No one can accuse writing-directing-producing brothers Joel and Ethan Coen of making the same movie twice. The 2007 best picture Oscar winner No Country for Old Men, the social comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the all-out comedies The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo, the crime thriller Miller’s Crossing and the indescribable Barton Fink are theirs.

But for A Serious Man, the first film since their Oscar victory, they’ve returned to their childhood in Minnesota in a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family that explores the relationship with God with a wink and a shrug. In the end the meaning-of-life answers that their protagonist, Larry Gopnik, is looking for seem to be unknowable even as God sends yet another misery Larry’s way. The Coens swear that the film is not an autobiographical look back at their own family, although like Larry, who is a college mathematics professor just on the cusp of tenure, their own parents were academics and the children seen on the school bus in A Serious Man have the same names as their real childhood friends.

Although it’s set in the suburbs of Minneapolis, A Serious Man reminds one of Woody Allen’s work. Like many of the characters central to Allen’s films, Larry keeps trying to understand why bad things happen to good people, only to come up short. His first two attempts to find answers to his own little disasters from three rabbis, leave Larry frustrated with only soothing platitudes and indecipherable riddles from the first two, a curt shut-off from the third and supposedly wisest of the three.

A Serious Man is set in 1967, but actually begins with a Yiddish-language prologue set about 60 years earlier in Poland where a couple are terrified one snowy night by the appearance of a neighbor whom they believed was deceased. The man tells a tale of how he survived what everyone thought was death. But then again he might be, as the wife fears, a dybbuk (demon) in disguise. It’s a strange little piece and one can only assume that the couple is Larry Gopnik’s grandparents, which might explain why Larry seems to be living under a permanent black cloud. Stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry with a mix of affable humanity and a “Why me, Lord, why me?” helplessness.

Larry’s troubles are an example of how things can go from bad to, well, terrible. His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), announces that she wants a divorce so she can marry Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), a soft-spoken widower who tries to smooth over every crisis. And it’s not just any divorce … a “get” which is a ritual divorce granted by a rabbi so she can remarry in the faith. Their son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is half-heartedly studying for his bar mitzvah; he’d rather be smoking pot in the boys room or listening to music on his transistor radio. Their daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is constantly yelling at her brother and worrying about getting a nose job. Larry’s shiftless brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), sleeps on the sofa, spends a lot of time draining his sebaceous cyst and raising the interest of the local police.

As for Larry himself, he’s worried that his next-door neighbor is a Jew-hating Nazi; that the nude sun-bathing neighbor on the other side is a temptress, and that someone has been sending anonymous notes accusing him of inappropriate behavior to the campus committee that is just then deciding on whether to grant him tenure. Also, he’s pestered by a persistent representative from the Columbia Record Club who says Larry owes them money. And he’s not sure what to do about that envelope crammed with hundred-dollar bills that one of his failing students, originally from South Korea, has left on his desk. Larry knows he shouldn’t accept the bribe. But then there are all those bills that keep mounting up, especially after Judith orders him out of the house and he moves into the Jolly Roger Motel with Arthur.

Larry’s world is falling apart and he doesn’t know how to paste it back together. The Coens have given Larry a philosophical bent that sends him fleeing for words of wisdom from the rabbis, but also a touch of wry humor. They touch some real nerves in his plight.

You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy A Serious Man. The terrors Danny faces on his way to stand before the congregation to recite a passage from the Torah in Hebrew is handled beautifully and with a great deal of realism. Yet being Jewish might help in understanding some of the film’s nuances. Certainly A Serious Man is as offbeat as some of Woody Allen’s films, yet not as consistently amusing. Allen gave his tormented character a measure of acceptance of his fate and hope. In A Serious Man fate is always ready to knock down a man who has just picked himself up.

*** 1/2A Serious Man

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus.

Rated: R, contains adult themes, profanity, nudity, sex, violence.

mjanuson@projo.com