A Seriously Small Man: Michael Stuhlbarg, as physics professor Larry Gopnik, teaches his students that there is order in the universe. The Coen Brothers aren’t convinced.

“I didn’t do anything!” is the repeated mantra of Larry Gopnik, a nebbishy professor of physics at a suburban Minneapolis community college, and the central character of the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man. And if he didn’t do anything, as he keeps suggesting, then why is it that so many awful things keep happening to him? How could Hashem (the Jewish word for God, one of a handful of Yiddish vocabulary words Goys are likely to learn from the movie) be so cruel? His wife is leaving him, he’s broke, his kids are ungrateful brats whose only use for him is to steal money from his wallet and send him up to the roof to adjust the aerial so they can watch F-Troop, he’s a victim of extortion and a plot to sabotage his bid for tenure, and his freeloading mental-case of a brother tends to hog the bathroom to suction fluid from a cyst on the back of his neck.

How many trials is one man expected to bear?

One need only look back to Larry’s biblical antecedent, Job, to know that the answer is many, many trials. Larry, like Job, tries to be a righteous man, a serious man, if you will, a phrase he picks up when he hears it used to describe successful, valium-voiced Sy Abelman, the man who is stealing away Larry’s wife. He wants the respect of the community that Sy gets, and doesn’t understand what it is he did to be not worthy of it. After all, Larry teaches physics, the elegant and predictable mathematical expression of the way an ordered universe works. Life, he figures, has to work according to the same principles. As he tells a student early on in the film, actions have consequences. The student isn’t ready to accept that theory, and neither are the Coens, who, playing Hashem to Larry’s Job, are about to give their creation a lesson in just how chaotic the universe can be.