God must really hate Larry Gopnik. His wife, Judith, is leaving him for their old friend. His loser brother sleeps on his couch and spends hours in the bathroom draining a cyst on his neck. His son smokes pot and sneakily listens to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew School. His daughter sneaks money out of his wallet to save up for a nose job. Larry is a physics professor, and defends his belief in the rational while his life falls apart. He has some small hope for tenure, but apparently an anonymous person has been writing scathing letters to the tenure committee. One of his worst students tries to bribe him and blackmail him for said bribing at the same time. Larry is not doing well.

The Coen Brothers have produced a labor of love. Even though it’s a bleak movie, it’s still greatly funny. The Coen’s particular brand of humor is present here in the masterful script, making this movie more comparable to Fargo than No Country for Old Men. This is the first movie I’ve seen that pulls off an extremely common scene in suburban family life: The father has just stepped through the door, and his wife and two children immediately stack demands and requests on top of him until he buckles and breaks. The funniest scenes are Larry’s dream sequences, which progressively get more and more ridiculous, and therefore funnier. The only fault I can tell is that there are loads and loads of Jewish references that might fly straight over people’s heads. Some of them are common knowledge, but some are very obscure and really only work as in-jokes for any Jews in the audience. I don’t think that a lack of understanding of some of the cultural references ruins the movie, though.

I cannot imagine how much time it must have taken to find Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Larry not as a depressed loser, but as a man who may have even been cheerful in the past. Any happiness must have been obliterated just before we first meet him. He cannot believe what is happening to him. He turns to Hashem – the name for God in his conservative Jewish community – but even with “a well of tradition to draw upon,” he cannot find any good help. When Judith confronts Larry with a divorce proposal, both of them agree that neither of them have done anything wrong, and Larry is thoroughly confused. It becomes clear to us, though, that Judith has found the only remaining parachute off a burning plane, twisting far too quickly towards impact.

One of my favorite performances is Fred Melamed as this parachute, a silver-tongued fellow named Sy Ableman. The first word we hear him say is Larry’s name, and we instantly know his attitude. This first scene is a telephone conversation, but his voice fills the room, and he might as well be there, embracing Larry. He manages to hug Larry every time they meet, and he talks to him in a tone and at a speed that suggests that Larry has just recently been told his mother has been brutally murdered. He seems aware, as Judith is, that Larry’s life is falling to pieces. His articulate speech drips with a love, geniality, and sympathy that Larry simply cannot reciprocate.

In the end, the film does not give us many answers. But then again, neither does Hashem.