Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

It's no exaggeration to say that I have loved - not liked, but loved - almost every Coen Brothers films that I've seen. So it's baffling to me why I found this latest, much praised film dull, unsubtle, and almost entirely lacking in all those qualities that I expect from anything of theirs - dark humour, sharp observation, a touch of cruelty, a wicked delight in life, and, always, the unexpected. The ‘serious man' is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), physics professor, family man, whose life is suddenly becoming unravelled.

The Coens have gone back to their roots in the 60s Jewish community of the mid west - this is not the Jewish community of, say, Barton Fink, but the middle class milieu of suburban families who go to the synagogue every Sabbath, work hard, and own modest houses in the suburbs, the over-furnished, claustrophobic interiors the Coens would have known so well. It's coming up to the time for Larry's son Danny's Barmitzvah, but suddenly things are going wrong. There's his not-quite-right looking brother Arthur (Richard Kind) dossing down on their sofa, escaping some unspecified and probably seedy misdemeanour, whose presence has proved the final straw to Larry's wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), off with a new paramour, creepy widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) . There's his awkward failed Korean student who wants to pay him off for a good grade. There's Danny (Aaron Wolff), beginning to try out the odd substance at school, and his daughter, trying, in vain one fears, to make herself into a Jewish princess. And then there are the neighbours - the scary goy father son hunting duo next door who don't talk much, and the troubling glamorous lone wife who sunbathes in the nude. Larry's attempts to seek spiritual help from a succession of rabbis are doomed from the start.

This all looks like fertile stuff, but the problem is, it's all things we've seen before, there's very little that is original, and practically none of it's that funny or engaging. These characters never go beyond almost insulting stereotype, and are neither grotesque enough to raise much of a laugh or a shiver, or real enough to care about. Larry tries to be a serious man, but no-one will take him seriously - the problem is, none of the other characters are taken seriously either.

The opening sequence, a folk tale from middle Europe which preshadows the anxiety to come in Larry's life, is mainly of interest as it is in Yiddish, a lively and abrasive language it's a pleasure to hear. It deals with a rather comic couple in some mitteleuropean shtetl, unsure if the old rabbi visiting them is himself or a dybbuk, a demon in human form . They never know, just like Schrodinger's cat explained by Larry in class could be either alive or dead, but in theory is both. The shifting reality of things even as one experiences them does in fact provide a powerful ending (showing what a greater film this could have been), as something looms, figuratively and actually, with the first true Coen-style shudder providing the last seconds of the film.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, 20 November 2009