MOVIE REVIEW
A Serious Man (2009)
Wilson Webb/Focus Features
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives the quintessential postwar American dream. He has a nice suburban Minneapolis home, a picturesque family of four and a car all his own. He gets up each morning and goes to work at a university, where he’s being considered for tenure. He’s a pillar of the local Jewish community and fashions himself a success, wholly contended with the direction of his life.
But the year is 1967, it’s the Summer of Love, and the tumult that will upend the social mores of the first two decades of the baby boom has begun brewing. Although “A Serious Man,” the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, only obliquely references the changes manifesting well beyond Larry’s front porch, they’re felt throughout a narrative that finds the bedrocks of the character’s well-heeled life methodically upended. Commencing with quotes from the Jewish scholar Rashi and Jefferson Airplane, the movie brilliantly considers one of the ultimate questions: Is there some order, some higher plan, that shapes our existence, or are we going at it alone?