lawyer and even a dentist in absentia. Those interactions often are hilarious, as is the unctuous sympathy shown by Sy, who showers Larry with awkward hugs and addresses him in a funereal tone.

The story takes place in a setting the Coens know intimately, having grown up in Minnesota with parents in academia. Although the tale is fictional, Joel Coen has pointed out that Larry is a middle-aged Jewish father in a community similar to the one in which they grew up.

The film opens with a prologue set in a Polish shtetl, filmed in Yiddish with English subtitles. It's mildly amusing but difficult to put in context with the larger story, and a bit of a weak link.

That doesn't take away from the overall saga, however, which is completely absorbing and hinges on the pitch-perfect performance by the Tony-winning Stuhlbarg. The Coens have said they were looking for a face that would be unfamiliar to film audiences. Stuhlbarg is primarily a stage actor, and his casting is brilliant.

The story takes unexpected twists and is exquisitely mounted, with an evocative score by longtime Coen collaborator Carter Burwell.

A Serious Man, while less commercial and star-studded than their last two films — 2008's Burn After Reading and 2007's Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men— is intimate, provocative and wickedly witty.

A positive review from Richard Corliss in TIME...

Stay through the end credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man and you'll find the disclaimer: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish — residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 — and just about all of them, it seems, are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for help.

Not that the Coen brothers — who were raised in an academic Jewish family in Minneapolis, and were 13 and 10 respectively when the movie takes place — are self or other-hating Jews. But as filmmakers (and Oscar-winners, last year, for No Country for Old Men), they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity as sympathy. So A Serious Man, which has its world premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in theaters Oct. 2, is a rare event in movies, where action is character. It's certainly rare for the Coens, in that this is one fable — Miller's Crossing might be another — that is worth taking seriously. (See the 10 best Coen brothers moments.)

In the two weeks leading up to his son's bar mitzvah, Larry is subject to a catalog of social crimes, small and large. His wife Judy (Sari Lennick) has become close with family friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); she wants Sy to move in and Larry to stay at the Jolly Roger. Larry and Judith's son (Aaron Wolff) is slumming through Hebrew school and harangues Dad to adjust the rooftop TV aerial so F Troop can come in clearly. Their daughter (Jessica McManus) thinks only getting a nose job and washing her hair, which she can't do nearly enough of because Larry's live-in, layabout brother (Richard Kind) spends a lot of time in the bathroom medicating his neck cyst.

At work, where Larry is up for tenure, a Korean student to whom he gave a failing grade leaves him an envelope full of bribe money; when Larry refuses, the student's father drops by to say he may sue the professor for defamation. The neighbor on one side is a belligerent, moose-killing goy; on the other side is not threat but temptation in the form of a pretty woman (Amy Landecker) who smokes pot while sunbathing nude. Anything else? Larry's legal bills are piling up, he just crashed his car, he needs to visit his doctor, and the guy from the Columbia Record Club keeps calling to dun him for a membership Larry never took out. According to those in his local synagogue, he isn't even the serious man of the title; that honorific goes to the oleaginous, wife-stealing Sy. Compared to Larry, Job had it easy.

Larry is a familiar figure from Jewish literature that dates back to the Old Testament and up to Bruce Jay Friedman's 1962 novel Stern, about a Jew who moves to the suburbs and endures a plague of abuse from neighbors and nature. The men at the center of Philip Roth's novels may rage and flail, but Larry doesn't dish out insults, he takes them. When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, just suck it up and hope you don't explode. That's Larry's method of coping. In Stuhlberg's precise embodiment, Larry accepts all tribulations with a mouth pressed into pruny silence, as if he had bitten into something rancid but doesn't want to be seen spitting it out. Wouldn't matter if he did: no one gives him a moment to articulate the psychic pains he harbors. (Read "Baffled After Seeing.")

The movie has no stars, few recognizable faces. And unlike so many American films, which cast gentiles in Jewish roles (Imelda Staunton, for example, as the stereotype mother in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, also about suburban Jews in the '60s), this one actually has ethnic-appropriate casting. The Jews here are sometimes broadly drawn — Larry's family slurps soup at a decibel level that even the Simpsons would find deafening — but they're fully assimilated. Nobody says, "Oy vey!" or talks shtick. If people answer a question with a question, the first would be Larry's plaintive "Why me?" when he seeks legal, emotional or spiritual help, and the second the world's "Who cares?"

As Fate keeps stomping him, he embraces Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. What he tells his class about the theory — "Even if you can't figure it out, you're still responsible for it on the midterm" — applies, in spades, to his crumbling life. And yet for most of the movie he hangs in there, behaving honorably, seeking the wisdom of his ancestors, trying to observe the Jewish concept of Hashem. "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you," says Elie Wiesel's Rashi. To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.

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A positive review from Todd McCarthy in VARIETY...

"A Serious Man" is the kind of picture you get to make after you've won an Oscar. A small film about being Jewish in a Midwestern suburb in 1967, this will be seen as a particularly personal project from Joel and Ethan Coen, and their talent for putting their characters through the wringer in peculiarly funny ways flourishes here on their home turf. With scarcely a familiar name in the entire cast, this Focus release will have to fly on the brothers' names alone, which in this case will mean OK biz in limited playoff in urban areas.

The '60s as we think of them are just barely beginning to touch this insular world of ranch housing, scientific academia, Hebrew school and very square clothing choices, and then only through pubescent Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), who gets high and listens to Jefferson Airplane when he's supposed to be preparing for his bar mitzvah.

But shouldering a weight of woes worthy of Job is Danny's father, Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the trials he must suffer are relentless enough to -- in a buoyant, comical way -- call into question the meaning of life and the nature of God's intentions for his chosen ones. Physics professor Larry is afflicted by his pain-in-the-tuchus brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who's sleeping on the couch with no prospects of leaving; wife Judith (Sari Lennick), who abruptly announces she's leaving him for widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), an overbearing smooth talker and "serious man"; burgeoning pothead son Danny and nose-job-seeking daughter Sarah (Jessicca McManus); a gun-toting redneck next-door neighbor; a failing student who simultaneously bribes and threatens to sue him; and an anonymous letter-writing campaign that may derail his chances for tenure.

If this all sounds like enough material to last a situation comedy for a full season, that's not the way the Coens play it. One doesn't know how (auto)biographical any or all of this is, but there's a tartness to the telling of what amounts to a well-shaped series of anecdotes that bespeaks distant pain or, at least, wincing memory twisted into mordant comedy by time and sensibility. The prevailing strain of humor makes serious light of the characters' foibles in a way that could make some Jews uncomfortable, to the extent that, for certain people, the film might fall into the category of Jewish caricature, even self-hatred.

But to anyone accustomed to the Coens' dark humor through years of exposure, the tone here, on balance, is benign enough. A curious Yiddish-language prologue set in a Polish shtetl establishes a framework in which vigorous disputation and discernment of divine intent are among life's requisites, and so it remains, as Larry, the downtrodden schlemiel and once and future outcast, shuffles among multiple rabbis and lawyers in an attempt to make sense of what is happening to him. Larry, who deals with mathematical certainties in his work, otherwise confronts uncertainties at best and the unknowable at worst, and the most any of the rabbis can do is to say there are some things we're just not meant to know.

This, in a way, gets the Coens themselves off the hook for not attaching any concrete meaning to life or their movie. But strung along the narrative clothesline of debilitating events are moments that blur the boundaries between the irrational, the improbable and the merely intriguing: An elaborate tale of a Jewish dentist who finds Hebrew letters spelling out the words "Help Me" on the backside of a goy's teeth; a sultry neighbor (Amy Landecker) who sunbathes nude and offers to put Larry's moral standards to the test; a bar mitzvah convincingly staged through the eyes of a totally stoned 13-year-old; and fantasies of WASPs on a Jew-hunt.

More than anything, "A Serious Man" would seem to represent a moderately jaundiced memoir of a specific time and place, that being the Minnesota of the Coens' youth. Many such quasi-autobiographical works in literature and film take the form of an escape story by a gifted soul just too sensitive or different to cope any longer with a restrictive environment. To the contrary, the Coens have chosen to identify not with the son but with the father, a man who, as narrative circumstances play out, could have decided to bail out at a certain point. But such a thing never occurs to him for an instant.

Certainly, the Coens' filmmaking skills are sharply attentive to the occasion. Precision is the name of the game in the writing, camera placement, editing, music choices and pitch of the performances, which are poised just so between heightened naturalism and comic stylization.

I certainly enjoyed this at TIFF. One of those stories with a well meaning, earnest man, where simply everything goes wrong - quite funny!

Although I rated it a B- at TIFF, I'm willing to give it another viewing, but I'll wait for it on DVD. I love the Coen brother's films, perhaps I was just mentally exhausted after watching 'The Road'.

I have not seen this film yet, but I am really really holding out hope for it. Despite the fact that some people find the Coen Brothers to be condescending to their somewhat stereotypical Southern characters, I have always felt that their ability to put characters into a situation that literally begins to unravel before our eyes is simply breathtaking at times.

Fargo, I don't have to tell you, is an enormously loved crime thriller that managed to make a kidnapping scandal into something to both shocked and humored audiences. No Country for Old Men is a film that many at the Gold Derby don't enjoy, but I have on more than one occasion fought in favor of the Best Picture winner, and sometimes gotten close to winning others over to my opinion. Even their madcap comedies like Raising Arizona can be brilliantly laid out and methodically wound up. In fact, my major complaint with their last film Burn After Reading (aside from the hammy acting of Clooney) was that, what could have been some of the best scenes in the film, were events only mentioned in conversational dialogue. That, and the ending left alot to be desired for me.

But here, with A Serious Man, I am predicting to following nominations:

Best Picture
Best Actor, Michael Stuhlbarg
Best Supporting Actor, Richard Kind
Best Original Screenplay

Granted, Stuhlbarg and Kind will both need to start getting attention from critics' circles in order for this to play out fully, but I for one voted Yes in the aforementioned poll that Tom O'Neil advertised.

I'm excited to see this film.

quote:

Originally posted by Dr. McPhearson:
I have not seen this film yet, but I am really really holding out hope for it. Despite the fact that some people find the Coen Brothers to be condescending to their somewhat stereotypical Southern characters, I have always felt that their ability to put characters into a situation that literally begins to unravel before our eyes is simply breathtaking at times.

Fargo, I don't have to tell you, is an enormously loved crime thriller that managed to make a kidnapping scandal into something to both shocked and humored audiences. No Country for Old Men is a film that many at the Gold Derby don't enjoy, but I have on more than one occasion fought in favor of the Best Picture winner, and sometimes gotten close to winning others over to my opinion. Even their madcap comedies like Raising Arizona can be brilliantly laid out and methodically wound up. In fact, my major complaint with their last film Burn After Reading (aside from the hammy acting of Clooney) was that, what could have been some of the best scenes in the film, were events only mentioned in conversational dialogue. That, and the ending left alot to be desired for me.

But here, with A Serious Man, I am predicting to following nominations:

Best Picture
Best Actor, Michael Stuhlbarg
Best Supporting Actor, Richard Kind
Best Original Screenplay

Granted, Stuhlbarg and Kind will both need to start getting attention from critics' circles in order for this to play out fully, but I for one voted Yes in the aforementioned poll that Tom O'Neil advertised.

I'm excited to see this film.

A lot of Goldderbyites enjoy "No Country for Old Men" as it did win the top prize for the Goldderby movie awards in its year. It also was #1 on my top ten list. 742 and several others as well.