A Serious Man
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until someone physically stops me: this is my favorite Coen Brothers movie. And I get that saying “favorite Coen Brothers movie” is both one of the hardest and easiest cinematic declarations a person can make. Hard because their filmography is just stacked with masterpieces. Easy because, realistically, you could shut your eyes, chuck a dart at their filmography, and wherever it lands, you’d have a perfectly valid answer. But for me—every time—it lands on A Serious Man.
On this rewatch, though, I felt like I understood why in a way I wasn’t capable of articulating the first time I saw it. Now, I think I can put my finger on it.I am Larry Gopnik. Not in a surface-level “oh no, my life’s falling apart” kind of way, but in that deeper, more unnerving crisis-of-faith, crisis-of-understanding-the-universe way.
Because A Serious Man is, at its core, a film about being cosmically bewildered. It’s about that existential whiplash of trying to understand the rules of existence only to discover, hey maybe there aren’t any. It’s about begging for meaning and receiving, at best, a shrug. Larry Gopnik is desperate for someone—anyone—to explain what’s going on. And that question, “What’s going on?” might be the truest sentence ever spoken about adulthood.
I grew up in a religious household. My grandfather was priests in the Russian Orthodox church. I was an altar boy. I went to Sunday school. I sat in church pews trying to understand why everyone around me seemed to know something I didn’t. Even as a kid, I could sense that there was this “thing” I was supposed to be connecting to during those services, some profound helping of purpose, and I just… didn’t. And the older I got, the stranger that disconnect felt. Not because I got further from religion, but because I started circling back to it in a new, almost analytical way—not to believe again, but to try and understand why belief matters to people in the first place. To see if there’s something buried in the rituals and stories that speaks to that deeper hunger for meaning.
I wouldn’t call myself religious by any stretch, but I have found myself actively trying to interpret the universe again. Asking questions beyond the normal, manageable ones. Asking the big, terrifying ones. And, like Larry, I keep coming up empty-handed. There’s just this giant, silent mystery hanging over everything. And that mystery sometimes feels incredibly comforting—like the pressure’s off because maybe we aren’t supposed to know. And other times it’s deeply anxiety-inducing—like maybe the silence is the answer and that’s somehow worse.
That’s what this movie captures so perfectly. Larry is presented with this barrage of life: his wife leaves him first Ableman (Sy Ableman!?!), his kids don’t respect him, his tenure track is threatened, the law is breathing down his brothers neck, temptation is hovering around him in the form of his hot neighbor. Everything is collapsing within a matter of weeks, and yet no one around him seems to notice, let alone care. Some people, like his brother Arthur, actually envy him. And that almost gives weight to Rabbi Scott’s “helpful advice,” which is basically: look at the parking lot.
That’s the other thing this movie nails. The total breakdown of communication between people. Larry spends the film asking, over and over, “What’s going on?” And no one gives him a real answer. His daughter is stealing cash out of his wallet without thinking twice. His students are bribing him. His wife and her new lover toss him out of his own home. His rabbi offers him vague metaphors about teeth. Everyone is moving through life like their logic is obvious, and Larry—and by extension, us—is left on the outside, staring through frosted glass.
And as I get older, I weirdly feel that more. The world feels louder and more technological and more disconnected, and somehow people make less sense than ever. I don’t know if that’s just part of aging or if that’s just part of being alive in whatever era this is, but A Serious Man articulates that disorientation with terrifying precision. The older I get, the more I become Larry Gopnik, for better or worse. And given where Larry ends up by the end of this film, I’m not exactly thrilled about that parallel. But it’s there.
What makes it worse—or better, depending on how you look at it—is that Larry is genuinely trying. He is trying to be a serious man, to be decent, to be good. Throughout the movie, he doesn’t commit any grand acts of evil. He just… tries. I mean he constantly says “I didn’t do anything” and he’s right—and maybe it’s the act of non-action that is to blame for his misgivings. But that doesn’t seem right, and it doesn’t seem fair.
And yet everything still goes wrong. Until the very end, when he finally bends, just a little, and changes that student’s grade in exchange for money. Is that morally corrupt? Maybe. Is it cosmically significant? Who knows. Is the phone call he receives immediately afterward connected in some divine, punishing way? Or is it just random timing? That’s the point: we don’t get to know.
Just like the story about the goy’s teeth that Rabbi Nachtner tells him. We crave answers, but maybe there aren’t any. And maybe we have to learn to live with that. Maybe that’s the real test of faith: sitting in the not-knowing.
Now, shifting gears before this turns into a full-blown theological essay—technically, this movie is immaculate. Michael Stuhlbarg gives what I genuinely believe is one of the most underrated performances of that year. He plays Larry with this quiet, trembling restraint—the kind of performance that looks simple until you realize how precisely calibrated it is. And Stuhlbarg absolutely deserved to be in the Best Actor conversation. He carries this film with the energy of a man who is seconds away from collapse but refuses to let anyone see it.
Roger Deakins’ cinematography is exactly what you’d expect from Roger Deakins, which is to say, quietly perfect. For a film that’s so suburban, so domestic, so rooted in bland Midwestern mundanity, it somehow pulses with visual life. On paper, “a modern retelling of the Book of Job through the eyes of a Midwestern physics professor” sounds like the most boring thing in the world. But in practice? This film moves with a vitality that most “big” movies can’t even fake. And it’s hilarious. Not broadly funny, not universally crowd-pleasing funny, but that dry, deeply uncomfortable Coen Brothers funny where only a small fraction of people are laughing and everyone else is unsure whether they’re supposed to.
And I am absolutely in that fraction. I think this movie is hysterical.
Ultimately, this film just feels like it grows with me. Not in a “my life is falling apart like Larry’s” kind of way, but in that creeping awareness that being a good person and being rewarded for it are not the same thing. That goodness is not a transaction. It’s not a currency you exchange for safety, or clarity, or happiness. It’s just… the thing you try to do. Day after day. Without the promise of return. Without the promise of meaning. You just do it because that’s what it means to live seriously.And I think that’s why this film won’t let go of my brain. That concept—the great mystery, the silence of the universe, the question with no answer—there’s something endlessly compelling about it. I don’t know that I’ll ever solve anything by watching this movie over and over, but it makes me feel less alone inside that mystery. And maybe that’s enough.
9.5/10