Rating:

The Coen Brothers take a look back at their Minnesota Jewish upbringing in their new film “A Serious Man,” which expands on their usual combination of dark comedy and nihilism and adds a huge helping of Jewish spiritual identity crisis. Never has a movie packed with so much hostility or existential angst made me smile from start to finish as this one did.

Joel and Ethan Coen, who returned to their native Minnesota to shoot their masterpiece, “Fargo,” in 1996, go back again with the new film, adding the Jewish angle, a period setting and a super-obscure cast of actors of whom Richard Kind and Adam Arkin are probably the biggest names. Thought-provoking as it is funny, “A Serious Man” adds up to one of the most original and entertaining films of the year.

The story, based very loosely on the book of Job, is set in 1967 and concerns Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a math professor in the heavily Jewish Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, who suddenly faces a series of crises. His wife is leaving him, a student is trying to blackmail him, his Bar Mitzvah-aged son is more interested in getting stoned, and his ne’er-do-well brother (Kind) won’t get out of his bathroom. One neighbor is an unfriendly, crew-cut gentile who stares daggers at him; another is a comely young woman who sunbathes nude.

Larry responds to this spiritual crisis by visiting a series of rabbis, while continuing his quest to be a mensch, or the “serious man” of the title. The film begins with a flashback to 19th-century Poland, and ends with an event very much out of the Old Testament.

In between are hints at the counterculture (Jefferson Airplane, pot) and lots of family drama that’s much more unique that it first seems.

A series of disclosures: I, like the Coens, grew up in St. Louis Park and attended St. Louis Park High School, from which my father graduated in 1967, the year the movie is set. My grandfather tried out for a part in the movie, and an uncle of mine appears in one scene as an extra. And yes, I’m a Jew. And while I wasn’t alive in 1967, I can say that the movie captures its place and community very well.

What the Coens have created here is a fascinating tale, tinged with Jewishness and full of very real, very funny characters. Veterans of Hebrew school will love the way it’s depicted, but you don’t have to be Jewish to see the humor in a scene where cantorial music serves as the background for a farcical domestic scene. There’s also a sequence, a story told by a rabbi about a dentist, that’s so wondrous it almost doesn’t matter that it has nothing to do with the plot.

The Coens also turn the lack of big names from a minus into a huge plus, casting people whose faces are just perfect for the characters — especially Fred Melamed as the wife’s lover, Sari Lennick as Mrs. Gopnick and Stuhlbarg, a revelation in the lead role. If the movie had cast, say, Ben Stiller as Larry and Marisa Tomei as the neighbor, it wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

The film, like in most Coen movies, makes room for lots of hilarious small parts; my personal favorite was the kid on the bus who drops an f-bomb every other word. The movie ends extremely abruptly, in a way that makes “No Country For Old Men” look downright tidy by comparison. But it makes perfect internal sense, and is probably the only ending possible.

“A Serious Man,” if nothing else, shows that the Coens had another great Minnesota movie in them. This, not Quentin Tarantino’s over-the-top “Inglourious Basterds,” deserves to be considered THE Jewish movie of 2009.