A Serious Man – Out of the Park

It’s strange that A Serious Man has such a middling score at Metacritic considering the types of reviews it’s been getting. With a couple of bad ones, the film is picking up raves from the LA Times and the NY Times.

The LA Times’ Kenneth Turan calls it “pitch-perfect”:

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of “No Country for Old Men,” to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.

Praise for the whole:

Doing their own editing (under the longtime pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) and working with such regulars as cinematographer Roger Deakins, costume designer Mary Zophres, composer Carter Burwell, co-casting director Ellen Chenoweth and production designer Jess Gonchor, the Coens have so exactly made the film they envisioned that it is hard not to be drawn in. Working largely with unfamiliar actors, their trademark blurring of the line between serious and comic has never been as artfully done as it is here.

High praise from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers’ technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse. The casting of near-unknowns in all the major roles (Michael Stuhlbarg is a renowned Broadway actor but unfamiliar to movie audiences) was a stroke of genius, and every performance is impeccable, as is the lambent cinematography by Roger Deakins (the Coens’ longtime collaborator). The costume design and set design (by Mary Zophres and Jess Gonchor) brilliantly evoke the staid and clannish world of semi-assimilated Midwestern Jews (a group for whom the new mores of the ’60s arrived much later than for the urban gentiles of Mad Men).

More raves from AO Scott at the NY Times, and NY Magazine’s David Edelstein.