A SERIOUS MAN is a theological shaggy dog story that could only spring from the miraculous minds of Joel and Ethan Coen. The film marks the 25th anniversary of moviemaking for these American masters, and from its audacious Yiddish-language prologue to its apocalyptic conclusion, A SERIOUS MAN grapples with themes of temptation and divine retribution in a world only the Coen brothers could create. Midwestern isolation and Jewish angst are the frame for Michael Stuhlbarg's Larry Gopnik, the film's Job-like protagonist who finds comfort in the certainty of physics as the uncertainty of his own life threatens to destroy him while he fiddles with the antennae on his suburban roof.
