The Coen brothers annual entry, A Serious Man, is their oddest film since Barton Fink and for all the thought provoking twists and turns that may befuddle, it remains a funny and often hilariously sad portrait of a man trying to find himself.
Setting you up for something different from the get go, we dive into a scene between a European Jewish wife and her husband, presumably sometime one to two hundred years before the films setting of 1967, as the bicker over a chance encounter the husband had with a man that has been presumed dead for sometime by the wife. Jump ahead to our main characters, Larry Gopnik and Danny Gopnik, inter-cutting between a pair of events that fill come full circle and not without consequence. The film from here follows Larry primarily with diversions into Danny’s life in the final days leading up to his bar mitzvah. What entails though is a strange, random, yet lightly intertwined series of events filled with black humor and many an existential consequence.
The direction and writing from the Coen brothers is as sharp as ever as this very different film would clearly come undone in less skillful hands. [Read more...]