Academy Award®-winning directors Joel and Ethan Coen return to their comedy roots with this original and darkly humorous story about one ordinary man’s quest to become a serious man. Physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can’t believe his life: His wife is leaving him for his best friend, his unemployed brother won’t move off the couch, someone is threatening his career, his kids are a mystery and his neighbor is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family, delinquent behavior and mortality in the film critics rave is “seriously awesome!” (Michael Hogan, Vanity Fair)Joel and Ethan Coen make movies like nobody else’s, but even by their standards A Serious Man is in a class by itself: a complete original that’s one of the brothers’ best. After a deeply weird Yiddish folk-tale prologue set in 19th-century Poland (and framed in the old 1.33:1 format), the picture shifts to the region and era of the Coens’ own upbringing, a Minneapolis suburb in 1967. Larry Gopnik (a superbly concentrated portrait in comic anguish by Michael Stuhlbarg) is a college physics prof facing a welter of crises and distractions: review by the tenure committee, son Danny’s bar mitzvah, a cryptic-verging-on-sinister protest from a Korean-American student, the alienation of wife Judith’s affections by widower Sy Ableman, the ongoing encroachment of brother Arthur and his sebaceous cyst–and don’t even mention the proto-Nazi who lives next door. All these, and more, form a screenplay of such intricacy that the blackly comic tensions of one shaggy-dog narrative strand leap synapse-like to another; the movie becomes a symphony of metaphysical dread. Working again with world-class cameraman Roger Deakins and editing, as always, under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, the Coens maintain impeccable control over the movie’s look and timing. This is more crucial than ever, given that in the precarious universe they define, “actions have consequences.” Then again, so does nonaction; not ordering “the monthly main selection” from the Columbia Record Club means you’ve ordered it. The main-title credits almost flaunt the fact that most of the cast members will be unfamiliar to us (though they all deliver); best known are Richard Kind as Arthur, Adam Arkin as Larry’s divorce lawyer, and Michael Lerner (the studio boss in Barton Fink) doing a hilarious, wordless cameo as Solomon Schlutz. Special praise is due Fred Melamed, seizing the role of a lifetime as the unctuous Sy Ableman; Amy Landecker as Mrs. Samsky, the multifariously zoned-out siren who’s Larry’s other next-door neighbor; and Avi Hoptman as Arlen, Larry’s mealy-mouthed academic colleague who can’t resist hinting at the latest rumblings from the tenure committee, even if he can’t really say anything. –Richard T. Jameson
Buy “A Serious Man” For Only $14.50
January 12, 2006
#1
A regular story nothing fantastic. So many abstracts been thrown at this movie is ridiculous. Ive seen this movie twice and the people that seem to enjoy this long winded story of nothing spectacular at all are from 59-80 year olds. If you were born in the modern age then this movie will bore you too wanting a refund.
update: seems getting attacked for ones opinion is right? I say its for senior citizens movie because thats the crowd that was there at both times i went to see the movie. went to see it twice to give it a fair chance to see what the good reviews were about.
January 12, 2006
#2
All right. I got the biblical allusions in A SERIOUS MAN, such as the story of Job, the temptation of David, yada yada yada. That still doesn’t mean that there was much of a story or for that matter–character development and plot–in this poor excuse of a movie. This is the type of film that gives arthouse cinema a bad name. I never felt so bored in my life. If the Coen brothers wanted to make a movie of a physics professor who is tortured by his everyday life–fine. But don’t torture your audience at the same time. I find the Coen brothers to be wildly inconsistent in the quality of their films–much like Steven Soderbergh. They’ll make brilliant films like Fargo and No Country For Old Men and then losers like this one, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ladykillers, etc. Not recommended at all. Instead, go see Amreeka.
January 12, 2006
#3
This has to be the worst film made in the last 100 years. Ugly, abhorrent, painful, disgusting and a waste of resources. Sure hope these two sociopaths are being watched. Children and pets are certainly not safe around them. Felt neither sympathy, concern or interest in any of the characters or their actions or activities. Not a moment of humor throughout the entire ordeal. I would have found more pleasure in calling up roto-rooter and having them come over and perform anal surgery without anesthesia than have to watch this again. I, unfortunately, give the benefit of the doubt to people and I believed the reviews on the dvd box – thief, liar, pervert! I kept hoping the chipper/shredder from their Fargo movie would show up and all the characters and the Coen cretins would dive in and we would finally have something to cheer about! Unfortunately you can not return a dvd just because it’s a rotten movie. Call the cops. I’ve been robbed!
January 12, 2006
#4
the main character is academically smart but has NO street smarts !!!
- he is the full manifestation of the term a ” WIMP” !
definitely entertaining but I could hardly resist the advice to
the main character to ” grow a pair ” !
He is the type of individual who would benefit from a vacation in
the SouthWEST, He could attend a NATIVE AMERICAN peyote meeting – this
would help cleanse all the FALSE TO FACT ideas he has about LIFE, living life
and his personal self worth and identity – He is hugely BLOCKED from living
life as an independent VITAL organism !
Worth seeing if you grew up back EAST in the 50s in the middle class .
January 12, 2006
#5
From the brilliance of “No Country for Old Men” to this stultifying mess entiled, “A Serious Man,” we can only stand back and see how far the mighty Coen Brothers have fallen.
I was curious as to why this movie never made it to our multiplex which usually shows every piece of film released. Now, I can see why the cinema owners didn’t want to lose their shirts on this hideous misfire that might appeal to maybe one viewer–that would be the local newspaper movie critic who still thinks “Citizen Kane” is the greatest movie ever made.
For one thing, unless you’re Jewish, nearly 98 per cent of this movie makes zero sense. The “serious man”–played with infuriating vagueness by Michael Stuhlburg–is being divorced by his hideous slob of a wife who has the hots for another hideous man whose also Jewish. In other brainless scenes that no one can understand is the sub-plot of the brainless son who keeps running into his home from a bully. Oh, yes. There’s the repeated plot line of him tellin his father that the TV aerial needs to be adjusted because favorite TV channels can’t be seen.
There are endless shots of someone putting a record needle on a 33 1/3 record to listen to Jewish music or instructions and then there are endless dream sequences where you FINALLY see something interesting and colorful but these end up with the serious man waking up in a sweat. Haven’t we all seen this same worn-out device in countless horror flicks made on $1.99 budgets-which, come to think of, looks exactly like this idiotic travesty.
We all know that “the serious man” is really a poor ole wimp because the Cohen Brothers dress him up in exactly the identical wardrobe of countless other wimps we see in horny teen adventures and modern tales of misfits–he wears his trousers too short with the cuffs almost halfway up his legs.
As to the usual crtics who gave this exercise in idiocy 4 star raves, I do wish that for punishment they would be forced to sit in a room where the Coen Brothers Production of “A Serious Man” unreels non-stop around the clock. But on second thought, I wouldn’t want to have mass breakdowns on my consience.