Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Film review: ‘A Serious Man’

When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies … then what?

Well, then you’d better find somebody to love, right?

Making an argument that a 42-year-old pop song’s lyrics hold as much insight to the eternal questions as anything your preferred religion can serve up is a surefire way to offend the devout.

But if Joel and Ethan Coen have shown anything over their quirky careers, it’s that they have no qualms about offending people in pursuit of their artistic vision.

While the fruits of that vision have varied widely in tone and subject — it doesn’t get more disparate than “Miller’s Crossing” and “Raising Arizona” — a constant theme in their oeuvre is a four-part theorem as simple as it is profound:

Stuff happens. A lot. At random. Most of it bad.

Their latest film, “A Serious Man,” offers a fitting corollary: If anyone tries to tell you that they can explain why, they’re lying.

In 1967, a long way from the Summer of Love — northern Minnesota, to be exact — Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a college physics professor, looks forward to two welcome events: He’s in line for tenure, and his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is about to celebrate his bar mitzvah.

And that’s it for the good news. From there, Larry is beset by a cascading avalanche of woes that pile up at warp speed. And any resemblance to a certain put-upon character in the Old Testament is purely intentional.

His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants a divorce, and not just because of their bedroom “whoopsie doopsie” problems; she’s fallen in love with one of Larry’s acquaintances, the oily and unctuous Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed).

Larry’s jobless, emotionally unstable brother, Arthur (the great Richard Kind), is sleeping on the couch — when he’s not hogging the only bathroom to drain the perpetually oozing cyst on his neck.

Danny is becoming a discipline problem, shirking his studies at Hebrew school and smoking pot — when he’s not nagging Larry to go on the roof and tweak the antenna so he can watch “F Troop.” An anonymous letter-writer is sabotaging his shot at tenure. A failing grad student wants to bribe him for a passing grade.

And his comely neighbor (Amy Landecker) torments him by sunbathing nude and tempts him to join her in partaking of “the new freedoms,” as she puts it.

Struggling to make sense of his deepening quagmire, Larry seeks out three different rabbis — none of whom can offer more than pabulum platitudes in artificially soothing tones. And his life continues to fly apart for reasons that baffle him — because there are no reasons.

“I haven’t done anything,” he repeatedly bleats, dizzy with anxiety about why he would deserve such a beating. Along the line, that plaintive cry becomes a painfully funny summation of a truly feckless life.

The cast is near-perfect, particularly Stuhlbarg, who will get an Oscar nomination next year. (You heard it here first.) Yet with no A-list names and thin marketing, the bankrollers clearly don’t expect the film to have legs with the “Transformer”-besotted masses. And they’re probably right.

But if you’ve ever pondered life’s cosmic mysteries while staring up into the star-filled night sky — or down into a half-filled shot glass — then “A Serious Man,” with its slyly subversive humor drawn from the dark corners of the soul, will speak volumes.