cinemadaily | The Coen Bros are Back, “Serious”-ly

In Todd McCarthy‘s assessment of the film within the current industry setting, he says “A Serious Man” is “the kind of picture you get to make after you’ve won an Oscar. A small film about being Jewish in a Midwestern suburb in 1967, this will be seen as a particularly personal project from Joel and Ethan Coen, and their talent for putting their characters through the wringer in peculiarly funny ways flourishes here on their home turf. With scarcely a familiar name in the entire cast, this Focus release will have to fly on the brothers’ names alone, which in this case will mean OK biz in limited playoff in urban areas.”

Slant‘s Fernando F. Croce is ambitious in his praise, “Are the Coens jokers who tread on despair, or tragedians with a penchant for death’s-head humor? Either way, ‘Serious Man’ is their bleakest comedy. Its spiraling slapstick cruelty encompasses elements from both the lugubrious ‘No Country for Old Men’ and the antic ‘Burn After Reading,’ yet it easily outclasses both by endowing the put-upon puppet with a human dimension so that laughter is caught in our throats.”  In a quite polemic review from the Village Voice‘s Ella Taylor, in which she attributes most of the films accolades as a desire to be considered hip, she ends, “Is ‘A Serious Man’ a work of Jewish self-loathing? Hard to tell, if only because—aside from Fargo’s Marge Gunderson, one of the great creations of American cinema—just about every character the Coens create is meant to affirm their own superiority.”  After calling the film “hell to sit through,” the New Yorker‘s David Denby continues, “The Coens’ humor is distant, dry, and shrivelling, and they make the people in ‘A Serious Man’ so drably unappealing that you begin to wonder what kind of disgust the brothers are working off. Whatever indignities the Coens suffered as teens, they have hardly been hampered by those memories as adults.”