What if they gave a Coen brothers film and nobody came?

That seems to be the situation with The Men Who Stared at Goats. It is a Coen brothers’ film in all but authorship. It has Coen alums Jeff Bridges and George Clooney. It features that Coenian mixture of visual wit and deadpan humor. And it orchestrates a group of disparate people for a singular, comical mission. Unfortunately, the mixture doesn’t add up.

But what is paradoxical is that there is also a new real Coen Brothers film in release. But A Serious Man isn’t much better. If we can’t turn to the Coen Brothers for a good Coen Brothers film, to whom can we?

The Men Who Stared at Goats is based on a non-fiction account of a psy-ops unit of the U. S. Army instigated at the height of both the Vietnam War and the hippie movement, as investigated by a British reporter, Jon Ronson. The movie fictionalizes much of Ronson’s story.

Here, an American reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), is reeling from a divorce and ends up trying to get into Iraq to cover the war and impress his now ex-wife. In Kuwait, he meets a man whose name he recognizes from an earlier story he has written, Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney), a former psy-ops member. Wilton — presumably, because we don’t actually see it — interviews Cassidy as the two attempt to enter Iraq, the former soldier supposedly activated for a secret mission.

The movie starts out kind of funny but soon piddles away all the good will you have for it all. For one thing, the narrative is bifurcated. There is Wilton’s story, the bulk of which is an unexplained entry into Iraq and capture by various antagonists. There is also the history of the psy-ops unit, which is told second-hand by Wilton, and which also goes along inconclusively. For example, Kevin Spacey shows up as a psychic warrior with an unexplained animosity, and we never learn much about him even though he is a linchpin on which some of the plot rests. In the end, the film neither reports accurately much of the real psy-ops unit, nor is it very funny. The movie has one virtue, however: it reveals how truly bad Ewan McGregor is an actor.

A Serious Man is a portrait of a middle class Jewish American c. 1967. He is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a science professor at a Midwestern university. His wife is having an affair with an older boor. His two kids don’t get along. The daughter wants a nose job, and the son wants only to watch television and smoke pot.

At school, Gopnik is up for tenure, but is under threat from a series of poison pen letters, and a Korean student is trying to bribe him into raising his grade. At home, Gopnik has a neighbor who scares him. To alleviate his concern about some of these things, Gopnik proceeds to seek out the counsel of three rabbis, none of whom help in any way. At the end of the film, Gopnik is back with his wife, his son is bar mitzvahed, and he gets tenure, but a natural disaster and an organic disaster loom.

A Serious Man is like a parody of the Coen brothers, but done by the brothers themselves. A new scene will start with a person staring off into space with the camera pulling back or cutting to reveal another person there, also staring into space. This deadpan approach to life is supposed to be funny but isn’t. Everyone is downtrodden yet speaks archly.

The narrative squares everyone against Gopnik, who is the privileged “Job” of the story, the supposed focus of our sympathy. The Coens are often accused of coldness to their characters, and no film of theirs since The Hudsucker Proxy has so coldly viewed its fictional population. The movie also has one of the bleakest endings ever to appear in a Hollywood feature.

It never seemed before that the Coen approach to humor was a dead end, but Goats and Serious Man suggest that it might be, or at least coming to an end. Maybe they are growing up and themselves getting more serious. Unfortunately, these days the cinema is no country for old men.

D.K. Holm is The Voice’s cinema critic and author of several recent and forthcoming books, including Film Soleil.