Corliss on the Coens’ latest

Today we’re pointed, via Awards Daily, to Richard Corliss’s review of the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” in Time magazine with this thoughtful closer:

As Fate keeps stomping him, he embraces Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. What he tells his class about the theory — “Even if you can’t figure it out, you’re still responsible for it on the midterm” — applies, in spades, to his crumbling life. And yet for most of the movie he hangs in there, behaving honorably, seeking the wisdom of his ancestors, trying to observe the Jewish concept of Hashem. “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” says Elie Wiesel’s Rashi. To absorb God’s body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.

And yet, as much as I respect and agree with that sentiment, the film is much more than that, working on deeper, even more universal levels — so much so that it is quickly firming itself up as the best film of the year, in my view.

Anne Thompson and I will be discussing “A Serious Man,” among other things, in the next installment of Oscar Talk.