There was a time when Joel and Ethan Coen were known (and, in some quarters, loathed) for the gymnastics they regularly took their camera through on the way to a finished feature, sending it racing down a bar with a quick vault over a collapsed drunkard or rocketing down a hotel sink drain. By contrast, what continually struck me while watching their latest film, A Serious Man, was the completeness of their command of the pure mechanics of narrative storytelling. That doesn’t mean their shot choices have gotten mundane. They still frame their images in fascinating, inventive ways, but also understand how to shape a scene, how to share information, how to drive forward their storytelling with the ways they assemble all their material into a finished work. Just watching the prologue that opens the film–a sequence as sneakily vital as anything they’ve inserted into a film since Margie Gunderson had an awkward encounter with Mike Yanagita–is like sitting through a master class in cinematic construction, building tension with the editing, the pacing, the sounds, the smart and subtle use of offscreen space. The expertise continues once they get to the main story, following college professor Larry Gopnik through a few particularly trying days. Without melodramatic flourishes or other crass trickery, they build tension until it is nearly unbearable, the celluloid clicking through the projector beginning to sound like the straining steel of a tightening vise. In one of the year’s great and underrated performances, Michael Stuhlbarg plays the leading role with subtle building strain, taking his character up to his spiritual breaking point without quite reaching it. The film is bleakly funny, right up to its perfect closing image.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)