A Serious Man

Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

(R)

***

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A Midwestern Jewish man in the late 1960s ruminates about life.

Judged on craft alone, “A Serious Man is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Set in 1960s suburban Minneapolis, Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film concerns Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a good and decent Jewish college professor who wants to understand why his life is coming apart at the seams. In their “bleak, black, belittling mode,” the Coens make Larry a modern-day Job—the familiar figure from the Bible—but the ruthlessly deadpan storytelling is “hell to sit through.” A Serious Man is hard to shake, let alone comprehend, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. But all in all, it’s a “work of cruel comic genius.” The brothers use little-known actors to portray a “pitch-black” reality in which “God is either absent, absent-minded, or mad as hell.” Only the Coens could pull this off—and do it so artfully. The two brothers have drawn deeply on their own Midwestern childhoods for this story, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Surprisingly, the “most personal, most intensely Jewish film” of their career turns out to be their most “universal as well.”