This Is Serious?

A Serious Man.

The Coen Brothers new film

The film is set in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the year 1967, and is intended in some ways to reflect the childhood of the Coen brothers...The protagonist is Larry Gopnik, a Jewish academic living in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in a Minneapolis suburb. The story follows Gopnik's spiritual and existential struggle as his wife Judith contemplates leaving him for his colleague Sy Ableman. Adding to his suffering is his ne'er-do-well brother, Arthur, who lacks the resources and the ability to care for himself and consequently lives on Larry's couch. Larry begins to question the value of his life as he deals with these and other trials, including his son, Danny, who steals money from his wallet to buy marijuana; his daughter, Sarah, who steals to finance a planned nose job; a student who alternately attempts to bribe him for a passing grade and threatens to sue him for defamation (made all the worse because Larry is up for tenure); and a neighbor lady who distracts him by sunbathing in the nude. Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis in an attempt to solve his problems and to become an austere and devoted man.

Another similar synopsis.

The released trailer:



Here:

What’s most striking about the preview for the Coen brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, aside from the rhythmic head-smashing that meters out a heightened sense of tension and absurdity, is the absence of known faces. Immediately that immerses the viewer in the story. There is nothing of this world distracting the viewer from the world of the movie. And it shows the Coens are confident enough in their story to let it stand on its own, rather than propped on the legs of celebrity. The second most striking thing is that we learn practically nothing about the plot.

As Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells points out, the trailer is a work of art in itself. It deviates from the hackneyed three-act preview structure that tends to give away too much. Here, using repeated footage, bizarre juxtapositions, and that constant, painful sound of a cranium being bludgeoned, master trailer editor Mark Woollen manages to convey the Coens’ eye for the bizarre without revealing anything more than the fact that there is a character, he is Jewish, and he has serious problems.