A husband bursts in from the snow to his Eastern European hut, his broken cart (as he tells his wife) set right on the road by Reb Groschkover, whom he has now invited for soup. (Yiddish dialogue in this sequence is subtitled in English.) The wife blanches. Reb Groschkover died three years earlier! During the time his family sat shiva, his corpse was left alone momentarily; the Evil One must have entered the body. “God has cursed us,” the wife pronounces. Suddenly, there’s a knock, and Reb Groschkover comes in from the storm, smiling, laughing – until he sees the wife is not amused. She offers him soup; he demurs. Right, the wife observes, dybbuks don’t eat. The alleged dybbuk laughs off the suggestion that he could be other than flesh and blood, whereupon the wife stabs him in the throat. Mourning the lack of hospitality with which he has been received, he wanders back into the snow. “Alles ist verschwenden,” the husband says – all is lost. The wife counters, “Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil.”

The Coen brothers deserve an Oscar for A Serious Man, which levitates above the dreary and floats to the surreal. The Big Liebowski and Fargo (two other two films I’ve seen by this pair) were as ambiguous as this one, but differently: The Big Liebowski was kitschy (nothing matters, Dude, it’s all strikes and gutter balls, so you might as well go bowling); Fargo, sinister, relentlessly bloody, driving us to the predictably violent consequences of each hoped-for jackpot. In their earlier movies, the Coens were at least kind enough to provide beatific foils for the hellishly serious and the seriously hellish, the neo-Taoist Dude in Liebowski and Margie in Fargo – a happily pregnant, Midwestern law enforcement agent wrapping up a case and snuggling up to her husband. Attitude triumphs over all.

In Oscar-nominated A Serious Man, it’s not that simple, not a matter of developing and practicing the right attitude – generosity, generativity, flexibility – but rather of living a righteous life in the midst of setbacks that would try the patience of (wait, you got it) Job.

The Yiddish ghost story from the shetl sets the scene for the events that follow in the suburbs of Minneapolis, circa 1967. End credits read Dybbuk? for the first of the film’s many ambiguities, uncertainties, hazy and indistinct choices or altogether seeming absence of available choice.

Larry Gopnik, a college physics teacher, is slated for tenure; the fact that he has never published, that a foreign student is trying to bribe and blackmail him into providing a passing grade, and that someone has engaged in a smear campaign accusing him of moral turpitude, these are “nothing to be concerned about,” according the tenure committee head. And in fact they are only comic highlights in a dark moral tale. A Serious Man is a serious yarn, a moral fable, much as the Book of Job is only a yarn once you’ve digested some unsettling notions – that God believes it’s okay to destroy a man’s life, giving him boils on top of everything else, as long as he is ultimately made whole with an equal number of livestock and offspring to replace earlier ones, now dead. God, Hashem, seems not so much jealous as arbitrary and legalistic.

As the Minneapolis portion of the movie opens, bored Bar Mitzvah boy Danny furtively listens to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school while his father, Larry, undergoes a physical examination, assured he is in good health. Things are in fact not so optimistic. Larry’s world is about to fall apart, though as a physicist and mathematician he is driven to search for order in a universe in which the Heisenberg uncertainty principle – where the observer inevitably changes the outcome of the observed – holds sway, where Schrödinger's cat can be simultaneously dead and alive. (Do I hear the footsteps of a dybbuk stumbling into a storm?) Larry’s wife is leaving him for Sy Abelman, an unctuous fool who can actually hug Larry when he and Judith – Larry’s wife – meet him at a restaurant to discuss a pending get (a religious divorce, required if Judith and Sy are to marry in the faith) and to suggest it would be best for the children if Larry and his brother Arthur (a bit of a leech who has been writing a rambling numerological treatise and perpetually tying up the bathroom to drain his sebaceous cyst) move to the Jolly Roger Motel. Shortly thereafter, Sy is killed in a car accident, and Larry is forced to pay the funeral expenses because the estate’s assets are frozen in probate. He sits by his wailing wife as the rabbi extols Sy’s virtues as a serious man and speculates as to the nature of Sy’s final destination in the bosom of Abraham.

Larry and Judith’s children seem a visitation by an angry God. Sarah, the older, has apparently been stealing from her father to save up for a nose job (“There will be no nose jobs in this house!” Larry bellows, ineffectually), while the younger, Danny, is high on marijuana as he studies for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah and manages repeatedly (but just barely) to avoid an angry student to whom he owes $20. A running gag is Danny’s insistence that Larry climb up on the roof to fix the television aerial so he can watch F Troop. Danny’s calls about the antenna come at the most inconvenient times imaginable, yet only on the roof can Larry acquire any perspective at all, seeing the world around him as it really is.

Larry’s other tribulations include a nude sunbathing female neighbor, a menacing next-door Gentile with a boundary dispute, and dunning phone calls from the Columbia Record Club, which Larry insists he has never joined. Larry is urged to call on the collective wisdom of the Jewish people by consulting with three rabbis. None solves Larry’s problems, but each offers a different and somewhat useful viewpoint.

The first, a junior rabbi, urges Larry to look at the parking lot – in other words, to notice and appreciate the world, where God is everywhere. “This is life,” says the first rabbi. Larry counters, “The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.” The second rabbi tells Larry a rambling story of a Jewish dentist who found Hebrew letters spelling out the words “Help me, save me” engraved on the back of a Gentile patient’s lower incisors. Try as he might, he could not find another instance of such engraving on the teeth of any of his other patients or of his sleeping wife. Nor could the dentist explain what the message – was it a message? – meant. The second rabbi goes on: “These questions that are bothering us, maybe they’re like a toothache.” Larry anguishes, “Why does God give us the questions if not the answers?” The third and most senior rabbi no longer does pastoral work; when Larry desperately tries to see him anyway, he is told he is busy. Larry says, “But I just saw him in there!” The secretary growls, “He’s thinking.”

No spoiler here; you’ll have to watch the film to look for aspects of yourself in Larry Gopnik, beleaguered by a God he is commanded to love and forced to make choices that have consequences, many terrible and unforeseen. “But I haven’t done anything!” is both his protest against life’s unfairness and his confessional self-indictment. This movie’s a winner for its comedic moments and for a sinister philosophy that peeks out from neatly mowed lawns and a publish-or-perish shark tank.

The cast includes Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Wagner Lennick, Fred Melamed, and Aaron Wolff.