Entertainment

Mazel tov!

JOEL and Ethan Coen mine their adolescences in the mid-1960s Midwest and strike blackly comic Jewish gold with one of their finest films, “A Serious Man.”

The title refers to Larry Gopnik, a hapless physics professor (brilliantly played by stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg) whose Job-like family woes are mounting by the moment.

His bored wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), is leaving him for Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), the kind of sanctimonious blowhard macher who gives you a bear hug even as he’s planting a knife between your shoulder blades.

Larry’s daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), spends half her life in the only bathroom of their split-level and swipes money from dad’s wallet for a nose job.

And their pot-smoking son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), is much, much less interested in his impending bar mitzvah than eluding his dealer, listening to Jefferson Airplane and demanding that Dad adjust the rooftop antenna so Danny can watch “F Troop” on TV.

Larry’s woes don’t stop at work, where’s he’s up for tenure just as a Korean student is trying to bribe him and the tenure committee is receiving anonymous letters making sexual allegations about our hero.

And oy, the tsuris keeps coming.

There’s the possibly shiksa temptress and the vaguely menacing, gun-owning goy in the neighboring tract houses — not to mention Larry’s unemployed brother (Richard Kind, excellent), who follows Larry from the couch to the motel where poor Larry is exiled by Judith and Sy.

Larry consults with three rabbis to explain why these plagues have been visited upon him.

One offers him a bizarrely hilarious story about a gentile with mysterious engravings on the inside of his teeth. This is about as helpful as the ersatz folk tale (in subtitled Yiddish) that the Coens have devised as a prologue, wherein an old woman in a shtetl stabs a rabbi she has decided is possessed by a dybbuk (the soul of a dead person).

Though the Coens flirt with caricature, there are some serious questions about faith and Judaism underlying their sadistic fun. The film conveys a vivid sense of time and place, and much of the excellently chosen cast are semi-professional locals recruited from the filming locations in Minnesota.

Beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins (“No Country for Old Men”), “A Serious Man” may not have the starry casts of the Coens’ more recent films, but it has plenty of heart and soul.

It’s a movie mitzvah.