The viewer knows how he feels. Arthur, please. Scott summed up the critical consensus when the film came out in theaters last fall: “The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque.” Horrific and opaque? Look at the Old Testament or even just look at Rabbi Marshak's (Alan Mandell) office. He adds, “Not just physics. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. Judith wants a gett (A Jewish divorce) not because of her faith, but because of Sy and all his pretensions. A Serious Man, also in contention this year, is a more unusual choice—even allowing for the fact that its creators, the Coen brothers, have slipped difficult fare into the proceedings before. I didn’t do anything.” During a conversation about his tenure prospects: “I haven’t done anything. "And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob," says Exodus 2:24. I've always considered the Coen Bros somewhat of a hit or miss, and this was a pretty blatant miss in all respects. Cue Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" and cut to credits. are notable refrains from Larry. Matt Goldberg has been an editor with Collider since 2007. Larry has sinned and now he and his son must be made to suffer. Let me try to explain. If he is a good Jew, then good things will happen to him. But Hashem doesn’t owe us the answer, Larry. Either God is punishing Gopnik for taking the bribe, or God will punish Gopnik no matter what he does for reasons beyond our comprehension. I mean what was the meaning behind the whole tornado scene? The problem with the notion of the community is that the world remains uncertain (as seen in the parable that starts the movie) and then American individualism compounds that uncertainty. Although nihilism is an easy (and false) reading of the Coens' work (they've even gone so far as to joke about it in The Big Lebowski by having The Dude remark about nihilism, "That must be exhausting. We've been trying to work our way through most of the nominees, and last night was A Serious Man. “Good riddance to evil,” she says when Groshkover walks out the door, bleeding. He may not be a bad professor, but neither is he an especially good one: As he says, he hasn’t done anything, hasn’t published anything. The go-to source for comic book and superhero movie fans. And yet for all of Larry's reliance on math and proofs, he doesn't understand his own behavior or the larger stories telling him to embrace his paradox. (Satan bets he won’t; God bets he will.) Set in their home state at the time of their childhood, and featuring characters that have clearly influenced their storytelling style, A Serious Man exists not only as the most personally realized film of the Coens' 25 year-long career, but quite certainly one of their best. God doesn't give us treats because we acted good; we're just supposed to be good. Accept the mystery. The Jewish God does not come here to ask us what he can do for us; the covenant is a relationship that we're supposed to abide by even as our American individualism tells us we're entitled to whatever we want (exemplified by Danny stealing money for the record club or Larry thinking he's owed answers from various rabbis). A Serious Man works very well, in my opinion, because it straddles causal and collective. He dreams of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which shows Larry's desire to prove uncertainty with mathematical certainty. It's the one about the Jewish dentist who discovers the words "help me" naturally occurring in Hebrew on the back of a gentile's lower front teeth. A Serious Man - someone wanna explain that to me? Something good has finally happened to him and he now has the financial security that has eluded him for the whole film. There's no secret meaning, no answer in the goy's teeth. Enigmatic to the point of inscrutability, A Serious Man leaves audiences in a state of interpretive uncertainty, popcorn uneaten, wondering what the Coens are getting at.

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