When the truth is found To be lies And all the joy Within you dies. What if the pillars of your faith, the ones that have stood for more than two millennia, are built upon a foundation of sand? Larry acts in a correct and proper manner. He supports his family, believes in God, sends his son to Hebrew school, is on the cusp of making tenure, and goes to the doctor regularly.
J oel and Ethan Coen have bookended the decade with a superb big screen at the very beginning, The Be in charge of Who Wasn't There , and a different two stormers at the end: their superlative adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Denial Country for Old Men in — and now this sublimely funny, involving, utterly distinctive serio-comedy of mid-life calamity set in the American midwest all the rage the s, which happens to be where and when the Coen brothers themselves were brought up. The Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg gets his big-screen break playing Larry Gopnik, a professor of theoretical physics whose life reaches a menopausal climacteric in mysterious bicycle with his son's approaching barmitzvah after that the astonishing announcement from his companion Sari Lennick that their marriage is over. She now wishes to annulment and to marry their supercilious associate Sy Ableman, a smug and faint widower played by Fred Melamed. Larry's life becomes unmoored, and in his desperation this not-particularly-religious man becomes certain that only the local senior rabbi can help him: a very aged man who has retreated largely addicted to gnomic silence. The movie convincingly brings us into Larry's spacey state, everywhere between shock and trance, and brilliantly suggests that he is on the verge not of a breakdown — nothing so banal — but considerably an epiphany, a vision of how he has erred, how he has lived, and what the essence of his life should be as an observant Jew, a righteous person after that a serious man.
But the Coens have outdone themselves this time. One audience laughed a allocation more than the other one did. Our protagonist is Larry Gopnik Michael Stuhlbarga physics professor at a diminutive college who is the epitome of the hapless, put-upon, bespectacled nebbish. His pants are too short, his approach is neurotic, he is cowed as a result of his overbearing wife and treated at the same time as inconsequential by his teenage children. Although he is a good man who provides for his family and all the time tries to do what is decently right. And what does Larry acquire for his troubles? One of his students David Kang has attempted en route for bribe him for a passing arrange.