The trials of Larry

This black comedy, written and directed by the Coen brothers, tells the tale of Larry Gopnik (played by the relatively unknown Michael Stuhlbarg), a suburban academic who endures incessant and sometimes absurd challenges as he attempts to maintain stability and family ties in late-'60s America. Despite being named to the top 10 lists of The American Film Institute and National Board of Review last year, the film has received only a limited release until now.

Compared with some of their recent efforts (Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, Intolerable Cruelty), this peculiar article marks a return to form for the oddball auteurs. Like Blood Simple (1984), Miller's Crossing (1990) and Fargo (1996), A Serious Man is moody and elegiac, exhibiting the directors' keen sense of the bizarre and taste for the macabre.

If anything, the Coens have gotten stranger as they've gotten older. It's possible to have a sense of humor that is too dry, however, and the flatness of tone and absence of punch lines or clear indicators of irony will likely result in some viewers missing the point. Indeed, even many fellow critics failed to be amused at the press screening in Prague, and it may be that this send-up of a distinctly American brand of Jewish culture during a specific period in history may not translate abroad.

The film opens in a European Jewish ghetto where a humble peasant family is visited by some kind of evil spirit in the guise of an elderly man. This seemingly unrelated vignette is not revisited and serves simply to establish a bizarre tone and an atmosphere of banality poorly concealed beneath a veneer of religion and custom.

The main part of the tale takes place in 1967 suburban Minnesota. Gopnik endures a string of entirely undeserved indignities and difficulties, and he soon begins to question "God's plan" and his place in the universe. His wife (Sari Wagner Lennick) brow beats and disturbs the domestic bliss by emasculating him constantly and announces her plan to leave him for an unctuous New Age swell. His kids are small-minded miscreants with no evident feeling for their father beyond his tendency to provide. He faces difficulties at work due to misunderstandings with a creepy Korean student who attempts to bribe him for a grade. As with most of the things that happen to him, his basic morality (he refuses the bribe, in this case) is no protection from unpleasant consequences.

To some, the film may seem to be a satire of a certain kind of Jewishness, but the group in question that receives the bulk of the skewering is incidental. One of the central points of the film is that people are strange - not Jews in particular, but people period. The brothers might have chosen any group and achieved the same result. If there is another theme at work, it's the need for humans to "find someone to love," as the refrain from the soundtrack's oft-repeated Jefferson Airplane song would have it.

But ultimately the Coens are ever the cineastes, and the movie is more an exercise in the exploration of the aesthetics of moviemaking than anything else. Whether you find the dryness of tone and bleakness of outlook either engaging or amusing, it cannot be denied that it's all of a piece and functions successfully on its own terms. As with most films in the Coens' considerable canon, it stands apart as an encouraging indicator of the health and robustness of American independent cinema.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com