Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Fred Melamed, Richard Kind Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen Category: IIB (English and Yiddish)
'Actions have consequences!' shouts A Serious Man's protagonist, the physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, right), as he confronts a horrid student. Or so he thinks: for cause-and-effect plotlines are very much at a premium in the Coen Brothers' latest film, a wonderfully intriguing piece which at once offers everything and nothing, with a twist-heavy story that rains red herrings from the get-go, with a prologue set in a 19th-century Polish shtetl about someone who may or may not be an evil spirit, in a story which may or may not be related to the film at all.
The main show here revolves around Gopnik, whose seemingly mundane suburban life in the American Midwest of 1967 is unravelling right in front of him: his wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for a sleazy, unshapely man (Fred Melamed); his son (Aaron Wolff) is braving for his bar mitzvah with a mix of marijuana, Jefferson Airplane songs and Jewish religious recordings; his daughter (Jessica MacManus) spends more time at a place called The Hole than at home; and an older brother (Richard Kind) obsessed with nursing his cyst and working on the 'Mentaculus', a dense mystic-looking treatise that offers 'a probability map of the universe'.
And that's not to mention his neighbours - a hostile redneck on one side, a mysterious femme fatale on the other - while he contends with a benign Korean student, his tenure application and his own health problems, as well as his hilarious exchanges with a string of rabbis as he tries to make sense of his tribulations.
While their last film, Burn After Reading, plunges a stellar cast into a story where everything comes together, A Serious Man sees largely unknown faces playing characters resembling loose atoms in a swelling radioactive element which, somehow, doesn't implode. Or maybe it does, given the film's last scene; viewers, however, are not privy to the information. But it's all the better for it, as the narrative disorder clashes with Roger Deakins' masterly shot images of squeaky clean lawns and ordered social routines; by conjuring more questions than answers, the Coens have yet again produced a winner.
A Serious Man opens today