The Coen brothers' dark comic take on the Book of Job

You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate the Coen Brothers’ latest masterpiece, and Mildred really believes this is a true masterpiece.

Famously autobiographical, A Serious Man comes from a place that no writer could make up. They would have had to live it, and the Coen brothers undoubtedly did.

The film is set in the 1960s and stars Michael Stuhlbarg in the lead role as Larry Gopnick, a physics professor whose tenure file is up for review.

Most of the dramatic comedy centers on Larry’s domestic life. He has done what everyone else of the working class aspired to do at the time – he moved to the suburbs, where every house looks like every other house.

It’s a place where nobody knows who their neighbour is. A measure of modern alienation washes over everything.

Larry is sweet and well-meaning and all he really wants to do is be a good person, a good father and husband, a kind and fair teacher. He practices his life with a strong code of ethics, and he tolerates a lot.

But into this suburban dream, a hell of a lot of bad stuff starts to happen in true Coen brothers fashion.

Larry’s younger son is permanently plugged into marijuana dealing, the happy and catchy Jefferson Airplane version of it. His daughter is at the teen-crazy age where washing her hair trumps all other tasks or duties.

She keeps popping up comically with a towel around her head. His willful wife announces she is having an affair with his best friend, an insipid, cloying, bear of a man whom you’d just hate to play golf with.

And all of that is just for starters. As many reviewers have pointed out, Larry is a modern day Job. He tries to live a decent life but someone or something or maybe just Fate is throwing him a lot of trouble.

Is it all a test of his character or is it just the random and unjust way the universe unfolds? Job wasn’t sure either, if you remember the Bible.

Larry seeks guidance in a trio of rabbis, each one more comic – and frighteningly authentic – than the next. Certainly there is an Old Testament view of the world at work here, one in which the Almighty shoots first and never answers questions later.

Ethan and Joel Coen have worked their uncanny ability yet again. They have a brilliant capability to harness dead-serious themes to unexpectedly absurd or comic situations. There are times you laugh like crazy; others where you are nodding your head in some profound recognition of truth.

The last masterpiece in the brothers’ repertoire was, of course, 2007’s Best Picture Oscar winner, No Country For Old Men. A Serious Man is less like that film and more like Raising Arizona (1987) and Fargo (1996), even more like The Big Lebowski (1998) in its mix of serious and comic tones, its unpredictable narrative trajectory, its side-splitting moments, its reaching for something deeper than the well-framed, pretty and superficial surface.

If there is a God, I bet that She or He is laughing hard while watching A Serious Man, getting all the in-jokes and scorning those who don’t. This is a merciless God. It’s part of the grim joke. Gallows humour never hung so well.

A Serious Man plays Thursday, Feb. 11, at Empire Theatres Studio 12 in the Avalon Mall. Tickets are $9 for students and seniors, $10 regular admission. Tickets go on sale at 6:00 pm, show time is 7:00 pm.