With the new Coen brothers’ movie, “A Serious Man,” opening on Friday (Oct. 2) reviews are beginning to trickle in. Those who have seen it (including Cathleen Falsani, who wrote a recently published book about the Coens and religion) say its the brothers’ most explicitly religious and personal film to date.

Set in the Minnapolis suburb, among the middle-class Jewish millieu in which Joel (soon to be 55) and Ethan (52) Coen were raised, the film follows physics professor Larry Gopnik through a series of Jobian (Jobish? Jobite) trials. He consults with rabbis, who give him no good answers.

The Coens’ mother came from an Orthodox home, their father was less observant, and the boys say they dutifully attended Hebrew school but are no longer religious. Clearly, though, they know a thing or two about Judaism.

Rabbi Dan Sklar, who consulted on the film, told the New York Times: The role of the prophet is to speak truth to power and to speak truth to the people. The Coens see right through the foibles of our humanity. They turn their lens on ‘normalcy’ and make the mundane at once abnormal, beautiful and terrifying.”

He also said “A Serious Man” is ” the most Jewish movie I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You leave the theater with a host of questions, no easy answers and, frankly, arguing about what it all means.”

In an interview with the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Ethan and Joel spoke about the Job comparisons, and made an interesting physics/kabbalah comparison:

“He does get an awful lot of abuse, but it’s a bit different from the Book of Job,” corrects Ethan, 52, a former philosophy major. “Job is about a servant of God whose faith is being tested. But this is a guy who’s never thought about those things. He doesn’t have that kind of spiritual dimension. He’s just sort of living his life.”

“Which appealed to us, too,” adds Joel. “That whole idea of scientific reason as opposed to religious experience. Also that both sides attempt to explain the universe using numbers – that’s why we brought in the Kabbalah a little bit. That became an interesting thing to riff on.”

But towards the end of the Star-Ledger’s article, the brothers acknowledged that they’ve been accused of trafficking in Jewish stereotypes (the nebbish, hen-pecked husband; the shrewish yenta…) or even embodying stereotypical self-hating Jews themselves.

Here’s what they say:”I don’t think (the criticism’s) necessarily a Jewish thing. Anytime you put out a movie – even in our own specialized, arty little niche – and there’s any ethnicity referred to, specifically, there’s going to be somebody, some person, who’s going to take it as a personal insult. They can never see it as a character. It’s always, always, all about them,” says Ethan.

“Yeah,” adds Joel. “But at the end of the day, we’ll probably get fewer offended letters over this than we did from Minnesotans over `Fargo.’ They really hated that movie.”