The Coen brothers aren’t known for being serious men. They are the guys who brought us “Fargo,” “O Brother Where Art Thou?” and “The Big Lebowski.” Their most recent effort was “Burn After Reading”, a caper that brought the Coens’ trademark combination of gore and goof to a new high, or low, depending on your perspective. (I fell into the latter category.) Compared to these past escapades, “A Serious Man” is maybe, almost, a serious movie. It’s the story of Larry Gopnik, a middle-aged Jewish man who is more randomly unlucky than The Dude, or even that fellow who ended up in the woodchipper. His family is coming apart at the seams: a wife who wants him gone from the house, a teenage daughter who spends her life washing her hair, a 13-year-old son whose life revolves around smoking weed and evading creditors, and a pathetic, freeloading brother with some problems obeying the law. We haven’t even gotten to Gopnik’s disgruntled student, aggressive neighbor, anxiety-provoking boss, or the Columbia Record Club.

Whether or not he’s a serious man, it’s clear that Gopnik has serious problems. Or they would be serious, if the movie weren’t so darn funny. Part of it is the setting—put people in the late 1960s and somehow the craziness that surrounds them becomes a little less immediately troubling. Maybe it’s a contact high from all the pot the characters are smoking? Although we may not take Gopnik’s predicaments too personally, he is a sympathetic character. It’s one of the differences that sets this film apart from “Burn After Reading.” So does the absence of violence—people do die shockingly in this film, but aside from the opening scene (which, as far as I could tell, was totally disconnected from the rest of the narrative) there’s no gore.

There’s not so much linear plot, either. In a fruitless quest to understand the mess he’s in, Gopnik consults a series of rabbis in the days leading up to his son’s bar mitzvah. The rabbis are highly amusing (to the movie viewer), but not particularly helpful (to Gopnik). The bar mitzvah seems to offer some possibility of acceptable closure, but then, in the last few scenes of the film, your expectations of this movie and screenwriting in general are upended. You’ll leave the theater shaking your head and thinking, those darn Coen brothers have done it again. And this time, I mean that in a good way.

The Coens are tangentially related to the other film I saw recently. They wrote and directed one of the short films that made up “Paris, je t’aime.” “Paris” came out in 2006 and included a dozen or so short films by noted directors all set in the City of Lights. It was a masterpiece that made you want to jump on the next plane. The follow-up, “New York, I Love You,” is not so successful. It takes the same format and is packed with big-name actors (James Caan, Cloris Leachman, Ethan Hawke, Chris Cooper, just to give you an idea of the range). But it just doesn’t connect in the same mesmerizing way. Somehow the film manages to be gritty and artificial at the same time. As in, the streets and buildings look gritty but the acting and dialogue feel artificial. I’m sure lovers of New York will enjoy the diversity of settings captured in the film. The scene of Coney Island on a cold day is particularly appealing. The problem with the acting may be a function of the premise. When a film is only a few minutes long, you’ve hardly had time to adjust to the concept of Natalie Portman as a bald Hasidic woman or Andy Garcia as a college professor before the story is over. It might, in such cases, be easier to watch an unknown actor. And, at points, “New York, I Love You” was just totally, inexplicably weird. I still have no idea what Shia LaBeouf was doing as a hunchbacked, suicidal bellhop to Julie Christie. But sometimes movies aren’t meant to be fully understood.

Just ask the Coens.