Throughout their careers, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn heavily upon the work of grotesque moralist Flannery O'Connor.
Black humor, bleak outlooks on humanity, many of the Coens' central themes can be traced back to O'Connor.
Except, that is, O'Connor's spirituality: the Coen brothers have a decidedly anti-humanist streak and, barring the Hell imagery of "Barton Fink," have never really dabbled in the spiritual side of things.
"A Serious Man" seeks to rectify this, and the Coens' retelling of the story of Job brings their work closer to O'Connor's oeuvre than ever before.
Opening with a made-up Yiddish folk tale about a man who may or may not have invited a dybbuk (a corpse possessed by a wandering spirit) into his home, "A Serious Man" wastes no time taking stock of and poking fun at the brothers' storytelling conceits.
Once the story cuts to its present, in 1967 Minnesota, the film reveals itself to be at once the Coens most autobiographical film and something that reaches far beyond,.
Though quite a lot happens to Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) throughout the film, "A Serious Man" contains little in the way of story, and one could sum it up simply: a mild-mannered man suffers countless hardships and slowly comes undone.
His wife informs him she wants a divorce out of the blue, work becomes more stressful as he frets over whether he will receive tenure, his redneck neighbor starts to build right on the property line and someone keeps calling from the Columbia Record Club to ask why Larry hasn't paid for records he never ordered. And that's just the start.
We meet Larry just as the first domino tips, and we watch as he slowly unravels he stands at the epicenter of an increasingly turbulent nightmare, his bewilderment and slipping grip on sanity delivered in a hilarious deadpan.
Through him, and the host of Jewish characters, the Coens dismantle Jewish stereotypes and comedic styles, from neurosis to harpy wives to phlegm.
Even the overall structure aids this as his life spirals out of control, Larry meets with three rabbis, a joke unto itself subdivided into each of their hilarious reactions to his questions.
One in particular sums up the directors' approach to their own work: the second rabbi engages in a long-winded tale about a Jewish dentist who found a message in Hebrew engraved in the teeth of a gentle.
The dentist went to the rabbi himself for answers. Oh, how does that story end? "Who cares?" says the rabbi with a smile.
Whether "A Serious Man" is the Coens' best film is irrelevant, given the number of modern classics they've churned out these last 25 years.
It is, however, their most mature, covering a variety of themes such as morality, faith, family and suffering.
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