While revisiting it recently, I came away with three lessons that the movie taught me. A Serious Man is chock-full of characters who are trying to understand the universe. But in the movie, none of these work. If trying to predict the universe is doomed to fail, what works?
A Serious Man isn't a movie en route for be solved. It's a film so as to revels in its paradoxes because those paradoxes illustrate what it means en route for be Jewish right from the aperture parable about the dybbuk. Arguably Joel and Ethan Coen 's most at an angle movie since Barton Fink , A Serious Man is also the brothers' most straightforward examination of their Jewish upbringing and how it crashes ahead against their American roots. To be Jewish is itself a paradox—an foreigner always living among other communities ahead of you for the inevitable next exodus, an exodus that's also key to your identity. To understand A Serious Be in charge of , or at least to accept its paradoxes, we must first air to its opening scenes, which break down us into a paradox within a paradox. The film's epigraph quotes the Rashi, a medieval French rabbi who wrote extensively on the Talmud books of Jewish law and the Tanakh the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures including the Torah , Receive along with simplicity everything that happens to you, and then we get the allegory of the dybbuk, a tone-setting foreword that refuses to be received along with simplicity.
Rabbi Nachtner : You know Lee Sussman. Larry Gopnik : Doctor Sussman? I think I - yeah. Rabbi Nachtner : Did he ever tell you about the goy's teeth? Larry Gopnik : No I- What goy? Rabbi Nachtner : So Lee is by work one day; you know he has the orthodontic practice there by Great Bear. He's making a coat mold - it's for corrective association work - in the mouth of one of his patients, Russell Kraus.