3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds

Some critics have been calling the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” a black comedy. Some have been calling it a drama.

I think it’s a horror film.

Protagonist Larry Gopnik is living a life in the Jewish version of Hell. His wife has fallen for an oily acquaintance and wants a divorce. His brother’s temporary stay with them is threatening to become permanent; he spends all his time draining a cyst. His 13-year-old son is a stoner and his older daughter washes her hair all day and dreams of getting a nose job. He is physics professor up for tenure, and one of his students tries to bribe him for a passing grade. He lives in a horrible 1960s house (the artwork is exquisitely awful) bounded on one side by an angry neighbor and on the other by a temptress.

Larry is a modern Job, or at least a Job in 1967, when the film is set. God is testing him for reasons he will never know, testing him severely. The question -- answered, but never asked -- is whether he will be able to remain moral in the face of all the stress.

The Coens are looking at the Big Questions here. What is God’s plan for us? How do we know what he wants? And as Larry himself asks, “Why does he make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give us the answers?”

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens when filmmakers begin poking around in the Big Questions, the film becomes a wee bit pretentious. And maybe more than a wee bit.

A certain smugness radiates from the screen as the Coens briefly touch upon Schrodinger’s paradox, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the stoned wisdom of Jefferson Airplane, specifically the Surrealistic Pillow album.

Hey, I like Surrealistic Pillow, too. But I’m not sure what point they’re trying to make by using it so much in a movie focusing on the idea that religion, specifically Judaism, has no answer for God’s questions. There is a disconnect in this film between what they are trying to say and how they say it.

The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, have introduced a number of fine movie actors over the years, and they do it again here with Michael Stuhlbarg, who stars as Larry. With a pained, blank look, Stuhlbarg is unsurpassable as the passive, manipulated professor, the pawn in everyone else’s game. The other actors are strong, too, but as the movie wears on we begin to feel as if their efforts are unrewarded by the lackadaisical plot.

Perhaps the best scene -- and certainly the most gripping -- is the first. Set in 19th century Poland and performed entirely in subtitled Yiddish, it tells of a poor and simple man and wife who are visited either by a blessing or a curse. The scene, which is narratively unrelated to the rest of the story, suggests the difficulty one has in determining good from evil. Or maybe it’s about how religion is just destructive superstition.

It’s kind of hard to tell.