A Disappointed Man

I love the Coen brothers. No, I adore The Coen Brothers, yes they don't always knock it out of the park, but their bunts are better than at least 50% of films made, and their small hits to get bases loaded can be better than 90% of films made, of course the home runs are the masterstroke, films such as No Country, O' Brother, Hudsucker and Lebowski for instance, so it's no surprise that A Serious Man is on the higher end of the 1-10 score spectrum.
Sadly it's barely there.

A Serious Man opens with a 5 minute vignette in a foreign snowy land, a man returns home happy, tells his wife his carriage broke and a man helped, she says that the man had been dead for years, the man enters, is stabbed for being some spirit thing, then walks out, bleeding. It has no relevance to the rest of the piece, maybe that's the point, but it's the level of almost smug cleverness that makes The Coen's forget the human factor and really making characters and situations you care about in place of such showing off in a filmic and linguistic manner, especially in the use of some yiddish, not Collinwood amounts, thankfully, and all rather easy to understand.
We meet the man we follow for the next 2 hours in a doctor's office, going through a medical, before he goes about his job as a professor at a university, and is bribed by a failing Korean student, then gets home to find his son wants the aerial fixed, his daughter needs to wash her hair, his brother is in the bathroom working on his cyst, and his wife wants a divorce.

A sudden storm begins to emerge without warning. And for the duration we see the divorce process in Jewish fashion, going through Rabbi's for help on his life, lawyers for the divorce, his brother's police issues, land issues, faith issues come about, family issues go mental, but through it all, there's limited engagement with the lead, he's going about doing things as you'd expect, the normal person in a quirky Coen world, but ultimately you know that like they always do, they'll pull that piss stained rug from under you and it'll all be meaningless, sudden and there'd just be wasted time to connect with the leads.
Even if you desperately try it's damn near an inaccessible film, it's funny, very funny don't get me wrong, but it's by no means a masterpiece, or even that good. The script isn't up to much, though the acting is superb all round, especially from Richard Kind as the brother and Micahel Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, our hero, and it looks especially beautiful, Roger Deakins back behind the camera for the duo, if only he was around for Burn too, but still. The score by Carter isn't as impressive as others he's done recently, then again it's overshadowed by a lorra lorra Jefferson Airplane anyway.

Overall, though A Serious Man is a very funny film, it's a middling, pointless and annoyingly dull film which might be better on the re-watch, but sitting down of an evening to see it, I was left cold and annoyed, not even asking questions like the dentist story Rabbi 2 gives halfway through, which is the film's key, it's just a step down from 2 10/10 films of late.

6/10