An English professor once told me that the hardships and travails with which you and I wrestle never rise to the height of tragedy, no matter their extremes or intensity. True tragedy only occurs, he said, when immense calamities befall exceptional individuals. Tell that to the ordinary shlub beset by unrelenting heartbreak in the Coen brothers’ extraordinary new film A Serious Man. Broken and humiliated, he just might take issue with that bookish definition.

The Book of Job has always been a disturbing and controversial presence within Scripture for devout believers and curious bystanders alike. In it, God makes a bet with Satan that no matter what occurs, his servant Job will never lose faith or curse his creator. Satan takes the bet and, with God’s unambiguous consent, decimates Job’s family and fortune, utterly wiping out everything the man ever held dear. Job was never far from Joel and Ethan Coen’s minds when they set out to make A Serious Man, essentially a modern retelling of the Book of Job and, by extension, an examination of humankind’s relationship to omnipotence.

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 teenaged 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 go to hell.

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 II Samuel) sunbaths 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 is sanctimonious platitudes and ineffectual parables. “You have to see these things as expressions of God’s will,” one spiritual advisor tells him. “You don’t have to like it.” Larry is told that his questions are imprudent, that his problems aren’t significant and that to see God’s will, he must get a new perspective. “Everything that I thought was one way turns out to be the opposite,” he cries out to a friend who responds: “Then it’s an opportunity to learn how things really are.” The one person Larry does not ask is God himself. Unlike Job who demanded answers from his omnipotent tormentor, Larry never calls out. Perhaps he is afraid of what the answer might be. Perhaps he cannot fathom the silence that might greet him in return. Perhaps that is why A Serious Man ends very differently than the biblical text of Job.

A Serious Man is an exquisitely, perhaps even flawlessly, realized piece of original art. If one were to say that the Coens have stopped evolving as filmmakers, it is only because one cannot improve upon perfection. Their 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, drawn almost exclusively from the stage rather than the screen, are nearly all unknowns. Michael Stuhlbarg, a distinguished Broadway star, is impeccable as Larry Gopnick, 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.

Never have the Coen brothers so deeply submerged themselves in their cultural identity. Stories and fables are the illustrative means by which the Jews explain their lives, we are told, the means by which they decode what would otherwise appear as randomness and meaninglessness. Add to that list now, films. While the Coens’ Jewishness is nearly always present, here it takes the shape of a character all its own. One can examine a thing, dissect it, mock it, even eviscerate it from the inside out if one is already a member in good standing. And that is exactly what the Coens do here, with nary a hint of sentimentality or compunction. There is more than a little humor in the line near the end of the closing credits: No Jews were harmed in the making of this film.

The Coen brothers have always populated their films with characters unable to catch a break, or who find themselves suddenly and often inexplicably cut down. In the past, we’ve been able to chalk this up to rampaging mobsters, homicidal psychopaths or even nihilism itself. But never have the filmmakers pushed God (or the absence of God) in front of the camera like this. They give their audience only two options: either God doesn’t exist and we’re wasting our lives trying to please him in a world ruled by randomness, or he exists and he is a vindictive monster out to annihilate us. Correction: not vindictive. Vindictiveness implies causality, which this film never infers. Here God (if it is God) scorches the earth for reasons far more inscrutable than the cryptic proofs Larry scribbles onto his titanic blackboards. In A Serious Man, the role of Anton Chigurh, the rampaging, relentless, unstoppable, murderous maniac in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men is played by none other than God himself. Not since Woody Allen have American filmmakers so brazenly tackled the subject of God as an absentee landlord. “No God” or “evil God” — there isn’t much of a difference from Larry’s perspective.

The problem for a man like Larry, who sees the world in theorems and proofs, is that life cannot be summed in an equation. Larry might insist all he wants is that “actions have consequences” when, in fact, it appears more that sometimes consequences arise without the genesis of actions. He may try to unravel mysteries like Schrödinger’s Paradox and the Heisenberg Principle — multifarious and cryptic algorithms which mean, more or less, “God only knows.” But when God isn’t talking, Larry’s line at one point to his class takes on an ominous dimension: “Even if you can’t figure it out, you’re still responsible for it on the midterm.”

Once again, the Coens’ nihilism rears its ugly head, though adorned this time with an epistemological crown. If there is a God — vindictive or not — then life is certainly not meaningless, even if it is no less enigmatic and terrifying. For those who would claim that human inconsequentiality cannot question much less fathom the omnipotence of God (as God himself tells Job) and that we should, therefore, simply accept both the bounty and the hardship with equal gratitude, they must have missed the commentary embedded in the final, unfathomable, shocking moments of the film. Because, in the end, who cares? The result is the same. Plead with heaven all you like — no meaningful answer will be forthcoming. And if you do get a response, chances are you won’t like it. So if you’re a Coen and life is almost certainly absurd and very nearly meaningless, you might as well learn to find the comedy in even the most barbaric of situations.

The Coens have always invited us to laugh at others’ misfortune. Now, perhaps, we are invited to laugh at our own, prescribed in a mathematical formula of another kind: tragedy + time = comedy.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.