A Serious Man
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the hopeless Larry. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is a discipline problem, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. What follows is a carefully constructed farce about the impossibility of understanding the mind of God, set in Minnesota's Jewish community in 1967. A Serious Man finds the Coen brothers rebounding from the shambles of Burn After Reading with their funniest film since The Big Lebowski.


