A Seri­ous Man

The Coen broth­ers sure know how to frus­trate. From the ear­ly days of Rais­ing Arizona’s curve­ball punch­line (“I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah?”) to last year’s odd­ly point­less Burn After Read­ing (“I’m fucked if I know what we did!”), this is a duo who lead audi­ences down unique­ly twist­ed paths only to leave them a lit­tle strand­ed, reluc­tant to explain the jour­ney. A Seri­ous Man is no dif­fer­ent, yet none the worse for it. Ulti­mate­ly, frus­tra­tion is the point.

Stay for the clos­ing cred­its and there’s a dis­claimer that hints at the broth­ers’ think­ing: ​‘No Jews were harmed in the mak­ing of this pic­ture.’ It could almost be the film’s sub­ti­tle. This is the Coens at their most cheeky and per­son­al, plac­ing the sto­ry in their home­town Jew­ish sub­urb of St Louis Park, Min­neso­ta, circa-1967.

It’s a very Amer­i­can – very Jew­ish-Amer­i­can – set­ting, but any fan of Woody Allen will rel­ish the blend of neb­bish guilt and dark laughs (there’s even a nod to Woody’s leg­endary ​‘Moose’ stand-up rou­tine.) The suf­fo­cat­ing social anx­i­ety of The Grad­u­ate, made the year that this is set, also looms large.

After the star-laden weight of Burn After Read­ing, A Seri­ous Man is lean­er. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg takes the lead as Lar­ry Gop­nik, a mild-man­nered physics teacher whose aver­age life – fam­i­ly, job, neat house and gar­den – slips out of his grip when divorce, teenage rebel­lion and work­place bul­ly­ing sud­den­ly trip up his com­fort­able exis­tence. With his social­ly autis­tic broth­er (Richard Kind) and a lust­ful neigh­bour (Amy Lan­deck­er) also prey­ing on his mind, Lar­ry won­ders whether he can ever be the kind of upstand­ing indi­vid­ual that his eth­nic­i­ty demands of him.

For proof of com­e­dy and tragedy’s close rela­tion­ship, watch this. Lar­ry is essen­tial­ly hav­ing a ner­vous break­down yet it’s the Coens’ most humane­ly fun­ny script in years. While the faith-spe­cif­ic ele­ments might deter some, the gallery of grotesques are broad enough to wide­ly appeal. Rab­bis, school prin­ci­ples, Uncle Arthur with his seba­ceous cyst – no social insti­tu­tions are safe, yet with­out them Lar­ry knows that his life would be even more unwieldy.

Rel­a­tive unknowns keep star bag­gage to a min­i­mum allow­ing warm­ly hon­est per­for­mances. When Stuhlbarg’s nerdy Lar­ry bal­ances pre­car­i­ous­ly on his roof to watch his neigh­bour sun­bathing, there’s a gen­uine hap­less­ness that a ​‘movie star’ would strug­gle to replicate.

A bizarre pro­logue to the piece, a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry urban leg­end spo­ken in Yid­dish, might encour­age the main fea­ture to be seen as a para­ble but return­ing to that end cred­it dis­claimer, A Seri­ous Man is the Coens’ least seri­ous film for a long time. Using the hilar­i­ous­ly ran­dom exis­ten­tial­ism that we’ve come to expect, this is their reminder that it’s point­less to try and con­trol the events of your life. Frus­trat­ing? Of course. But that’s always good for a laugh.