‘Serious Man’ another Coen Brothers’ winner

Published 2:11 pm Thursday, October 8, 2009

The movie begins with a 10-minute prologue, in Yiddish, set in 19th-century Poland. This is immediately followed by the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” blasting out of the theater speakers, as a kid in a Minneapolis grade school listens to music through his transistor radio.

Who else but the Coen brothers, right?

This is “A Serious Man,” the darkly funny but absolutely haunting new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, who (following “No Country for Old Men” and “Burn after Reading”) are clearly in a rich phase of their career.

It’s the Summer of Love, 1967, but things in the Minneapolis suburbs are somewhat different from what they are in the rest of the country. At the center of “A Serious Man” is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor whose world suddenly begins to collapse on him.

His wife (Sari Lennick) asks him to move out of their home because she’s fallen in love with a buttery-voiced widower (Fred Melamed), another member of their close-knit Jewish community.

Larry’s kids (Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus) are acting out in various ways, and his dotty brother (Richard Kind) can’t find a place of his own to live. Someone’s sending poison-pen letters about Larry to his school, plus he’s broke.

Then there’s the sultry neighbor who likes to sun herself in the back yard, and wonders if Larry has “taken advantage of the new freedoms.” This dangerous character is played by Amy Landecker, in one of those letter-perfect five-minute performances that can make an actor’s career.

Like most of the other cast members (with the exception of sitcom-familiar Richard Kind and Adam Arkin), Landecker is a pretty obscure movie face. The Coens have filled “A Serious Man” with virtual unknowns, led by stage actor Stuhlbarg in a fine, understated performance.

The style of the film will be instantly familiar to fans of the Coens: crisply shot and edited, self-conscious, funny one minute and serious the next. It’s impeccably of the period, bringing some of the detailed appeal of TV’s “Mad Men.”

And, not surprisingly for the guys who made “Barton Fink,” “A Serious Man” is occasionally mystifying: The movie (beginning with that oddball prologue) is full of tall tales, dreams and enigmatic rabbinical advice, with an ending that at first feels like one of Larry’s interrupted nightmares but will certainly come back to you days later.

It all works, in a mysterious way. The Coens have been accused in the past of using their kooky style to denigrate their characters, but (as funny and weird as some of the people here are) this movie feels like a completely sympathetic-yet-satirical portrait of the way human beings live and the world they — we — live in.

“A Serious Man”

A funny but absolutely haunting new film from the Coen Brothers, set in a Jewish suburban community in Minneapolis in the summer of 1967. A professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) is beset by a series of problems, which play out with dreamlike relentlessness — a situation that works as comedy but is also enigmatic, as the Coens have played it in the past.

Rated: R for language, nudity

Showing: Harvard Exit