A Serious Man may be getting rave reviews – but it's like nothing the Coens have made before. Joe Queenan on weird one-offs and the directors who make them
About halfway through the very funny, very disturbing, very ethnic new film A Serious Man, the modern-day Job who is the serious man in question climbs up on to the roof of his ghastly 1960s Minneapolis suburban home and tries to adjust the antenna to improve his TV reception. Beleaguered on all fronts – conjugally, professionally, medically – Larry Gopnik, a dorky physics professor who may be about to lose his job and is very likely to lose his family, is a bright, principled Jewish man whose children have begged him to fix the antenna so they can watch F Troop, an idiotic 1960s comedy. Many of Larry's travails unfold as songs from Jefferson Airplane's seminal 1967 LP Surrealistic Pillow play in the background.
About halfway through the very funny, very disturbing, very ethnic new film A Serious Man, the modern-day Job who is the serious man in question climbs up on to the roof of his ghastly 1960s Minneapolis suburban home and tries to adjust the antenna to improve his TV reception. Beleaguered on all fronts – conjugally, professionally, medically – Larry Gopnik, a dorky physics professor who may be about to lose his job and is very likely to lose his family, is a bright, principled Jewish man whose children have begged him to fix the antenna so they can watch F Troop, an idiotic 1960s comedy. Many of Larry's travails unfold as songs from Jefferson Airplane's seminal 1967 LP Surrealistic Pillow play in the background.
- 11/29/2009
- by Joe Queenan
- The Guardian - Film News
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