Movie Review: Coens mine childhood for ‘Serious Man’

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Published: October 30, 2009

"A Serious Man” is Joel and Ethan Coen’s seriously funny portrait of an ordinary guy who can’t catch a break despite his devotion to faith, family and his academic profession.

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"A Serious Man”

1:44

3½ stars

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Adam Arkin, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus.

(Language, some sexuality and nudity, brief violence).

Set in Minneapolis suburbia, 1967 — the time and place of the writing-directing brothers’ boyhood — the typically Coen-quirky cast of characters and situations are undoubtedly drawn from their own wonder years, then darkly exaggerated to serve their own subversive comedic purposes.

Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor who teaches mathematical certainties in the classroom while his disastrously uncertain personal life is spinning completely out of his control. His wife Judith (Sari Lennick) has announced that she’s leaving him for their insufferably pompous friend, Sy Ableman (a perfectly solemn Fred Melamed), who seems to be a more reliable source of security and support than the ineffectual Larry. She’s also sick and tired of Larry’s neurotic and unemployable brother Arthur (a hilariously weird Richard Kind), who’s become a permanent fixture on their couch (when he’s not loitering in disreputable bars).

If those aren’t enough headaches, Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a pot-smoking washout in Hebrew school and his bar mitzvah is only days away. He’s also subscribing to the Columbia Record Club under his dad’s name, and Larry keeps getting calls about overdue payments for albums he didn’t order.

His daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is stealing from his wallet to save up for a nose job, one of his students is simultaneously trying to bribe him for a passing grade and threatening to sue him for defamation of character, an anonymous enemy is writing nasty letters about him to the university tenure committee, he’s frightened of his gun-loving redneck neighbor, and driven to distraction by his other neighbor, a beautiful, pot-smoking brunette (Amy Landecker) who likes to sunbathe in the nude.

Unlike Job, Larry’s patience and his sanity are wearing thin, and he desperately seeks answers from three rabbis, young and old alike, but they only mouth baffling, pious platitudes that indicate they’re just as clueless as he is. "It’s God’s will,” someone tells him of his misfortunes. "You don’t have to like it.”

It seems no one can help him cope and become the mensch, the righteous, serious man he longs to be.

The Coens have long wanted to make this film about their experience growing up in a Jewish community in the Midwest of the 1960s, in a bewildering world where the goofy "F Troop” was a smash on TV, and the trippy Jefferson Airplane had a hit on Top 40 radio, singing, "When the truth is found to be lies / And all the joy within you dies ....”

"A Serious Man” won’t sell as many tickets as the award-winning box office successes that enabled the Coens to make this little film, but it certainly must have satisfied them on a personal level, and the audience that does turn out for it should find satisfaction in Stuhlbarg’s amazingly controlled, sympathetic and understatedly hilarious performance as a good man suffering the undeserved slings and arrows that living can inflict.

Through his skillful portrayal, the Coens effectively unravel a telling and typically unconventional parable on the human condition, complete with all its symptoms — angst, sorrow, drama, laughter and a need for somebody to love.

— Gene Triplett