Review: A Serious Man

A SERIOUS MAN is the fourteenth feature film collaboration between Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coen brothers have been critical darlings ever since their debut, the brilliant BLOOD SIMPLE. They won their first Academy Awards with FARGO in 1996, and their two latest films, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and BURN AFTER READING have been their most commercially successful.

It's been a strange career path, one which probably only features one film universally regarded as a failure; the ill-advised remake of THE LADYKILLERS (although INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is unjustly held in low regard by many), but has seen their last decade of work be seen as inferior by most reviewers.

Looking through their filmography, this is probably the case, but only because their 'nineties' were so great. In addition to FARGO, they created stone-cold masterpieces MILLER'S CROSSING, BARTON FINK, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY and THE BIG LEBOWSKI. In comparison, the likes of THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and BURN AFTER READING can't help but feel slight.

Slightness is something that has been attributed to A SERIOUS MAN; albeit wrongly. This is an intensely intimate film, one which asks questions of man's ability to live in a world without levity. Our hero is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a midwestern professor whose wife is preparing to leave him, and whose children are laws unto themselves. He suffers a small crisis of faith, which in addition to an unwell brother (a terrific Richard Kind [cousin Andy from CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM) and problems at work lead him to the brink of a breakdown.

Stuhlbarg delivers a knockout performance. Larry is a sympathetic character, a man unable to see humour in anything in his life. It strikes me that this film is about men like this. Men who allow each slight to compound the previous one. Getting inside the mindset of Larry is no easy task, so filmmakers and actor deserve credit for the breadth of the character study. That the film has little time for any other character aside from as a reflection of Larry is true (the same could be argued of BARTON FINK, of course), but this is no bad thing. It's Larry's world we're inhabiting, and a diversion from it would lessen the impact, although on this note, the film's extended prologue, which takes place many years, and miles away from the main narrative is a delight.