Coen Brothers give viewers a lot to chew on with 'A Serious Man'
It's not all "Fargo" and "No Country for Old Men" box-office glory for the filmmaking Coen Brothers.
Sometimes they stumble and give us a bad movie that's deliriously watchable, such as a "Big Lebowski."
And sometimes they drop a challenging, worthwhile film that you won't ever want to watch again ("Barton Fink").
"A Serious Man" teeters closer to the latter than the former. This is a cryptic Minnesota-Jewish riff on the biblical Book of Job. Their most inside joke ever, it leaves you with a lot to chew on, if not a lot to enjoy.
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, doing a decent, damp slow burn) is a physics professor hoping only for tenure at his suburban Minneapolis college and for his foul-mouthed pothead son (Aaron Wolff) to not shame him by botching his bar mitzvah.
It's not looking good. The boy listens to Jefferson Airplane on his transistor radio in Hebrew School and gripes incessantly that the poor TV reception ruins F-Troop for him at home.
A combative Korean student of Larry's accuses him of giving an "unjust" test and starts to make trouble. A Gentile but not gentle neighbor with a thing for hunting and encroaching on their shared property line is testing Larry.
His insufferable, aimless brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is visiting and hogging the bathroom with his incessant cyst draining.
And then Larry's wife (Sari Lennick) drops the bomb. She's fallen for this passive-aggressive widower in their synagogue (Fred Melamed) and wants a "Get," a "ritual divorce."
The other man, Sy, is pleasantly insistent that they all be "adult" about this. Larry, mensch that he is, just goes along.
With each new body blow we wince for Larry, hope he'll grow some spine and either find comfort through his faith, like Job or renounce it and stick up for himself.
The sense of a closed, tribal world of ceremony, tradition and ritual joins to a period-perfect, knotty-pine paneled design. But this is the movie equivalent of the old Jewish joke: "Why does a Jew answer a question with a question?" "Why not?"
What's clear is how this fits within that long, spotty track record of the Coens, exactly the sort of film they release after some dazzling success.
Sometimes, "Serious" or not, they don't quite deliver.
'A Serious Man'
¤¤¤ (of 5)
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen.
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, David Kang, Amy Landecker, Peter Breitmayer, Adam Arkin.
Rated: R; profanity, sexuality, nudity, brief violence.
Run Time: 1 hr. 45 min.
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