At bottom, the Coen brothers' most "personal" work. To be sure, they've never been reduced to hired hands. They've always had the good fortune to be able to make the films they wanted to make, films that reflected their personal tastes and personal attitudes and personal interests and personal viewpoints. Still, in the strict autobiographical sense, this one must be acknowledged as extra personal, set as it is in the Minneapolis suburb of their adolescence (Jefferson Airplane on the soundtrack to fix the date, 1967), in a Jewish household headed by a university professor with a son on the brink of his bar mitzvah. The filmmakers bring to their subject the unkind eye of the caricaturist. They demonstrate an acute and excruciating body awareness, the girth, the ear hair, the sebaceous cyst on the neck, the protagonist's half squat at the classroom blackboard, his outthrust butt, his pant cuffs riding up to his calves. And their subtly bulging face shots and torso shots, fronted and centered, approach the freak-show aura of the photographs of Diane Arbus. The parade of surnames has a Dickensian grotesquerie all its own: Gopnik, Finkle, Marshak, Nachtner, Schlutz, seldom a simple Shapiro. And the three rabbis of three different generations are hilariously ineffectual in three different ways. But to complain that the character portraits are not rounded, are slanted, would be to complain that a caricaturist is not a classicist, that Daumier is not Ingres. This is, it bears stressing at this point, a personal film. It is also — unexpectedly enough, as unexpected as the superstitious Old Country folk tale of the prologue and its old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio — a religious film, a film concerned not just with the specific religion of Judaism and its whole exotic lexicon, but with broader religious questions, universal inquiries into life's mysteries: what have I done to deserve this? what have I done with my life? what ought I to do? what am I here for? Joel and Ethan Coen have long and lately devoted themselves to the vast panoply of human stupidity. Stretching out now, stretching back to Barton Fink, they have chosen to reassure us, although "reassure" doesn't sound quite right, that an intelligent, educated, well-meaning, and would-be serious man is no less at a loss. Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind, Aaron Wolff, Fred Melamed. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd