Out of the Whirlwind.

THE films of Joel and Ethan Coen represent one of the most challenging bodies of work in contemporary American cinema--so challenging, in fact, that I'm constantly surprised by how many reviewers are confident that they've figured out exactly what the Coens are up to. This goes for critics who hate the brothers' oeuvre as well as those who love it: Members of both camps often find common ground in the conviction that the Coens are essentially nihilistic jokers, squeezing entertainment value out of a universe that's godless, meaningless, and fated to extinction.

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Consider the critical reaction to their latest provocation, an updated version of the Book of Job set in a Minnesota suburb circa 1967, in which a well-meaning Jewish academic named Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a stage actor in his first big movie role) is subjected to an escalating series of catastrophes by God, the Universe, or random chance. In reviews both pro and con, similar passages recur. From the New York Times: "[The Coens'] insistence on the fundamental absence of a controlling order in the universe is matched among American filmmakers only by Woody Allen." From The New Republic: "The universe they are now navigating is one of godlessness and capricious misfortune." From The Onion's A/V Club: "A Serious Man is a wholly Coen brothers movie ... anchored to a way of looking at the world that seems to posit a fundamental absence of meaning."

Now, you can make up your own mind on this front: A Serious Man is one of the year's best movies, so hie thee to a multiplex and puzzle over it yourself. But I would submit that characterizing the Coens' latest fictional universe as "meaningless" is a category error of significant proportions.

Like the Book of Job itself, this is a film about God and the mystery of suffering, with an emphasis on mystery. The Coens are certainly open to the possibility that the universe is all a cruel joke--but from the movie's opening epigraph to its (literally) whirlwind finale, A Serious Man is equally open to the possibility that while we can't know everything, there is, in fact, something (or Someone) out there to be known.

The epigraph is a quote from Rashi, the medieval Jewish sage and commentator, glossing the Deuteronomic admonition to "be wholehearted with the Lord, your God" as follows: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." Larry Gopnik has trouble following this advice. He receives his share of suffering with mounting angst, and the recurring demand that God--referred to, throughout, by the oblique and respectful Hebraic designation "Hashem"--provide him with some answers.

Not that you can blame him, since his share seems so wildly disproportionate to the decent, upright life he's tried to live. His marriage has suddenly, shockingly failed, and his wife wants to leave him for a bearish, oleaginous widower named Sy Ableman (a wonderful Fred Melamed). His redneck, possibly anti-Semitic neighbor is trying to make a land grab in their subdivision. His asocial, unemployable brother is sleeping on his couch, draining a cyst and filling a notebook with mad equations that purport to predict the future. A soft-spoken but persistent Korean student wants to bribe him to change an F to a C+. An anonymous enemy is sending defamatory letters to the tenure committee at his college. And the Columbia Record Company claims that he owes them for a year's worth of the "monthly main selection."

"I didn't do anything!" our hero wails to the Columbia representative. "I didn't ask for this!" But like Job, he's getting it--good and hard.

Like Job, too, he has three advisers trying to help him make sense of it--three rabbis, in this case, one young and callow, one middle-aged and garrulous, and one so old that he refuses to grant interviews. ("The rabbi is busy," Gopnik is told. "He's thinking.") But whereas Job's friends insisted on trying to make his suffering comprehensible--claiming that God was punishing him for his sins, whatever those might be--Gopnik's rabbis take the opposite tack, emphasizing the impenetrability of the Almighty's ways.

"Hashem doesn't owe us the answer, Larry," the second rabbi tells him. "Hashem doesn't owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way."

The rabbis' personalities, like Larry's vividly realized suburban/Jewish/1960s world (the world of the Coens' own childhood, as it happens), are often played for laughs. But their advice--accept uncertainty, live with what God gives you, and be good--is of a piece with the movie's broader insistence on the mysteriousness of existence, rather than its meaninglessness.

It's of a piece, too, with the Coens' oeuvre as a whole, their reputation for nihilism notwithstanding. (It's telling that when actual nihilists make an appearance in their work--as villains in The Big Lebowski--they're dismissed with one of the Coens' most-quoted lines: "Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.") As Matt Zoller Seitz has written, their movies are proudly mysterian: They "tease our suspicion that powerful, unseen forces move the universe --moral and ethical forces that sometimes seem to be rendering judgment or sending a message" while simultaneously insisting that "no man can verify if these forces actually exist."

Theirs is a universe that might be pointless, in other words, but then again it might not. And while we struggle with the mystery, A Serious Man repeatedly suggests--especially in its baffling, provocative finale--it's important to keep trying to do the right thing.

You never know Who might be watching.