A Serious Man is Even Funnier and More Serious

On October 2, the Coen brothers released their 14th feature film, A Serious Man, to wide acclaim. The tale of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor whose life appears to be unwinding before his eyes, was both a comic and profound experience. With his wife leaving him, his children ignoring him, and someone attempting to torpedo his professional life, Gopnik became a modern-day Job. Despite appealing to three different rabbis to explain his misfortune, Gopnik is left adrift.

Salon wrote, “A Serious Man is one of the subtlest, darkest, and most deceptive ever spun by Joel and Ethan Coen.” In 2019, The Film Experience summed up its classic status, writing, “In 2009, A Serious Man was hailed as a masterpiece. Not much has changed since.”

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Ethan Coen told NPR that the idea for the film started with a desire to do “a short movie about a rabbi that we did know when we were growing up.” While the story is not autobiographical, the plot mirrors many aspects of the filmmakers’ lives. “The story takes place in a community very much like the one that we grew up in,” Joel Coen told the MinnPost. Gopnik lives in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and teaches physics. The Coen brothers grew up in the same suburb, and their father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota. Despite such similarities, the film’s comic characters and inventive plot twists come straight from the filmmakers’ bountiful imagination.

To populate the film’s world, the Coens cast theater and local talent. “We wanted a lead actor who would be essentially unknown to the audience,” Joel explained in the production notes. Gopnik’s children, played by Aaron Wolff and Jessica McManus, were picked from a casting call in the local paper. For Cinema Blend, this “tremendous supporting cast…capture the constant indignity and desperate grasps at freedom that surely marked the Coens' own childhood—as well as everyone else's."

In the last 15 years, this hilarious take on man’s search for meaning has become a classic comedy. In 2009, The Guardian wrote, “The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece.” Stuhlberg was nominated for a Golden Globe, and the film was nominated for Academy Awards® for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. 10 years later, the Daily Beast wrote it “has never been timelier…a timeless watch born from a timeless read, the Book of Job.”