Coen brothers movie is seriously dark and seriously good

Job didn’t have it hard enough.

In “A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen take an average schlub and heap on him Biblical helpings of hardship and heartache. And then they toss in some more, and some more.

This modern Book of Job retelling examines humankind’s relationship to omnipotence. And the Almighty doesn’t come off that well.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives on a featureless suburban street in Minneapolis in the sort of featureless suburban house that has almost given rise to its own genre of films about soul-eating disenfranchisement and middle-class mediocrity.

But this is not one of those films. Larry lives his featureless life in his featureless house on his featureless street with his wife and two teenage children. The year is 1967, and Larry, a physics professor on track for tenure and an upstanding member of the local Jewish community, is trying very hard, in his bland sort of way, to be a good man and to lead a righteous life.

But like the radical ’60s counter-culture that is just beginning to turn his quiet little neighborhood all topsy-turvy, everything in Larry’s life is about to get seriously weird.

His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), tells him that she is leaving him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a widower friend with a mellifluous voice, maddening poise and a penchant for reflecting attention away from his flaccid aggression by enveloping Larry in sympathetic embraces.

Son Danny (Aaron Wolff), whose bar mitzvah is just around the corner, is continually strung out on dope, and daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus), who can’t see anything or anyone beyond her outsized nose, is stealing money from her father’s wallet for cosmetic surgery. Larry’s sad-sack, out-of-work brother (Richard Kind) sleeps on the couch each night and has long since worn out his welcome. And if that weren’t bad enough, one of Larry’s neighbors is encroaching on his property line with a boat garage, and another (leaving Job momentarily for the Book of 2 Samuel) sunbathes in her backyard, Bathsheba-like, for Larry to see.

At work, Larry is deluged with harassing phone calls, anonymous letters besmirching his good name and threats of blackmail from a student contesting a bad grade.

Larry, who has always considered himself an upstanding man, is shell-shocked by the ambush of bad fortune and sinks into a spiritual crisis.

What does God want from him? How did he offend God? Why, if he did right, is he being punished? And how can he make it right?

Larry, very much a believer in the axiom “actions have consequences,” struggles to comprehend what actions of his might have turned God against him. But the harder he looks for answers, the more his troubles are amplified.

Beleaguered and desperate for clues to his situation, Larry turns to his rabbis for advice, but they comprehend the situation and God’s hand in it no better than he. All they can offer are sanctimonious platitudes and ineffectual parables.

“You have to see these things as expressions of God’s will,” one spiritual adviser tells him. “You don’t have to like it.”

“A Serious Man” is an exquisitely, perhaps even flawlessly, realized piece of original art. The Coens’ technical mastery is above reproach. Their longtime collaborators, cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell, turn in masterful contributions.

The script, written by the brothers (who, as usual, also took on the editing duties under the name Roderick Jaynes), is lyrical, dense, darkly comical and wickedly perverse. The cast members, drawn almost exclusively from the stage rather than the screen, are nearly all unknowns. Stuhlbarg, a distinguished Broadway star, is impeccable as Larry, as is every other cast member right down the line — many of them surely chosen for their resemblance to the sorts of grotesque caricatures we’re used to finding in Fellini films.

Filmgoers may not like the ideas the movie delivers about the nature of God. Some may find it frustrating, blasphemous or just downright depressing. But there’s no denying the poetic skill with which it’s delivered.

GRADE: A-

A Serious Man

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind, Adam Arkin, George Wyner

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen

Theater: Kimball’s

Rating: R (for language, some sexuality/nudity and brief violence)

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.