Even by Joel and Ethan Coen's bleak standards, A Serious Man would be an uncommonly pessimistic movie. The film tells the story of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a college professor in Minnesota in 1967 whose life is spiraling out of control. Larry may be a mensch, but: his wife is leaving him for another man; his kids are growing increasingly rebellious; his debt-ridden brother has moved in and refuses to get out, and his tenure is threatened by anonymous claims that he's a pervert.

And then fate really gets cruel. A Serious Man, which opens Friday, is of a piece with the world view the Coens have established throughout their canon. Like No Country For Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There and Miller's Crossing, the movie argues that only a fool believes that everything will turn out fine if he does the right thing. In the realm of A Serious Man, even the most dutiful life can be wrecked by a sudden tornado of happenstance.

That outlook would be utterly depressing if the filmmakers didn't also render it so comically. Leavening the bleak with the humorous has always been a specialty of the Coen brothers. Even when they adapted novelist Cormac McCarthy's mournful No Country For Old Men, they sneaked in the occasional -- albeit uneasy -- laugh.

But unlike some of their past movies, in which the humor occurs at the expense of foolish protagonists, A Serious Man never mocks Larry's plight. The film's underlying compassion refutes longstanding criticism that the are misanthropic cynics, although they acknowledge why some people would characterize them that way.

``Yeeeaaah. I kind of understand that,'' Ethan begins in the halting, stumbling manner in which he and Joel, notoriously press shy and reluctant to explicate their work, will answer every question during a short conversation from New York. ``We probably are. . . . I turn it into a self-serving thing when I try to figure it out.

``But yeah, there's a certain lack of sentimentality in our movies, which is something we gravitate toward in terms of what kinds of story you like personally and what kind of story you're interested in telling. So getting called cynical is the obvious language for that criticism. I'd say it is certainly true we're not interested in telling stories with happy endings just for the sake of making people feel better.''

Stuhlbarg, who makes the besieged Larry a sympathetic figure, argues that the cynicism of the Coens' work is actually rooted in their films' settings and themes: The bleak noir landscapes of Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There, in which characters constantly double-cross each other; the mercilessness of Fargo and Miller's Crossing, in which criminals and murderers place zero value on human life, or even the surrealist hell of Barton Fink, in which a naive writer explores the most malevolent place on Earth: Hollywood.

``I think the Coens are mischievous more than cynical,'' Stuhlbarg says. ``They enjoy torturing their characters. But I found them both to be not cynical at all, as people or as artists. They have learned things in their lives they want to express in the worlds they create in their movies. But it's the genres their films are placed in that supply the cynicism. They are obviously capable of enjoying that cynicism, yes. But they also bring a buoyancy and a sense of humor to everything they do that keeps them from becoming too grim.''

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