In adding my review of Fargo for no other reason than that I couldn't have a "favorite movies" section that didn't mention it, I discovered that I somehow left "A Serious Man", my favorite Coen Brothers film, off.
"A Serious Man" doesn't get mentioned much. Besides being my favorite Coen Brothers film, it's probably also their least accessible. I consider it more a work of art than a movie. The narrative is ambiguous, to say the least, and at times intentionally confusing, as the story unfolds of a prfessor in the late 1960s who is simply unable to understand why his life is falling apart: his wife leaves him for a man who empathizes with the pain of his losing her and offers him a hug; someone is sabotaging his career with anonymous slanderous letters to his employers; he is threatened by the father of a student who has bribed him not to fail the student and puts him in an impossible conundrum where there is no action he can take on the bribe that doesn't have a serious negative consequence for him.
The whole point of this movie, I think, is the futility of trying to understand: we are given no answers, just as the protagonist is given no answers, because there may not be any answers.
I have a lot of further thoughts but I don't want to try to pin it down. It is what it is.
It's my favorite Coen Brothers film. You will either dislike it or love it. I have a hard time seeing anyone coming down anywhere in between. To be honest this movie probably has the single greatest disparity of any movie between how much I love it and how little I recommend it to people.
Roger Ebert, a critic I always admired, loved it too. He said, "This is the kind of movie you make after you've won your Best Picture oscar." I agree. They made this movie like they had nothing to prove to anyone anymore, like they were going to make the movie they wanted to make without regard for what anyone else might think, and fortunately for us, they're skilled enough filmmakers that the movies they want to make are very, very good movies.
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