There's a new Cohen brothers film being prepared for release, which is always good news. Salon's Andrew O'Heir interviews them:
One thing is for sure: This story, which comes to us in the form of a movie called "A Serious Man," is one of the subtlest, darkest and most deceptive ever spun by Joel and Ethan Coen, its writers, directors and producers. This is by far the most personal and revealing film the Coens have ever made, which might not seem like saying much: They're known for creating mannered, sardonic fictional worlds shaped as much (or more) by film history as by real life. But in recapturing the vanished realm where they grew up -- a self-enclosed world of Midwestern Jewish suburbia -- the Coens have crafted perhaps their most original work, one that presents itself, early on, as middleweight middle-American domestic comedy before revealing a strange and secret power that's closer to magic or myth.
In fact, it isn't true that "A Serious Man" appears to be suburban comedy at first, since it opens with an ambiguous yarn straight out of 1920s Yiddish theater. On a snowy night, in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe, a man and his wife are visited by -- well, who, exactly? Is it a man who recently recovered from a serious illness and was mistakenly reported to be dead? Or has the man really died, and been possessed by a malicious, wandering spirit -- a dybbuk? (Whether dybbuk or human, the visitor is played by legendary Jewish theater actor Fyvush Finkel.)
Only after that are we plunged into suburban Minneapolis in 1967, straight into the ear canal of bored teenager Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff), who is listening to Jefferson Airplane on his transistor radio instead of paying attention in Hebrew school. That transgression will be discovered and punished -- Hashem sees everything we do, after all -- and so will the other sins committed by the movie's characters, which range from adultery to accepting bribes to smoking some killer weed in the middle of a weekday afternoon with the hot, semi-abandoned wife next door.
This new film also inspires the AV Club's scenic routes for Barton Fink:
Last month’s Toronto Film Festival found me spending much of my precious between-movie time arguing with colleagues—including The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias and Noel Murray—about A Serious Man, the latest Coen brothers joint. Most everyone was impressed, to varying degrees. I, however, was not. My beef, in paradoxical essence, is that the new film is so nakedly personal in its depiction of the Coens’ Midwestern-Jewish upbringing that it winds up being oddly impersonal, because the brothers only fully let their guard down when they’re safely hiding behind genre tropes. In fact, I persisted, A Serious Man is basically just Barton Fink revisited, with the surrealism dialed way down and the Jewish angle shoved front and center. (It didn’t occur to me at the time, but Barton Fink could quite aptly have been titled A Serious Man.)
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