A Serious Man

When you’re going into a movie theater, you don’t know if you’re going to be watching gold, or watching pure crap. After watching the first ten minutes of A Serious Man, I knew I had struck gold. The next 95 minutes grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go without laughing or crying. Arguably, the Coen Brothers have topped themselves with this crowning comical achievement. Set in Minnesota in the late Nineteen-Sixties- semi-autobiographical to the Coens- Larry Gopnik, a middle-aged physics professor embodies Job by being pelted with divorce, his job and his enigmatic brother while questioning his Jewish faith. The pain grows with Larry’s self-absorbed teenage daughter and his son, who soldiers through Hebrew school with a handheld radio and a lid of weed.

Playing first-mate aboard the Coen’s Cruiser is cinematographer, Roger Deakins. Deakins captures the monotony of Midwestern suburbia that echoes American Beauty with an approach that would make Hitchcock grin, along with towering angle shots and drug-infused sequences that mirror Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. Carter Burwell’s romantic, yet haunting, blend of piano and strings flows throughout the film’s damned protagonist as he cycles around through id and superego. On top of Burwell’s score is an unforgettable blend of Jimi Hendrix and, primarily, Jefferson Airplane.

Michael Stuhlbarg has pounded the floorboards of New York reciting Shakespeare for the past decade. After seeing A Serious Man, you will be talking about Stuhlbarg’s intense, brooding, and funny performance as Larry Gopnik; this is a performance worthy of speculation and adulation. Richard Kind takes his comedic shtick from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and gets darker as Larry’s deadbeat brother. Amy Landecker adds another weight onto Larry’s back as a seductive neighbor who plagues his mind with the sexual energy and gravitas of Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson.

If you want cheep laughs and thrills, this is not the film for you. If you want to be philosophically and theologically mind fucked, than get as close to the screen as you can. A Serious Man is, seriously, the best film of the year. The Coen Brothers have created their cinematic Sgt. Pepper that will have the religiously devout or true agnostic reeling with laughter and self-loathing.

4 out of 4 stars: ****