Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik.

By Ann Driscoll
Associate Editor 

Torture porn director Eli Roth has nothing on the Coen Brothers. Their latest film systematically victimizes its likeable protagonist with such determined, misanthropic glee, that it’ll leave your emotions in a vice. For a movie with no violence, there are moments so painful that you almost want to peek through the cracks in your hands rather than endure the cruelty.

A Serious Man is certainly an improvement over the Coens’ last film, Burn After Reading, whose uniformly hideous characters are cruel without reason. By contrast, the Coens are on the side of their beleaguered protagonist the entire time. Larry Gopnik, (Michael Stuhlbarg) a college professor and family man in 1967 Minneapolis, is smart, kindly, and morally upright, though pathologically incapable of standing up for himself.

The film progresses as a series of humiliating situations depicting the deterioration of Larry’s life. There isn’t an arc to the plot so much as a plummeting sense of doom; everything that can go wrong in Larry’s life does. His wife divorces him and demands that he move out. A student tries to bribe then blackmail Larry to achieve a higher grade, threatening the tenure he seeks. His teenage son and daughter, both unloving, are stealing money from his wallet. His parasitic brother (Richard Kind) loafs on his couch suctioning out puss from a cyst on his neck

The most upsetting part of the film is that everyone treats Larry’s distress as unreasonable and infantile. The rabbis at his synagogue don’t respond to the details of Larry’s predicament, and they can’t convey in any convincing way how Judaism can enrich or improve his life.

The Coens compile the details of Jewish suburban life in the 1960s to an amusing effect. Antics at a Hebrew school and a Bar Mitzvah scene have a charming, autobiographical tone, as we see these scenes through the eyes of the bored, stoned Gopnik son, Danny. The hirsuteness of the rabbinical faculty is a running joke, as are the profanity of Danny’s school chums.

The Coens less successfully try to cull black comedy out of the absurdity of Larry’s suffering, the emotional sadism of his tormentors, and his helplessness to combat it. The film captures how seemingly civilized middle-class people mistreat each other, but the characters, with the exception of Larry, lack a convincing interior.

For instance, Larry’s wife, Judith (Sari Lennick) is a crude caricature of a shrewish housewife. In fact, the film’s portrayal of women in general falls into a bitch/whore dichotomy. The dynamic female heroines of the Coens’ best movies, Fargo and Blood Simple have given way to the lame villainesses of Burn After Reading’s Tilda Swinton character and A Serious Man’s Judith. A third act revelation of a character’s homosexuality is treated as just another repulsive indignity that Larry has to deal with.

Movies that are wholeheartedly bleak and misanthropic strike me as just as unrealistic and phony as saccharine-sweet sentimentality. It’s hard to accept the film’s emotional impact as anything other than one-dimensional nastiness because the Coens don’t acknowledge the glimmers of hope that’s possible amidst suffering. Even those who live the saddest of lives occasionally have moments of peace. The only peace to be found in the film is in a wistful dream of Larry’s, and even the dream itself is fraught with sacrifices.