Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances Sy Ableman.
A Serious Man is a singular Coen Brothers achievement — a darkly comic, Kafkaesque meditation on Jewish identity, moral uncertainty, and the inscrutability of God filtered through 1967 suburban Minnesota. The plot is deceptively simple but philosophically rich, escalating Larry Gopnik's misfortunes with relentless, absurdist precision that few films dare to sustain. The acting is uniformly excellent, with Michael Stuhlbarg delivering a career-defining performance of exquisite, bewildered suffering. Novelty is genuinely high — the film's specific cultural and spiritual texture, its prologue fable, and its commitment to an entirely unheroic protagonist make it unmistakably itself. The ending is deliberately abrupt and ambiguous, which is thematically coherent but divisive enough to keep it from a top rating. Cinematography by Roger Deakins is clean and precise but somewhat deliberately drab, serving the suburban setting without standing out as extraordinary.