A Serious Man

The Coen brothers’ best movie is a painfully funny comedy about a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), benumbed but bewildered by his wife’s announcement that she’s fallen in love with their neighbour Sy Abelman (the unctuous Fred Melamed) and she wants a get (a divorce). Professionally, too, things take a turn for the worse when a failing student tries to bribe and blackmail Larry for a passing grade. Indeed, things get so dark that the professor is moved to consult with a rabbi…

The Coens — cultural magpies whose movies are often inspired by literature and other films — drew on their experience of growing up in a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in the late 1960s for what is, probably, their most personal film. It’s also, one should add, their most “serious”, an intellectually rigorous existential inquiry into faith, and, for some of us, their funniest.

This is the first Coens’ film to address religion head-on, and a fat lot of good it does Larry, who stumbles from one crisis to the next, never resolves anything and only pleads helplessly that he “hasn’t done anything.”

Jul 29: Intro by Marc Staehling, broadcaster

As funny, heartbreaking, questioning, trying, exasperating and sincerely inquisitive a portrait of the human condition as you’ll find on screen.

Sean Axmaker

A philosophical and painfully relatable tale that contends with big questions… the most blisteringly honest in the Coen catalogue.

IndieWire

The scariest comedy ever made.

Sean Fennessy, The Ringer