In the closing shots of the last Coen brothers movie, Burn After Reading, the camera zooms outwards and upwards, away from the characters, away from the Earth, and comes to rest only when positioned far above us in the cosmos, as the all-seeing eye of God. It is fitting then that with their latest production, A Serious Man, Joel and Ethan Coen have spun the camera round and, in their most personal film to date, trained it on the nature of God. The results, typically, are bracing.

“Why does God make us feel the questions if He doesn’t give us the answers?” is one of the plaintive cries of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor braving personal crises in a Midwestern Jewish community circa 1967. The Coens were brought up in a Midwestern Jewish community by a college professor and, like Larry’s two children, were both adolescents in 1967. And though the film is clearly fiction it is built mostly on the characters, situations and emotional landscapes of their shared past.

Backdrop aside, the film itself is brutal, unforgiving — and quite brilliant. After a gorgeous storybook prologue, set in a 19th-century Polish Shtetl, we are plunged into the increasingly tortuous life of Gopnik, who is plagued by an ungrateful dope-smoking son, an unfaithful passive-aggressive wife, a simpleton brother with a leaking sebaceous cyst and a Korean student threatening to sue for defamation. Oh, and on top of this his doctor has asked, worryingly, if he can take some chest X-rays.

Gopnik, who teaches Schrödinger’s paradox and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle but is nonetheless devout, approaches three different rabbis for some ad hoc life coaching. Their philosophies, however, are empty and platitudinous (“Help others. It can’t hurt!” is one rabbi’s advice), and indeed part of the film’s perverse pleasure is rooted in watching Gopnik squirm in the face of an unforgiving world, and wondering if he’ll ever have the courage to meet it without his ideological crutches.

It’s a familiar theme from previous Coen features, especially The Man Who Wasn’t There, in which Billy Bob Thornton’s protagonist Ed shared a similar downward trajectory. And, although A Serious Man might not be as zany or obvious as The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading, there is, as the title suggests, serious thought here and a thorough questioning of the need for religion. That the film refuses to supply any answers is not a sign of weakness, but rather an acknowledgement that the Coens, despite being two of the finest film-makers working in cinema today, are not God.

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