Academy Award winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen bring their famously wicked sense of humor to this every day tale about a moral man who sees the world inexplicably turn against him in this darkest of comedies. Larry Nidus is a good man. He is a loving husband a committed father and a dedicated professor who always does the fair and just thing in the face of daily temptations. But one day everything starts to go wrong. His wife leaves him for reasons she can't explain and her smug new lover manages to convince Larry that he should be the one to move out of the house and into a cheap motel - all for the children's benefit of course. Then Larry's career is put into jeopardy by a series of anonymous letters falsely accusing him of unnamed treacheries. And when his wife's new partner dies in a car accident she insists that he should foot the bill for the funeral! Now the cash strapped Larry finds himself paying to bury a man he hates bailing his gambling addicted brother out of jail and desperately trying to save his name and his career in academia. Yet in spite of it all we can't help but laugh as we contemplate Larry's plight in a world with no silver linings that might just seem uncomfortably familiar to us all...