Opiniões dos críticos

With “A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen reached back into their past and deep into their souls to deliver something so personal that it could only become universal... the story unfolds with typical Coen-esque brio, with a new audio or visual joke in practically every other shot. It’s a perfectly constructed comedy of Jewish manners that doubles as an allegory for America’s own entrance into adulthood...

A Jewish science professor in 1960s Minnesota (played by the great Michael Stuhlbarg) and his son contend with multiple miseries in this odd, beautiful comedy-drama that might be one of the Coens' most perfectly modulated films. This is probably their most questioning work: Is the universe cruel, indifferent, or sadistic? And can an understanding of God actually make a difference?

This film is at once laugh-out-loud funny and deeply serious, troubling and satisfying, warm and bleak, both respectful of the Jewish heritage and mocking its restrictions and false comforts.

A Serious Man, their latest, is being touted as their most "personal" film, and its vision of a suburban Jewish community in Minnesota in 1967 has moments of laugh-out-loud verbal quirkiness to rank with the best they're capable of. But it also falls in line with the Coen shortcomings: a narrow emotional range, a patchiness of construction and a contemptuous refusal to seek meaning or revelation in anything. Comedy, even tragicomedy, should not feel like such hard work.

A Serious Man had me gripped from the first frames, and the film conjures a woozy, weightless feeling, combined with an almost hallucinatory clarity and heightened sense of itself. It's a little like the feeling that migraine sufferers describe just before an attack. Yet what follows is no headache, but a superb and intelligent comedy.

The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes – florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters – but the film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation.

Much of the success of “A Serious Man” comes from the way Michael Stuhlbarg plays the role. He doesn’t play Gopnik as a sad-sack or a loser, a whiner or a depressive, but as a hopeful man who can’t believe what’s happening to him... “A Serious Man” is so rich and funny? This isn’t a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny, too.

The entire script is a mishmash: funny, droll, and anxiety producing, just like daily life in many Jewish families.

This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun.

The Coen brothers’ films have always been funny, cerebral, hermetic, sardonic to the point of nihilism, and preoccupied with human suffering but allergic to sentimentality. In short, they’ve always been Jewish. But the previously subterranean kinship between the brothers’ cultural identity and their movies’ subject matter is finally made plain in A Serious Man (Focus Features), the Coens’ most autobiographical work so far.

Instead of paintings meant to look like photographs, the Coens give us photographs that look like paintings, and there’s a touch of the uncanny in the hard-edged look, as if Hashem had isolated and withered Larry with his gaze. As a piece of moviemaking craft, “A Serious Man” is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable.