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A Serious Man - 3.5/4
If 500 Days Of Summer was about a married Jewish guy with everything in the world to whine about but who somehow just wants to pull everything back together before it falls apart, this is what it would be.
Michael Stuhlbarg is a truly excellent actor and here he gives his very best type of performance. He's particularly brilliant at playing characters with repressed neuroses and seeing him in the role of a family man who's life is far from perfect is understandable and somehow extremely desirable in the right hands. The Coens are treading familiar territory here, this is a white collar, familial Barton Fink with a parallel morality to it.
Stuhlbarg is a blend of sympathetic and relatable that very few actors can pull off in a role where you kind of want to shake the guy by the shoulders and beg him to man up. The rest of the important roles are filled by lesser known actors of whom Adam Arkin and Richard Kind are most familiar to me. I was greatly impressed by the actress playing the wife, she was a savage mixture of detestable and resonant, a woman who has been sighing for too damned long and the only one who hasn't noticed is her husband.
The kids are interesting, the daughter serves as a violent foil to the son's thieving stoner boychick awaiting and preparing for his ascent to manhood.
This film is a fairly quiet little number, the comedy lies in the way situations are handled, ignored or procrastinated upon by Stuhlbarg's character and the overview that the Jewish faith is as prettily bureaucratic and time consuming as any other.
I enjoyed this film a great deal, it goes into the top half of the Coen films for me.
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