A Serious Man

Something about Larry: In the painfully funny ‘Serious Man,’ the Coens throw the book at a suburban dad

October 09, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

The other day, a colleague of mine called the Coen brothers “Stanley Kubrick’s grandchildren,’’ and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. He was referencing the cold, almost inhuman brilliance the filmmakers share; the cynicism that allows no emotion beyond the unforgiving laugh. (The songs of Steely Dan also came up, and that makes sense, too: Any major dude will tell you Becker and Fagen and Ethan and Joel share pop-culture DNA, crafting works of mysterious pleasure while sneering at greater meaning.)

Can art come from jadedness? Will the brothers ever “mean it’’? “A Serious Man’’ forces the issue in ways that will either floor you or drive you batty. There are Coen movies that are inconsequential goofs (that would be “Burn After Reading’’), and there are the ones that count. This is one of the ones that count, and it’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’ Some have already labeled the film despicable. I think it’s Jewish Bergman and one of their very best movies - a pitch-black Old Testament farce in which God is either absent, absent-minded, or mad as hell. It’s a film to haunt you for a long time to come.

The year is 1967, the place the flat, plastic suburban grid of St. Louis Park, outside of Minneapolis. The hero is a college physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), married with children, open-faced and earnest. He’s on the tenure track; his son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is about to be bar mitzvahed; the world is in order and Larry is content. Enter the Coens, with banana peel.

“A Serious Man’’ has been compared (over-compared, really) to the Book of Job. Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for a pompous widower (Fred Melamed), and someone is sending poison-pen letters to the tenure committee. There are minor and major car accidents; a bribery attempt; there’s a brother (that wonderful sad sack Richard Kind) who has been living on the couch for months, sinking into a morass of psychosis and sebaceous cysts.

The children are self-absorbed horrors; the man from the Columbia Record Club never stops calling. Bad things keep happening, and why? Is Larry’s serial misfortune meant to test his faith? To force him to acknowledge a godless universe? To get him to stop being such a schlemiel?