Image courtesy of Time Out New York

A Serious Man
Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel & Ethan Coen (screenplay)
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, and Sari Lennick

The Brothers Coen set the last three years of the 2000’s on fire.  First No Country For Old Men, their new-age western masterpiece adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, wins Best Picture of 2007 at the Academy Awards.  Then the next year, fearful of being taken too seriously by the Hollywood elite, they unleash Burn After Reading, a hilarious farce of mass proportions.  Now with 2009’s A Serious Man, they put forth comedy so staunchly pitch-black a viewer not accustomed to the Coens may think they have no idea how to tell a joke.

In that assumption, they couldn’t be more wrong.  In their screenplay, the Coens have managed to not only write one of the funniest scripts of 2009, but also layered it with philosophical musings and darker thematic elements.  All of this is set against the the late 60’s Midwestern Jewish background the Coen brothers grew up in, which many critics think makes the film autobiographical.  What I think they are trying to do is just show what it was like, not tell their life story.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is the vessel with which the Coens convey that environment.  He is an academic coming up for tenure with a wife  (Sari Lennick) who wants to leave him for the more sensitive and passive-aggressive Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), children who only want him to fix the TV, and a social outcast brother (a hilarious Richard Kind) who sleeps on the couch and comes up with formulas to win at gambling.  All of these forces crush Larry simultaneously, as well as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed neighbor who is invading the property line in order to build a garage and the other neighbor who teases him by sun-bathing nude.  Surrounded on all sides both physically and mentally and desperate for answers, he reaches out to three rabbis.

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