A Serious Family

The NY Times has a photo spread of A Serious Man, the Coen brothers new dark comedy. They have a whiff of Diane Arbus.

Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt on ASM:

TORONTO — The always surprising Coen brothers have finally made a very serious movie with “A Serious Man.” It’s about God, man’s place in the world and the meaning of life, so naturally it’s one of their funnier movies. And because the year in question is 1967, the oracle of human wisdom and experience can be found in the lyrics of the immortal rock band Jefferson Airplane. Of course, it can.

“Serious Man” will do serious business among the Coens’ many admirers but is not likely to expand the membership rolls greatly. In commercial terms, it’s not as gripping as “No Country for Old Men,” nor as knee-slapping hilarious as “Fargo” but rather a quiet sort of movie that finds sly humor in the quotidian lives and mind-sets of a Midwestern Jewish community about 40 years ago. So the movie narrows its audience to adults who take comedy seriously.

And Variety’s Todd McCarthy:

More than anything, “A Serious Man” would seem to represent a moderately jaundiced memoir of a specific time and place, that being the Minnesota of the Coens’ youth. Many such quasi-autobiographical works in literature and film take the form of an escape story by a gifted soul just too sensitive or different to cope any longer with a restrictive environment. To the contrary, the Coens have chosen to identify not with the son but with the father, a man who, as narrative circumstances play out, could have decided to bail out at a certain point. But such a thing never occurs to him for an instant.