-By Ethan Alter

For movie details, please click here.

Few contemporary filmmakers take as much delight in remaining enigmatic as Joel and Ethan Coen. Although they've been making movies in and outside of (mostly outside of) Hollywood for almost three decades now, the brothers deliberately avoid the spotlight, doing the bare minimum of press and publicity appearances in support of their films. In the occasional interviews they do grant, both Coens happily toy with their interrogators, offering up responses that come loaded with a healthy amount of sarcasm and dodging questions designed to get them talking about the deeper "meaning" of their work. And where directors like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith put their personalities onscreen for moviegoers to see, the Coens routinely deny any personal connection to the stories they choose to tell.

All of this makes the brothers' latest film, A Serious Man, such an unexpected—and delightful—surprise. For this darkly comic portrait of a middle-class Jewish family in ’60s-era Minnesota, the Coens drew heavily on their own experiences growing up as…a pair of middle-class Jewish kids in ’60s-era Minnesota. Watching the film, one gets the sense that they know every character that passes through the frame, from the self-important rabbi who tells longwinded stories with no point, to the seedy MILF-next-door with a penchant for nude sunbathing, to the kid who tokes up in the synagogue bathroom right before his bar mitzvah. Granted, all of these individuals arrive onscreen filtered through the duo's cracked gaze, but this will probably be the closest we ever get to a Coen Brothers autobiography.

A Serious Man is more than just a great Coen Brothers comedy—it's also a great comedy about Judaism, one that perfectly captures the complex mixture of misery, absurdity and self-doubt that defines Jewish humor. At its best, the film feels as if it was ghostwritten by Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish writer best remembered for penning the series of stories that became the basis for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. In fact, the movie opens with an extended sequence set in a 19th-century Polish village that could almost be an adaptation of a typical Aleichem shtetl tale. (Although, according to the press notes, it is entirely a Coen Brothers creation.) In it, an elderly man returns home late one night and informs his wife that he encountered the rabbi on his way back. The woman blanches and nervously explains that the rabbi died several days ago and that her husband must have crossed paths with a dybbuk—the spirit of a dead person on the hunt for a live body to possess. Suddenly there's a knock at the door and in enters the aged rabbi himself. What are the man and wife to do? Do they welcome this wizened, respected man into their home or do they slay the suspected dybbuk in their midst and cast it out into the cold winter night?

That choice between doing the right thing and the convenient thing—and deciding which is which—establishes the conflict that will bedevil the movie's put-upon hero, Larry Gopnik (Broadway actor Michael Stuhlberg in a terrific star turn), a supposedly happily married father of two who lives in a cookie-cutter suburban paradise and teaches physics at the local university. The fault lines in Larry's neat, orderly universe start to appear when one of his students awkwardly offers him a bribe to change his failing grade. Instead of making a choice between accepting the bribe or reporting the pupil to the school administrators, the conflict-wary professor locks the cash away in his desk drawer, postponing his decision until an unspecified future date.

Meanwhile, life continues to throw him one curveball after another; his wife (Sari Lennick) announces she's leaving him for another man, his unemployed brother (Richard Kind) is repeatedly arrested for gambling, and his soon-to-be bar mitzvah’d son only speaks to him when the TV antenna needs fixing. Feeling increasingly overwhelmed, Larry turns to his synagogue's religious leaders for guidance, only to discover that they don't have the answers either. His life is entirely in his own hands and nothing scares him more than that.

Because the Coens have little interest in engendering sympathy for their characters, A Serious Man may face the same controversy that Fargo encountered, with some viewers complaining that the filmmakers are mocking Jews and Jewish-American culture. But that kind of knee-jerk reading overlooks the subtle, humorous way the film tackles such complex subjects as morality, faith and family. More than any film the Coens have made since Fargo—including the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men—A Serious Man feels as if it provides a rare glimpse directly into the minds of the mysterious men behind the camera. Then again, perhaps that's just what they want us to think.