A Serious Man (R)
The Coen Brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, is watching his world fall apart.
He has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a discipline problem, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is taking money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job.
In the midst of all this Larry is trying to get tenure, being threatened with a lawsuit and seeking desparately to wrestle serious philosophical questions and become a serious man.
