It's hard to put a finger on exactly what a Coen brothers movie is. That's part of their great allure.

As writers and directors, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen don't just keep pumping out the same movie over and over, as so many filmmakers do. From the comic antics of "Raising Arizona" to the noir of "The Man Who Wasn't There," the goofballs of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" to the outlaws of "No Country for Old Men," they're all strikingly different. They surprise us.

But there are some thematic threads that frequently run though them, which get tangled together in what is the Coens' most thoughtful and personal film, "A Serious Man."

Basically, the point here is that the universe is random, it gives you insurmountable challenges, and there's nothing you can do about it. The concepts of justice and karma are irrelevant: Things happen to people whether their behavior is good or bad, and you can question them all you like, but good luck finding any answers.

You could invoke "The Big Lebowski" in trying to explain this philosophy: They're nihilists. But the Coens are clearly having a little fun in making life so difficult for the nebbishy Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor raising his family in a predominately Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in 1967, a place and time inspired by the Coens' childhood.

Larry tries to do the right thing at home and at work — tries to be a serious man — but out of nowhere one day, the problems start piling up until they reach an absurd level.

His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), informs him that she's leaving him for a longtime friend of theirs, the smarmy widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). His son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), has been getting into trouble at Hebrew school as he prepares for his bar mitzvah. Daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is stealing cash from his wallet to save up for a nose job. And his unemployed brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), who's been sleeping on the couch, spends his days doodling gibberish equations in a notebook and draining the cyst in his neck.

Meanwhile, Larry is up for tenure at the university, which his boss assures him is imminent even as he drops passive-aggressive hints that there's a letter-writing campaign against him. And then there is the sizable bribe that an intense Korean student has offered him to change a failing grade.