With problems like these, it’s hard to not be ‘A Serious Man’

“A Serious Man”

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind and Fred Melamed

Directed by… “A Serious Man”

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind and Fred Melamed

Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen

Studio: Focus Features

Grade: A-

The Coen brothers are addicted to tragedy. In almost all of their films, someone gets shot, loses their family or gets stuffed into a wood chipper. You know what kind of movie you’re walking into if Joel and Ethan Coen are headlining the directing and writing credits.

They seriously define the modern genre of tragedy, and “A Serious Man” might be their most tragic film yet.

A loose adaptation or comparison to the Book of Job, the film begins in Eastern Europe, in a distant Yiddish past. A Jewish couple meets an old man, who was thought to literally be dead by the community. The wife proclaims the man to be a “dybbuk,” a ghost of sorts, and acts upon her beliefs in violent Coen-style.

Flashforward to 1967 Minnesota and enter Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor who is coming close to achieving tenure in the late 1960s. Everything that could possibly go wrong in his life is going wrong.

One of his students bribes him for a passing grade, his wife leaves him for their widower neighbor Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is pursued by the police for gambling issues, and on top of all that, his pot-smoking, Jefferson Airplane-listening son Danny’s bar mitzvah is rapidly approaching.

This movie is a heaping spoonful of hopelessness and despair. Usually in most films of this sort, the viewer believes that he can fix the main character’s problems. It’s always, “Why doesn’t he just talk to the girl?” or “I would’ve been able to get the money if I were him.”

But Larry Gopnik is a lost cause. There’s no solution to his problems. Sometimes you hate him for his actions, but at the same time you are unsure if you would’ve done anything different. But for some sick reason, it’s so damn entertaining.

Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony award-nominated actor only seen in film for minor roles, takes his first lead role as Gopnik with an amazing aura of mastery. He carefully balances himself on the line of believability, but credit should be given to the Coens’ writing, as well.

“A Serious Man” is a baffling, thought-provoking film. It questions the bounds of religion, community and what it really means to be a serious man. The Coen Brothers have redefined tragedy once again with yet another impressive film.