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When a new Coen Brothers film is on the horizon you never quite know what they are about to unleash. With a genre-hopping back catalogue ranging from the screwball-comedy (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to the crime-based thriller (No Country For Old Men) you would be excused of any feelings of trepidation as you enter the cinema.
It is due to this variation that it is such a great joy that they are once again returning to their black comedy sensibilities in the form of A Serious Man. Alongside this the Coens have also decided to weave in the big questions of life, love and religion amongst the sight-gags and the wide array of colourful supporting characters.
The main focus of the film is Larry Gopnik, a physics professor whose life takes a dramatic down spiral from the word go. His wife wants a divorce. One of his disgruntled students is blackmailing him. His brother, who is oft-seen draining a cyst on the back of his neck, is in trouble with the law for illegal gaming. These troubles are but a small sample of the many that now plague Larry’s life and transform him into a modern-day Job. Here a man of logic and science slowly succumbs to the law of spirits and the twists of fate which are unyielding in their supernatural conspiracy to rob him of all that he holds dear. In the wake of all this he tries to get advice from his local spiritual leaders to understand why God is doing this to him, with the most satisfactory answer involving car-parks.
This story is in stark contrast to Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard whose descent into the maelstrom is one of his own doing, but instead Larry is just terminally unfortunate. All of this links very closely to the opening vignette of an Eastern European couple where the logical husband refuses to listen to the words of warning issued by his superstitious wife and inadvertently lets a Dybbuk (a malevolent spirit who takes possession of an unguarded corpse) into their house, which serves as an early illustration that amongst the dream sequences and cliff-hangers that not all is as it may seem.
All of this is achieved with the employment of a cast of unknowns, a rarity in an otherwise typical example of Coen-fare. Maybe they felt that after Burn After Reading, where the cast list was remarkably impressive, there was something to prove. In doing so they gave the lead to little-known theatre actor Michael Stuhlbarg whose starring debut was a very pleasant surprise and a dark-horse runner in the upcoming awards season.
With No Country For Old Men behind them it is unlikely that A Serious Man will make that much of a mark on the upcoming awards season as it should do. This is a pity seeing that it is probably the best film they have made since Fargo.
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