"Tell me you love Total Eclipse of the Heart as much as I do."

Cast: Michael Stuhlberg, Richard Kind, Sari Wagner Lennick, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Screenwriters: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

If there’s anything predictable about the Coen brothers at this stage in their career, it’s that there’s no way of telling what film they’ll make next. Accused of contrarianism by critics after following the weighty, epic No Country for Old Men with screwball ensemble piece Burn after Reading, the Coens have made a career out of consistent inconsistency, careening from genre to genre with little regard for whether anyone els shares their enthusiasm for film noir tropes, bowling, UFOs, or whatever else has caught their eye at the time.

If nothing else, the lightweight Burn after Reading made for a palette cleanser between two more sombre movies, even if A Serious Man can’t quite keep a smirk off its face.

So we meet Larry Gopnik – Michael Stuhlberg, looking comfortably uncomfortable in his first lead role – , a Jewish physics teacher living in a Minnesota suburb in the sixties. But the suburbia of A Serious Man is not the idyllic childhood suburbia of Spielberg movies, or even the gorgeous-on-the-surface, rotten underneath suburbia of Blue Velvet. These suburbs are a colourless and claustrophobic, a stultifying mix of washed out green lawns and faded beige cars. Even the sky, free of clouds, is the colour of an old dish cloth. The Coens admit that there is a touch of autobiography in the film, and you get the impression they hold little nostalgia for their old neighbourhood.

Unlike the usual Coen characters, whose eventual undoing is usually caused by greed or deceit, Larry is just a timid, hard-working schlub to whom the universe has taken a dislike. Larry refuses bribes, is faithful to his wife, and is a devoted teacher, yet he is dragged from pillar to post, the message seeming to be that inaction isn’t enough to save you from misfortune. Larry stands still and the world moves around him, until by the end of the film he’s divorced, living in a motel with his insane mathematician brother, redundancy hanging over his head, on the brink of financial ruin.

Fables run through the movie, most commonly told by the series of rabbis Gopnik visits to try and take some kind of spiritual message from his trainwreck of a life. Fables are supposed to be messages in story form, a way of making deep truths about life easier to digest, but the stories Gopnik’s spiritual leaders tell are empty, or else they’ve forgotten the meanings. The second rabbi tells of a dentist who finds Hebrew scripture written on a gentile’s teeth, which is only about how amazing it is that someone would find scripture on a gentile’s teeth.

Despite how it may sound, A Serious Man is a comedy, but it’s more the jet black, wry smile kind of funny, aside from an amazing scene where Larry’s son Danny tries to navigate his bar mitzvah while stoned, which is genuinely hilarious. It is funny despite, or even because of, the total absence of meaning or solace to be found in Larry’s misfortune. The film’s bone dry gallows humour is reminiscent of a line from another Jewish dark humorist, Franz Kafka: “There is hope, endless hope – but not for us!â€?

A Serious Man is out now through Universal Pictures (UK)

By Tom Brown