It’s 1967 – Grace Slick is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV – when the life of Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) takes on hellish dimensions. A maths lecturer, his proposed tenure is compromised by a failing Asian student’s attempts at bribery. His dotty brother (Richard Kind) has moved in and refuses to seek work or a place of his own. His thick-necked all-American neighbours are gearing up to build a boathouse on his lawn. His wife announces she is leaving him for an oily family friend (Fred Melamed, excellent) who insists on hugging the cuckolded husband by means of consolation. His daughter wants a nose job and greater access to the bathroom; his son, a Lebowski in training, alternates bar mitzvah preparation with a mean dope habit. The details are inspired by the Coens’ own Jewish boyhood in late-sixties suburban Minneapolis, but the personal connection isn’t enough to protect poor old Larry Gopnick from the comic cruelty of the Coeniverse. Never mind No Country for Old Men, even Cormac McCarthy’s fatalism is no match for the brothers when they start getting Old Testament on your ass. Their malevolent machinations coalesce into a loose reworking of the testing of Job and a superb companion piece comedy for The Big Lebowski.
Like that film and much to the consternation of those who define themselves by the two scarcely discrete fields, A Serious Man neither fits neatly with ‘their earlier funnier ones’ nor their respectable, heavyweight Oscar pictures. Fair weather friends may scratch their heads on the sidelines but for paid-up subscribers, this is the best Coen outing in more than a decade, a film that demands to be watched and watched again until dialogue like “I think, really, the Jolly Roger is the appropriate course of action” is learned entirely by heart.