A Serious Man

                 When the truth is found to be lies

                 And all the joy within you dies

                 Don't you need somebody to love

                 Wouldn't you love somebody to love

                 You better find somebody to love.

                                                                               - Darby Slick

Thank Mighty Thor for the Coen Brothers. Are there any American filmmakers making movies as good as these two? Their prolific and diverse output is the aesthetic glue for the credibility of the U.S. cinema in between the eternal wait-times for Terrence Malick, Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch enterprises.

At the risk of alienating my vast homosexual readership, I will use a baseball analogy.

Joel and Ethan work the nasty curveball to great effect. It is not hittable by the large majority of cinema goers. It comes out of the blind spot, looping in and freezing the viewer at the exact moment when their pupils enlarge and they bring the visual bat back to explode on the soft meat of the pitch. Then it breaks viciously across the plate, a swing, a waft of air, and they must return to the bench of filmic misunderstanding. Another dimwitted strikeout victim in the Coen's clever game of quality cinema.

Their latest, A Serious Man, is yet another genre-bending jaunt outside their already varied oeuvre. A sort of 1960s Hebrew generation gap picture with monstrously biblical overtones and a subliminally cynical wit. Think Job with a tallis, seeking tenure.

How's that for a curveball?

It is certainly their most unique and understated film to date. While it is inherently strange at its very core, it possesses very little of the usual Coen flair for visual high jinx and sudden, often violent plot twists. It instead concerns itself with character persecution, the deeper questions of man's moral imperative and the absurdity of religious faith in the face of an indifferent universe. Its humor is a slow burn. Building with the relentlessly nagging torment of Larry Gopnik (a remarkable performance from the relatively unknown Michael Stuhlbarg), the physics professor and protagonist of the film, who simply cannot catch a break from his wife, his job, his kids, his brother, his students, his rabbis, his faith or the turning of the earth on its axis. He is a doomed man, rapt with guilt, questioning the meaning of existence, morality, actions and consequences as he wanders idly through the philosophical landscape constantly reacting to forces beyond his control. He believes, in his mathematically oriented mind, that all problems are finitely solvable. But the world's a little too messy for that.

It is an extremely Semitic picture.

So decidedly Jewish, in fact, that I think my goyish foreskin was actually trying to grow back as I watched.

For those viewers expecting Fargo or Raising Arizona or No Country for Old Men - beware. This one is more like a stripped down Barton Fink with the fatalistic elements of The Man Who Wasn't There. It is even more reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's After Hours - only more sedate, cruel and Talmudic.

Gopnik's suffering is very much akin to that of Caden Cotard (the Philip Seymour Hoffman character) in Synecdoche, New York. But Gopnik lacks the artistic freedom for catharsis that Cotard uses to battle the angst and persecution. He's a nebbish - an ineffectually bookish professor - who is easily bullied and manipulated by others. His pushy wife is leaving him for an overly sincere douchebag who still wants to be his friend, his son is a stoner, his daughter steals from him, his brother is a mentally unstable freeloader (a surprisingly moving turn by Richard Kind) who spends most of his time in the bathroom draining his cyst, one of his students is trying to bribe him for a better grade, his impending tenure is in jeopardy from some anonymous hate mail being sent to the university and his neighbor is a scowling, gun-toting anti-Semite.

A guy could go mad.

And that's where the genius lies in A Serious Man. In the brimming anxiety. In the continual helplessness of Gopnik amid the undeserved onslaught against his integrity and character. The put-upon everyman who did all the right things - studied, graduated, earned, married, procreated, purchased - yet can't remotely buy a break from the gathering shitstorm pounding against his little dam of the world. It's the comedy of shared frustration and schadenfreude combined.

In the Coen's inimitable style, loose ends are never tied.

And it'll all have to do until that next Malick film comes out.