Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) is going through a personal crisis. His wife wants a divorce, someone is writing critical letters about him to the tenure committee, his kids are apathetic and the local rabbis are little help.
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As much as I love The Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men and Fargo, I think this film might be the Coen Brothers' masterpiece. It does everything that a film from the Coens is supposed to do (it's beautifully shot, darkly funny and thought provoking) AND it accomplishes all of this without their usual safety-net of genre conventions. It's not a western, there are no spies or gangsters, and the amount violent death is kept to a minimum. This the Coen Universe stripped to it's bare essence: Man v. God. And though we already know going in who will win, it's still makes for one heck of a fun battle.
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