A Serious Man (2009)

Truly Dreadful Film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A Serious Man is seriously disappointing. This film takes the book of Job and makes it even more bleak than the original story. The dialogue and acting are actually quite good, but the story is intolerable most of the time. This is on the low end of Coen Brothers' movies.

Waste of time, only put it on if you want to fall asleep

A Serious Man has a quirky feel with dark undertones much like Fargo. Both mid West, A Serious Man takes its character from the more urban, yet similarly bleak suburbs of 1960's Minnesota, and the exaggerated Jewishness of the characters. A clear palette of oranges and browns, this film feels about as Coen as you can get. The entire film carries this sinister sense of a soulless suburban life, while also playing on complex themes of Yiddish folklore.It opens with this horror like 1800's Eastern European scene of a Jewish man inviting a supposed dybbuk into his household. The questioning of paranormal devil like themes so early on sets the film up to be that of impending peril. The entire film essentially focuses on the continual failings and misfortune of Larry Gopnik, a physics professor with a failing marriage. Much like Fargo, the similarly terrible events juxtapose the almost innocence of the characters, as we watch Gopnik's world fall apart, the whole interactions of the characters are just so mundane. This creates that typical Coen black comedic effect. Much like Fargo's Steve Buscemi, calmly explaining how he will "have to, you know shoot you", Larry is easily let down time and time again by other characters, to the extent where it appears almost funny.

Released in 2009 and written & directed by the Coen brothers, "A Serious Man" is a black comedy/drama/satire about a passive Minneapolis physics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) in 1967 who faces a series of tragedies and desperately seeks the answers 'Why?' Sari Lennick plays his unfaithful wife and Fred Melamed (who looks like Francis Ford Coppola) her lover. Richard Kind appears as the eccentric (maybe genius) uncle while Aaron Wolff & Jessica McManus play the kids. Amy Landecker is on hand as a sexpot neighbor. Simon Helberg (from The Big Bang Theory) has a small role as an assistant rabbi. There's a prologue that was shot in the Czech Republic which the Coens say has no link to the rest of the movie. Really? It struck me as rather tedious and, if it has no connection to the story, why is it there? Actually, I didn't find the entire first half of the film very entertaining and the protagonist's ultra-passivism started to become exasperating, but around the halfway point things began to click and I found myself consistently amused till the end.Freely borrowing from the awesome book of Job, this movie will obviously play better to Jewish and Christian audiences; perhaps also other spiritual seekers. It addresses the deep questions of life and the inherent challenges of the human condition (trapped in a physical shell in a fallen world while yearning for the perfect and divine) with a good sense of satirical humor. The song "Somebody to Love" by Jefferson Airplane is a focal point and supposedly holds the non-answers:"When the truth is found to be lies; And all the joy within you dies. Don't you want somebody to love? Don't you need somebody to love? Wouldn't you love somebody to love? You better find somebody to love." There are anachronistic references to two albums: Santana's Abraxas and Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory, which weren't released until 1970, three years after the events in the film. The movie runs 106 minutes and was shot in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, area (e.g. the suburban scenes were filmed in Bloomington), including St. Louis Park, where I spent my childhood. GRADE: B-