Reviews & Quotes

"Please. I need help," Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) pleads in A Serious Man, the 14th -- and best, and most heartfelt -- film by Joel and Ethan Coen. But there's no help to be found. Larry, dutiful husband, caring father, responsible college professor and all-around mensch living in Minnesota in 1967, is about to discover that everyone is out for himself, and woe to those who assume other people really care about you. Even God can't be bothered. He's busy, you know?

That summary may sound bleak, and, on one level, A Serious Man certainly qualifies as a cinematic cry of despair. But the movie is primarily a dark, acidic comedy, one that argues that the snowballing problems facing Larry -- an adulterous wife (played by Miami native Sari Lennick), a trouble-prone son (Aaron Wolf), a ne'er-do-well brother (Richard Kind), anonymous threats to his pending tenure and a student's attempt to bribe him -- are all a result of his complacency, of his willingness to sit back and let life happen to him.

"A Serious Man" begins in an amber-tinted room in a home in an Eastern European shtetl. A pragmatic wife and her believing husband debate the arrival of a visitor.

Is he, in fact, the good rabbi so-and-so? That's his wavering position. Or is he a dybbuk, a demon? That's her stance.

In Joel and Ethan Coen's quietly amusing, philosophically rich tale about a beset family man, this parable of the welcome-unwelcome guest is less a key to the ensuing domestic drama than a teasing reminder of the traditional roots of the brothers' singular skill with humor and violence.

"A Serious Man" is set in 1967, a time when the Coens were coming of age in suburban Minneapolis. Outside that same Twin City, Danny Gopnick (Aaron Wolff) listens to Jefferson Airplane on a transistor radio when he should be paying attention to his Hebrew lesson.

The radio is confiscated, along with the money tucked into its leather case. Danny, a budding pothead, must now figure out how to pay back his connection, a beefy classmate.

Danny's sister, Sarah (Jessica McManus), filches bills from Dad's wallet. This frivolous girl may be the least-calibrated character in "A Serious Man." But she does clue us in on the brokenness of Uncle Arthur, who has annexed the kids' bathroom for hypochondriacal rituals.

Mother Judith, played with acrid clarity by Sari Lennick, is having an affair with quasi-hipster Sy Abelman (a brilliantly unctuous Fred Melamed).

Life is pain. Life is funny. Things happen randomly, with no purpose or reason that can be discerned. Searching for answers is futile.

Enjoy what you can.

The philosophy behind the Coen brothers' films is hardly hidden.

What's marvelous is the way siblings Ethan and Joel mix their misgivings into movies that on the surface seem to have little in common, and how consistently entertaining and challenging the results are.

"A Serious Man" may well be the funniest serious movie of the past decade, a tear-out-your-hair, pratfall-filled anxiety fest riffing on the Coen's youth as Jewish kids growing up in Minnesota in the '60s.

In contrast to their last film, the Oscar-winning "No Country for Old Men," it stars no one you've likely heard of and only a few faces you might recognize. And yet the dark clouds that hovered over "No Country" hover here as well, even coming into the open as the film ends.

Theater actor Michael Stuhlbarg stars as Larry Gopnik. After the Coens start off the film somewhat inexplicably with a traditional Hebrew ghost story, Larry -- father of two, good husband, math professor at a local college and faithful Jew -- begins getting slammed every which way.

It's the 1960s, and physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can't get a break. His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants to divorce him, to the seeming indifference of their children Danny (Aaron Wolff) and Sarah (Jessica McManus).

Meanwhile, Larry's brother Arthur (Richard Kind) keeps monopolizing the bathroom, and Larry's tenure committee grapples with charges that he's morally unsuitable. Could one of his accusers be a student who attempted to bribe him for a passing grade?

Perhaps a talk with the most respected rabbi in this Midwestern community would help Larry sort everything out. But the rabbi's secretary claims he's busy.

"He doesn't look busy," Larry protests, to no avail. It's just the latest disappointment for a man whose universe is steadily unraveling.

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen ("No Country for Old Men"), "A Serious Man" is a comedy of discomfort — and one of their best, most insightful and most provocative films. The final shot, which won't be revealed here, is at once extraordinary and disturbing.

Larry could be the breakthrough role for Stuhlbarg, a respected stage actor who has appeared in films including "The Grey Zone" and "Body of Lies." Not since Woody Allen in his glory days has a screen schlemiel been so endearingly hilarious.

Also turning in splendid performances are Fred Melamed as Judith's condescending boyfriend, and Adam Arkin as Larry's empathetic lawyer.

We've come to expect drollery and eccentricity from Joel and Ethan Coen. The filmmakers have specialized in ruthlessly comic, often mercilessly bleak anatomies of the foibles of ordinary men.

What is much less expected is the humanity and emotion that comes pouring out of the comedy-drama A Serious Man, the brothers' 14th feature film. This portrait of a university professor under extreme duress has the shaggy-dog storytelling elasticity of Barton Fink, the gorgeously stark visual compositions that propelled Fargo and a supporting cast populated by hilariously off-kilter oddballs. But this time the Coens wed their singular style to an intellectual probity and moral purpose. It's the best film of their careers.

The movie begins with an elusive prologue, spoken entirely in subtitled Yiddish, set in 19th-century Eastern Europe, where a man announces to his wife that he has invited a new friend to his cottage, only to have his wife react with terror. The man in question died two years ago, and thus a ghost must be on his way to visit. Once the opening credits roll, this strange fable is never again referenced. But it seems to encapsulate everything the Coens are reckoning with in A Serious Man , about the struggle against chaotic forces larger than us and our hapless search for meaning in all that chaos.

The question in "A Serious Man," the Coen brothers' latest film, is simple enough, if the details are much more complex. Why does God test us, challenge us, punish us? Is there no relief in this life?

They waste no time in asking the question. Answering it is another story, something they really never get around to. But this is a movie

that delights in posing the big query, in exploring the limits of tolerance and patience.

It's also hilarious.

It's easy to peg "A Serious Man" as the Coen brothers' most personal work to date.

After all, what's the runner-up? "Fargo?" "Blood Simple?" Ethan and Joel Coen specialize in detachment as filmmakers, the more ironic the better. And just because some elements of "A Serious Man" may (or may not) reflect their own experiences - Jewish family life in the suburbs in the '60s, with all the hope, promise and crushing claustrophobia that implies - doesn't mean they've left it behind.

They toy mercilessly with their protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor on the cusp of tenure. From a distance, Larry's life is nondescript, perhaps even pleasant. Up close it's a different story.

"A Serious Man" is a masterpiece. The Coen Brothers top themselves every time!

The Coen brothers continue to grow in sophistication and subtlety. "Fargo" is still one of their best pictures, and yet when you compare it to "No Country for Old Men," it looks a little obvious. Joel and Ethan Coen were always original and interesting, and some people were willing to call them great from the beginning. But in truth they've become great before our eyes, expanding their vision and using their films to grapple with the big issues of life, death and the spirit.

"A Serious Man," the newest film, combines the spiritual desolation of "No Country for Old Men" with the black comedy of "Burn After Reading." It's an unusual and effective combination. It tells the story of a hapless physics professor, living in a Jewish enclave in Minnesota in 1967, and the movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful.

At least "No Country for Old Men," taking its cue from the Cormac McCarthy novel, had a certain epic grandeur. "A Serious Man," made from an original script by the Coen brothers, presents life as a meaningless void, in which people spend their days worrying and scurrying, only to end up getting cut off at the knees. The placement of the story four decades in the past reinforces this sense - that everything happened, and it all amounted to nothing.

"A Serious Man" is a tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than "No Country for Old Men" but with a script rich in verbal wit. This time it’s God — or chance, or fate with a grudge against the Minneapolis suburbs — wielding the stun gun. The most we can do, the film implies, is stick to our principles and hope for the best.

Physics professor Larry Gopnik, played by the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg in precisely modulated degrees of panic, is God’s chosen sufferer, coping with a failing marriage, his son’s imminent bar mitzvah, a South Korean student bribing him for a better grade, and a brother (played by Richard Kind) plagued by a literal pain in the neck, a cyst in need of constant, mysterious drainage. The time is 1967. The film begins with a Yiddish-language prologue set a century earlier in a Polish shtetl, in which a man and a woman are visited by an ancient character (Fyvush Finkel). The wife thinks he may be a dybbuk, or supernatural intruder, and deals with him in a way that either saves them or curses them — we don’t know. Do we ever know?

A Kafkaesque/Philip Roth-ian comedy about a Jewish family in 20th century Middle America, "A Serious Man" may be Joel and Ethan Coen’s most personal film, and also their iciest.

It’s a "Fargo" of the soul, an existential "No Country for Old Men," and what it lacks in snuggliness, it makes up for in Job-evoking, Old Testament-meets-borscht belt grandeur.

It begins in the past with a dark fairy tale in which a Jewish villager and his wife encounter a rabbi the wife is convinced is a dybbuk (i.e. evil spirit). The scene, in Yiddish with subtitles, suggests a demonic "Fiddler on the Roof."

The Coens’ Job-like protagonist is Larry Gopnik (stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg), a 1960s-era Minnesota physics professor we meet as he’s discussing Schrodinger’s cat and the uncertainty principle. Soon, Larry is beset by uncertainty.

At home, Larry must put up with his more than slightly creepy older brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who is supposedly working on some scientific formula of enormous magnitude while squatting on Larry’s sofa and hogging the bathroom, much to the dismay of Larry’s unruly teenage daughter (Jessica McManus). Arthur uses a pump to drain a sebaceous cyst on his neck.

Suddenly, Larry’s biblically-named wife Judith (Sari Lennick) announces she’s leaving him for widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a devout, bear-sized passive-aggressive bully.

The other day, a colleague of mine called the Coen brothers "Stanley Kubrick’s grandchildren," and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. He was referencing the cold, almost inhuman brilliance the filmmakers share; the cynicism that allows no emotion beyond the unforgiving laugh. (The songs of Steely Dan also came up, and that makes sense, too: Any major dude will tell you Becker and Fagen and Ethan and Joel share pop-culture DNA, crafting works of mysterious pleasure while sneering at greater meaning.)

Can art come from jadedness? Will the brothers ever "mean it" ? "A Serious Man" forces the issue in ways that will either floor you or drive you batty. There are Coen movies that are inconsequential goofs (that would be “Burn After Reading’’), and there are the ones that count. This is one of the ones that count, and it’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’ Some have already labeled the film despicable. I think it’s Jewish Bergman and one of their very best movies - a pitch-black Old Testament farce in which God is either absent, absent-minded, or mad as hell. It’s a film to haunt you for a long time to come...

After spending a quarter-century making intriguingly edgy, smart films that have little to do with their own experience, the Coen brothers have gone back to their roots. And getting personal suits them.

Like their best films, A Serious Man is a dark comedy with a pervasive sense of unease. But the milieu harks back to the Coens' childhood. And while the atmosphere — with its painstaking attention to details of the era — may be familiar to those who grew up in the '60s and '70s, the story is wholly original.

A Serious Man is a wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film. Underlying the grim humor are serious questions about faith, family, mortality and misfortune.

The year is 1967, and Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a Midwestern college professor, a decent, hardworking father and husband whose life unravels when his wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), announces she's leaving him for their smarmy acquaintance Sy (Fred Melamed). Shortly thereafter, his oddball live-in brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), gets in trouble with the law.

Larry is focused on attaining tenure, but also grappling with a disgruntled student and a threatened lawsuit. His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is preparing for his bar mitzvah but seems far more interested in smoking pot and amassing a collection of the latest rock records. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is reduced to sitcom caricature, hellbent on getting a nose job.

The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are getting personal. They shot their new film in suburban Minnesota, where they grew up as sons of Jewish academics. But if you're expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don't know the Coens, and A Serious Man is no country for you. This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

Front and center is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor who's getting shit from every side. Unsigned letters to the dean question his ethics and threaten his tenure. His son, Danny (the excellent Aaron Wolff), days away from his bar mitzvah, is lost in a pot daze. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is obsessed with getting a nose job. His unemployed brother, Arthur (a wonderfully kinky Richard Kind), is crashing on his couch. And his wife, Judith (a pitch-perfect Sari Lennick), is leaving him for slimy, silver-tongued Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a serious man.

Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, “A Serious Man,” some details have been changed. He’s called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son’s bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.

At work, Larry specializes in topics like Schrödinger’s Paradox and the Heisenberg Principle — complex and esoteric ideas that can be summarized by the layman, more or less, as “God knows.” Because we can’t. Though if he does, he isn’t saying much.

Larry, played with poignant, brow-furrowed deadpan by Michael Stuhlbarg, does not exactly fear the divinity whom he, like other devout Jews, calls Hashem (“the name” in Hebrew). It’s more that he’s puzzled, beleaguered, perplexed. What does God want from us? What should we expect from him? As weird inconveniences spiral into operatic miseries, Larry dutifully searches for clues, answers, signs. He talks to learned rabbis and listens to recordings of famous cantors. What he encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter.

"If not now, when?" the Jewish sage Hillel famously asked, and with "A Serious Man" the Coen brothers have answered.

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.

Set in a very specific time and place -- the Jewish community in suburban Minneapolis circa 1967 -- that closely echoes the Coens' own background, "A Serious Man" is a memory piece re-imagined through the darkest possible lens.

Yet the more the man of the title suffers the torments of Job, the more he tries to deal with the unknowability of the usual willfully absurd and decidedly hostile Coen universe, the more we're encouraged to wonder if this isn't just the tiniest bit funny. And the more real the pain becomes, the more, in a quintessentially Jewish way, laughter becomes our only serious option.

The serious man in question is Larry Gopnik (Tony-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg), a university professor who's up for tenure in physics. Married with two children and the standard suburban house, he's always tried to live up to expectations, tried to be the best person he can, so he's totally unprepared when every aspect of his life begins to collapse in a slow-motion riot.

Man plans, God laughs, and so do the Coen brothers. Their latest, "A Serious Man," is a slapstick meditation on divine intent, human yearning and the consolation of faith in an unfair universe. The central character is a suburban Job asking the ultimate question, "Why me?" The Coens record his woes with sublime assurance, guerrilla wit and a lot of Yiddish.
The film is set in a heavily Jewish suburb of Minneapolis circa 1967. Larry Gopnik (deliciously underplayed by Michael Stuhlbarg) is a schlumpy junior physics professor. When we meet him he's trying to explain a profound paradox of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's Cat, a hypothesis that requires a kitty to be both dead and alive at the same time. It's the basis of the uncertainty principle, that some things in the cosmos you can't know.

Larry's life is chaos theory incarnate, however. His strident wife is openly dating sanctimonious creep Sy Ableman, who wraps him in faux-compassionate embraces. His unemployed brother has taken up permanent residence on their couch. Larry's distressed that a student is bribing him for a passing grade, that his beautiful neighbor sunbathes nude, and that he has to climb up on the roof to see her.

Always the cruel gods of their movies, the brothers now turn to religious desperation—a perfect match—and, obliquely, to their own Jewish boyhood in late-’60s suburban Minneapolis. A Serious Man, like their shaggy masterpiece The Big Lebowski, justifies the loftiest expectations, both highly controlled and uncommonly exposed. The Gopniks are an unstable clan: Anxious Larry (Stuhlbarg) uncertainly pursues tenure as a math prof while one of his students blackmails him for a better grade. His wife is leaving him for an orotund patronizer (the outstanding Melamed); Larry’s oily brother (Kind) won’t vacate the bathroom; his daughter wants a nose job; and his son alternates bar mitzvah prep with habitual toking.

Growing up going to Hebrew school every day and synagogue every Saturday may not be a prerequisite to overcome the bleak confusion of A Serious Man, but my guess is that it sure would help. This is the new one from the quirky Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who shift from comedy to drama with uneven results, and work easily with big stars or nobodies. This time it’s the latter (not even a guest appearance by Brad Pitt), as they return to their hometown of Minneapolis in 1967 and the setting of Fargo to tell the depressingly sluggish story of a nebbishy Jew named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who goes through the perils of Job in the stressed-out weeks before his son’s bar mitzvah. It’s a farce like the dreadful The Big Lebowski, with a confusing and maddeningly unsatisfactory ending like No Country for Old Men. Not one of their best films, but because of its sincerity and the parsing away of sentiment and pretension, it is, in many ways, one of their most likable.

Seriously funny troubles abound in `Serious Man'

It's hard to put a finger on exactly what a Coen brothers movie is. That's part of the great allure of them.

As writers and directors, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen don't just keep pumping out the same movie over and over, as so many filmmakers do. From the comic antics of "Raising Arizona" to the noir of "The Man Who Wasn't There," the goofballs of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" to the outlaws of "No Country for Old Men," they're all strikingly different. They surprise us.

But there are some thematic threads that frequently run though them, which get tangled together in what is the Coens' most thoughtful and personal film, "A Serious Man."

Basically the point here is that the universe is random, it gives you insurmountable challenges, and there's nothing you can do about it. The concepts of justice and karma are irrelevant: Things happen to people whether their behavior is good or bad, and you can question them all you like, but good luck finding any answers.

You could invoke "The Big Lebowski" in trying to explain this philosophy: They're nihilists. But the Coens are clearly having a little fun in making life so difficult for the nebbishy Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor raising his family in a predominately Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in 1967, a place and time inspired by the Coens' childhood.

A SERIOUS MAN

directed by the Coen Brothers

The short version:

A ridiculously great movie. Funny as hell. I really loved this one.

The long version:

This is a phenomenal film. Is it too much to ask that it become a big success? Is that at all possible?

Larry Gopnik is comfortable. He doesn’t get a lot of respect from many folks around him, but he’s achieved something and is maintaining it. He’s even up for tenure at the university where he is a professor. So it comes as a great shock to him that not everyone around him is happy with the status quo.

His wife wants a divorce, and has gone so far as to find his replacement (someone for whom she DOES have respect). Someone has been sending letters, urging the university against granting him tenure. He’s forced to move into a divey motel with his mostly useless brother and his sebaceous cyst. Things that seemed stable, are no longer.

And I guess that’s what the movie is about - what does one do, when the illusion of stability is taken away?

Michael Stuhlberg is a total revelation as the put-upon Gopnik. He is absolutely perfectly cast here, and turns in a smart, funny and sensitive performance. He has a silent movie star’s face and needs to be shot in black and white at some point.

The movie itself is screamingly funny at points. If you like the Coen Brothers’ sense of humor, you will revel in this film. They get everything right here. The ‘Tale of the Goy’s Teeth” in particular, is a killer sequence. The audience was in hysterics.

The Coen Brothers‘ A Serious Man is very comparable to Alexander Payne’s masterwork Election, which just happens to be one of my favorite films of all time. Both films are brilliant dark comedies about teachers who are trying to do their best, trying to do the right thing, and somewhere along the way, make one small bad decision which spirals out of control into the biggest mess you’ve ever seen.

A Serious Man is set in 1967, and centers on Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) a midwestern professor who is faced with divorce, and all the consequences that may bring to his Jewish family, which includes a son prepping for Bar Mitzvah while evading bullies at school, a daughter, and his crazy gambling brother who keeps getting into more trouble. Larry seeks answers from three local rabbi, none of which are able to give him any advice he believes to be of value. And things only get worse, because they certainly aren't getting any better.

Can I make a confession? I'm not usually a fan of things that are super Jewish. Jewish I like. In fact, Jewish I love! My list of Jewish cultural heroes ranges from Franz Kafka to Bob Dylan to Sarah Silverman, with about a bazillion stops in between. But super-Jewish stories about shtetls and magic-realist rabbis—all that Fiddler on the Roof crap? Meh! I'm Irish American, with my own schmaltzy ancestral pseudohistory to mythologize, feel guilty about, and feel superior for overcoming. Spare me the Nathan Englander routine. I don't need another nightmare to wake up from.

Prejudices are made to be renounced, though. For example, just when I swore I'd never willingly sit through another exigesis of the cultural dislocations of the 60s, Mad Men landed and revived the entire genre for me. (I still refuse to see Taking Woodstock though.) And now along comes A Serious Man, which is as super-Jewish as the Coen brothers are likely ever to get. It’s also seriously awesome.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Latest, A Serious Man, is a portrait of a period (1967) and place (Minnesota) and milieu (Jewish) that the brothers know very well. They cast it with excellent actors; Richard Kind as pathetic Uncle Arthur and Adam Arkin as a well-heeled lawyer are probably the only recognizable names. The writer-directors start the movie off in a wintry shtetl, evoking the dread spirit the dybbuk hovering over an uneasy marriage. This movie is utterly assured, personal, serious, sad and very funny.

I wanted to sit down and write a full review of Joel and Ethan Coen's "A Serious Man," but structuring my thoughts around a paradigm such as that seems folly at this stage. I need to see it again — and will certainly do so many more times — before any sort of authoritative personal take will begin to surface. But a few things stand out that are worth conveying.

In my view, it is the finest Coen film since “Fargo” and, perhaps, since "Barton Fink." It is without question the siblings’ most personal film to date, an exploration of the "What does it all mean?" thoughts that plague each of us on a daily basis. (The repetition of the line, "What's going on?," is by no means incidental.)

However, despite the film's heavy dosage of the particulars of the Jewish faith, it is also curiously universal. After all, I don't know from Hashem, but the film affected me deeply, it's themes and ideas resonating from start to finish.

"A Serious Man" Bottom Line: A seriously funny film about an angst-ridden Jewish professor seeking the answers to life's questions and getting a metaphysical pie in the face.

More Toronto reviews

TORONTO -- The always surprising Coen Brothers have finally made a very serious movie with "A Serious Man." It's about God and man's place in the world and the meaning of life so naturally it's one of their funnier movies. And since the year of the story is 1967, the oracle of human wisdom and experience can be found in the lyrics of the immortal rock band, Jefferson Airplane. Of course, it can.

"A Serious Man" will do serious business among the Coens' many admirers but is not likely to expand the membership rolls greatly. In commercial terms, it's not as gripping as "No Country for Old Men" nor as knee-slapping hilarious as "Fargo," but rather a quiet sort of movie that finds sly humor in the quotidian lives and mind sets of a Midwestern Jewish community some 40 years ago. So the movie narrows its audience to adults who take comedy seriously.

Toronto: "A Serious Man" is, believe it or not, a personal film by the Coen brothers by Owen Gleiberman

Joel and Ethan Coen aren't usually accused, even by their most ardent devotees, of making intensely personal films (unless, of course, you count their technique as personal, or their attitude). What's more, in a quarter of a century of moviemaking, the Coens have never dealt deeply and explicitly with their Jewish heritage. (Not that there's anything wrong with not dealing with it.) And that makes A Serious Man, their remarkable new film, something of a landmark in the Coen universe. It's set in 1967 in an unnamed, amusingly flat and nondescript Midwestern city (very much, the Coens claim, like the Minnesota town in which they grew up), and it's about a fractious, scrambling, and deeply anxious Jewish family, in particular the perpetually rattled physics-professor father, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is doing everything he can to be a mensch, but whose life is coming apart at the badly tailored seams. He's a bespectacled, clean-cut Tevye with the spilkes spilling out of him, only in this case there's a faulty TV antenna rather than a fiddler on the roof.

"A Serious Man" (Focus Features, 10/2), the latest work of Ethan and Joel Coen and the highest-profile awards hopeful to be making its debut here at TIFF, screened for the first time this morning. Only a year after they came here with the disappointing "Burn After Reading" — which was fun enough but not nearly as deep or layered as most of the rest of their oeuvre — the brothers' latest offering marks a decisive return to form. It is an absolutely hilarious –an extraordinary satire of the Jewish-American experience — but nevertheless strikes me as unlikely awards bait.

Prior to the screening, the press had heard very little about the plot — only that it was inspired, to some degree, by the Coens’ own experience of growing up in a Jewish family in Minnesota during the late sixties and early seventies. As it turns out, the film focuses less on the Gopnik family's kids than on its patriarch (Michael Stuhlbarg), a reserved if not wimpy professor (think Marty McFly's dad in "Back to the Future") who is presented with moral dilemma at the very same time that his personal life begins crashing down around him, and who cannot find anyone to provide him with the guidance that he so desperately needs.

This is the dark comedy that Joel and Ethan Coen have been working towards. A Serious Man is the culmination of their lives, reminiscent both of their own suburban childhoods in the '60s, and of their cinematic successes over the last twenty-five years. It grabs the magic of local flavor and charm we saw in Fargo with a cast widely filled with unknown names (that pack as much of a cinematic punch as any star-studded roster you can think of), to the rapidly escalating drama of Burn After Reading. A Serious Man is cohesive and slick from stem to stern. It's serious about the craft of storytelling, both in form and function, with a dedication to characterization, pitch-perfect performances, and a cinematic backdrop that is both severely nostalgic and completely immersive.

In many ways, A Serious Man is a modern-day Candide. But rather than a hapless hero who is continually undaunted by the neverending drama that plagues him, the Coens' hero isn't a ray of sunshine. Larry Gopnik (perfectly embodied by renowned stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg) is a man utterly at a loss to explain his life's severe turn for the worse; he is a man desperate for answers. The classic Candide optimism shines down in the form of the rabbis he consults with as he tries to make sense of things. But rather than sage advice, they deliver wholly inadequate responses to life's trauma that don't speak at all to the nature of Larry's life.

There is something about the Jewish way of humor and storytelling I've always found enormously appealing. I memorized material by Henny Youngman and Myron Cohen at an age when, to the best of my knowledge, I had never met a Jew. I liked the rhythm, the contradiction, the use of paradox, the anticlimax, the way word order would be adjusted to back up into a punch line. There seemed to be deep convictions about human nature hidden in gags and one-liners; a sort of rueful shrug. And the stories weren't so much about where they ended as how they got there.

The Coen brothers' new film, "A Serious Man," tells a Jewish story. It is largely about misery and bad luck, and it's very funny. Its hero's first two words must have been oy vey. The Coens, who have a way of following their vision with unwavering consistency, do not flinch from the problems of poor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), which include a wife, son and daughter who cause him misery, a deeply flawed brother-in-law who has taken up residence on the sofa, three rabbis who are no help, and an exhibitionist neighbor who goes heavy on the eye liner and smokes during sex. If you aren't Jewish when you go into this movie, you may be when you come out.

I want to briefly discuss several films I've seen at Toronto his year, so this isn't the time for a full-dress review. But let me praise the brothers, Ethan and Joel, for making no attempt to "mainstream" the story in a misguided attempt to appeal to the goyim. Being specific makes their movie more accessible, not less, because there's some Larry Gopnik in all of us...