A Serious Man &#9733;&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;&#9733;

By David Wildman

Just when you thought 2009 would finish up as a veritable black hole of mediocrity, Ethan and Joel Coen drop a casual masterpiece on us. A Serious Man is seriously smart, dark, brutally funny and, in the duo&rsquo;s best tradition, completely inscrutable.

Of late, the most mysterious quality of most movies I&rsquo;ve been seeing has been the mystery of why they were made in the first place. With A Serious Man, the Coens are interested in larger subjects like the meaning of life, faith, morality and so on, yet they tackle the big questions by telling a small story, one likely drawn from their own childhood experiences, and imbuing it with a profound ambiguity.

The basic plot centers on nerdy Jewish physics teacher Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fundamentally gentle soul trying to navigate through a simple life in 1967 suburban Minneapolis while his world is crumbling all around him. His troubles range from the life-altering to the mundane: his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) is unsatisfied and wants a divorce, he is up for tenure and someone is writing nasty letters about him, his next door neighbor is encroaching on his property, his nutty brother Arthur (Richard Kind &ndash; the only recognizable face here) is living on his couch, his stoner son, soon to be Bar Mitzvahed, has an unhealthy fixation with F-Troop, and so on. In his frustration he seeks the wisdom of three consecutive rabbis, each introduced with mock portentous white lettering on a black screen. None of them have any answers.

If this were all that A Serious Man was about, it would still be a good film with some excellent performances by refreshingly unknown actors, but still just a dark domestic comedy. What makes it special is the way the Coens are able to playfully hint at an unseen world beyond the protagonist&rsquo;s insular experience. Part of this is represented by Grace Slick&rsquo;s almost taunting voice singing &ldquo;Somebody To Love&rdquo; on a transistor radio his son has spirited into Hebrew School, indicating the shifting mores of the times outside of this cloistered existence. Larry is clueless to how the world around him is changing, but of course we as audience members know all about things like women&rsquo;s lib and the impending decay of the family unit that the 1970s will bring.

And there&rsquo;s something else we know that he doesn&rsquo;t. The opening minutes of the film depict a bizarre ancient Yiddish tale about a gregarious husband and his brooding wife who murders a local holy man thinking he&rsquo;s some kind of ghost. The connection is left unexplained, but the Coens seem be saying that Gopnick&rsquo;s family is cursed. By giving us all this information that the protagonist isn&rsquo;t aware of, it can be seen as serving to cast us, the audience, in the role of God &ndash; overseeing events we understand on a greater level but are powerless to change, and perversely having a good laugh at all of the characters&rsquo; misfortunes.

A Serious Man compares favorably to great works of dreamlike satirical bleakness such as Godard&rsquo;s Pierrot le fou or Bunuel&rsquo;s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In American cinema this kind of artful ambiguity is rare, but the Coens have been dealing in it from the beginning with little apparent concern for the commercial viability of their work. A Serious Man is receiving the same low-risk art theater treatment as did their 2007 release No Country for Old Men, a process that has evolved into the preferred treatment for Oscar contenders: a small run in the fall to qualify, followed by mainstream success after the nominations and ultimately awards come through. So far I haven&rsquo;t seen any films that come close to A Serious Man in deserving that scenario.