Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism - and intersections thereof - A Serious Man is the new film from Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen.

A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man's search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry's unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person - a mensch - a serious man?

WRITE WHAT…YOU KNOW?
A Serious Man is, according to executive producer Robert Graf, "a story told from the perspective of the place that Joel and Ethan Coen knew when they were growing up."
Ethan Coen comments, "The picture takes place in 1967 among a Jewish community in an unnamed Midwestern suburb; Joel and I are from the Midwest and so it's reminiscent of our childhoods. The milieu, the whole setting is important to us and was a big part of what got us going on this story. Where you grew up is part of your identity. That doesn't go away, even if you've been away for a long time."
Joel Coen notes, "The landscape of a place informs a story a great deal, although the genesis of the project dates back many years; we considered making a short movie about a bar mitzvah boy who goes to see an ancient rabbi. The rabbi character would be loosely based on a rabbi we knew when we were kids."
Ethan remembers, "This rabbi we knew was a sage, a Yoda. He said nothing, but he had a lot of charisma."
As the script developed, Joel notes that "that element stayed in it, but the feature we now have is quite different and deals with other things as well.
"Although Larry Gopnik is a made-up character, he is based on people who were familiar to us growing up because he's an academic and both our parents were academics. Through them we met lots of people who were professors at universities. Also, Larry is a middle-aged Jewish father in a community not unlike the one we grew up in, where there were lots of them."
"Everybody in the Gopnik family has an agenda," says Ethan. "The son, Danny, wants to get pot and LP records. His sister, Sarah, wants to get a nose job. The wife and mother, Judith, wants to run off with another man, Sy Ableman, whom she sees as 'a serious man,' unlike her husband."
Joel notes, "Larry is the head of the family, and he just wants to keep things going. At the beginning of the story, he's happy with the way things are, with the status quo. But misfortunes befall him - and he can't believe that the apple cart is being upset."
The screenplay was initially equally about Larry and his son Danny, but the emphasis shifted as the script developed. Ethan admits, "The fun of the story for us was inventing new ways to torture Larry.  His life just progressively gets worse.
"Two key experiences for Danny remain at the climax of the movie, yet Larry's fate became more of what the story was about - maybe because there are more ways to beleaguer an adult."
Though the majority of A Serious Man is set in the suburban Midwest of 1967, the movie opens with a prologue set a century earlier - in a Polish shtetl (small Jewish village), where an unsettling folk tale plays out completely in Yiddish.
Ethan explains, ""We thought a little self-contained story would be an appropriate introduction for this movie. Since we didn't know any suitable Yiddish folk tales, we made one up."
Joel adds, "It doesn't have any relationship to what follows, but it helped us get started thinking about the movie."
Actor Fred Melamed confides, "I asked Joel about the screenwriting process. It turns out that he and Ethan write scenes as they wish to see them, as if they were in a movie theater."

CASTING CALLS
In casting A Serious Man, Joel Coen reports that "we wanted a lead actor who would be essentially unknown to the audience. Now, Michael Stuhlbarg isn't unknown if you're a theatergoer in New York, but to movie audiences he's relatively unknown.  From his theater work, we knew how good he was."
The Tony Award-nominated actor was originally called in to read for a part in the film's prologue, scripted entirely in Yiddish. To prepare, Stuhlbarg "studied with a Yiddish tutor and had a wonderful time working on it. At the audition, Joel and Ethan Coen laughed a lot and I was really pleased.  But they ended up going with an actor who spoke Yiddish fluently."   Read more

BETTER HOMES AND MORE
"1967 in the Midwest was a great period," reflects production designer Jess Gonchor. "New designs styles were developing.
"We did a lot of research, and we looked for practical locations to alter and then film in. Walking in and just shooting? That's never happened on any movie I've been on…"
Indeed, a key challenge in recreating a Midwestern suburb of the 1960s was to find a neighborhood that had remained largely unchanged over the past 40-plus years. Robert Graf elaborates, "There are a lot of neighborhoods in the Twin Cities area that are very well-preserved from the standpoint of the architecture, but most of them are 50 years old now and very overgrown, with big trees. Read more


THIS IS SERIOUS
Richard Kind states, "A Serious Man is, I believe, how Joel and Ethan Coen view the world and 'the human condition.' It's also a good yarn about one very sad SOB."
Fred Melamed muses, "In A Serious Man, bad things happen, good things happen, and a lot of it goes unexplained. Larry wants to know what he's done wrong; he wants to see that he's done something morally wrong so that he can straighten things out and not be that way, and not have these horrible things befall him. But, in fact, he hasn't really done much wrong at all. He's just gone through life."
Michael Stuhlbarg cites the quotation that appears on-screen at the start of the film; "'Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.' That's a great mantra to keep in mind in terms of how we live our lives."
Mary Zophres sees the film as "a comedy of angst. There's drama and sorrow, yet it's told with a great sense of humor. So, to me, it's like life, and it's hilarious."

A Serious Man Glossary

Agunah (pronounced "ahgoonah") - a divorced person who has not been religiously sanctioned to remarry
Bar mitzvah - Jewish religion's important ceremony, held in a synagogue for a young man who has come of age (at 13) and will now be responsible for practicing and upholding Jewish values, morals, and traditions; female equivalent (at 12 or 13) is a bas mitzvah
Bupkes (also spelled bupkis) - nothing; applied with great emphasis, e.g., "And what do I have? Bupkes!"
Dybbuk (pronounced "dibbuck") - The soul of a dead person, often looking to possess a live person and as such inspiring fear among the living
Gett - ref., agunah (above); a religiously sanctioned divorce, tandemed with the sanction to remarry
Goy - colloquial term for a person not of the Jewish faith (i.e., a Gentile)
Haftorah - Portions of the Hebrew Bible read aloud in synagogue services, including by a bar mitzvah boy
Hashem - means The Name, and is basic Hebrew term/name used for God
Macher (pronounced "mohhcc-er") - an achiever, a person of importance/influence
Mazel tov! (pronounced "mozzle-tov!") - Congratulations!
Mensch (pronounced "mensh") - someone with strength of character/an applied sense of purpose
Mitzvah - good deed or blessing, though mostly used in an everyday and non-religious context, e.g. "Picking up your groceries while you were stuck in bed with a broken leg - that was a mitzvah your neighbor did."
Nu? - What's up? What's the story here?
Rabbi (pronounced "rab-eye") - Ordained Jewish religious scholar/teacher, often relied upon as community leader
Reb - Formal-address equivalent of Mister, as in "Reb Nudell is coming to visit our family;" or, more colloquially, abbreviation of a prominent rabbi, as in "Which Reb is conducting the service today?"
Shabbas (or, shabbos, from Shabbat) - Judaism's Sabbath, from Friday evening through Saturday evening
Shtetl (pronounced "shtet-el") - a small Jewish village, in bygone times, in Eastern Europe
Shiva - means seven, and also refers to the participatory seven-day mourning period for the recently deceased; e.g., "We are sitting shiva for my wife's uncle, who passed away earlier this week"
Shul - a synagogue and its congregation
Synagogue (pronounced "sinagog") - a Jewish house of worship
Torah - the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, transcribed onto a scroll for use in synagogue services including a bar mitzvah

About the Filmmakers

JOEL COEN (Director/Writer/Producer)
Joel Coen was honored by the Cannes International Film Festival in 2001, as Best Director for The Man Who Wasn't There, and in 1991, as Best Director for Barton Fink. He was honored as Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, and the BAFTA Awards for 1996's Fargo; and also won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, which he co-wrote with his brother Ethan.
The screenplay for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, also co-written with Ethan, was nominated for a BAFTA Award and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films that he has directed and co-written are Intolerable Cruelty; The Big Lebowski; The Hudsucker Proxy; Miller's Crossing; Raising Arizona; and Blood Simple.
He co-directed and co-wrote the 2004 comedy The Ladykillers with Ethan. Joel and Ethan Coen's 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men brought them the Directors Guild of America, BAFTA, and Academy Awards; the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay; Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay from the New York Film Critics Circle; and Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay from the Oscars and the National Board of Review. The film's cast was voted the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and Javier Bardem won the Screen Actors Guild and Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor, among other accolades.
Joel and Ethan Coen's most recent film, Burn After Reading, was nominated for the BAFTA Award and the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.

ETHAN COEN (Director/Writer/Producer)
Ethan Coen has produced and co-written such critically acclaimed films as Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, which won the Palme d'Or [Best Picture], Best Director, and Best Actor (John Turturro) Awards at the 1991 Cannes International Film Festival; and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards (winning one).
One of 1996's most honored films, Fargo, which he produced and co-wrote, received seven Academy Award nominations and won two, including Best Original Screenplay for Ethan and his brother Joel. Among the other films that he has co-written and produced are Blood Simple; Raising Arizona; The Hudsucker Proxy; The Big Lebowski; The Man Who Wasn't There; and Intolerable Cruelty.
He co-directed and co-wrote the 2004 comedy The Ladykillers with Joel. Joel and Ethan Coen's 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men brought them the Directors Guild of America, BAFTA, and Academy and Awards; the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay; Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay from the New York Film Critics Circle; Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay from the Oscars and the National Board of Review; The film's cast was voted the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and Javier Bardem won the Screen Actors Guild and Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor, among other accolades.
Joel and Ethan Coen's most recent film, Burn After Reading, was nominated for the BAFTA Award and the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Almost an Evening, comprising three short plays by Ethan Coen, was staged in 2008 off-Broadway by Neil Pepe at the Atlantic Theater Company's Stage 2 and then at the Bleecker Street Theater; in 2009, the same director and company staged his three new short plays under the title Offices.

THE ART OF ORIGINAL FILMMAKING

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