A Serious Man

Throughout the Coen brothers’ new near-masterpiece, A Serious Man, it is made very clear that Larry Gopnik (played to perfection by Michael Stuhlbarg) is not the figure of the title. Gopnik is a hapless professor and a bumbling, panic-stricken cuckold, seeking tenure and anticipating his son’s upcoming Bar Mitzvah. At its most basic level, the film is a story about how all of this goes wrong.

Taking the roles of rabbi, Hashem (God) and dybbuk (a demon)—these last two being examples of the film’s colorful hyper Judaic landscaping—are the Coens themselves. They have, by means of a terrific acting ensemble, lingering cinematography and the latest of their consistently brilliant soundtracks, created a manic Jewish dystopia wherein no character has control of anything. Their film is an allegory of religious belief as a method, the constant allusions to Hashem’s will acting as reminders that just as the Coens wrote these clueless characters and their calamitous lives, God could, might or does write yours.

Joel and Ethan take core aspects of their childhoods—the languid Hebrew lectures, the advent of marijuana in the suburbs, the mythic goyim—and inflate them from the inside until they are misshapen and exposed. Gopnik’s little town is a world where dreams of having his head slammed repeatedly against the uncertainty principle and crew-cut father-son Jew-hunting squads are almost as believable as reality—and equally as vivid.

Gopnik is easily the Coens’ most convincingly disintegrating protagonist since John Turturro’s Barton Fink, though Stuhlbarg—and the film—never quite reaches those lofty heights. This isn’t a fault, though, just as a gangster film’s failure to match The Godfather could never be held against it. Rather, A Serious Man is an insidious dark comedy that ranks with the best of its filmmakers’ oeuvre and, arguably, as this year’s best movie yet.