I watched "A Serious Man" the other night.

Someone characterized it as "the movie you get to make after you make "No Country For Old Men." Probably true, though having made "Fargo" and "O Brother" didn't hurt either. I suspect no one but the Coen Brothers could have made "Serious Man" because only they wouldn't need to pitch it, and who could pitch "Well it's like the story of Job only in suburban 60s America and funny."

Maybe the point was in fact that the husband in the parable was a mensch, and so what did it get him? Bupkis... but you can bet he went on being a mensch anyway (and his wife went on being a wacko, no doubt) A couple of sources I've stumbled across indicate that the prologue* of "A Serious Man" - according to the Coens - isn't intended to correlate directly to anything in the film itself. It was a faux Yiddish folk tale, concocted by the filmmakers, to get them into the mood for writing the main movie.

I'm damn glad they decided to stick it on the movie, it could have been a throwaway, and I think it adds to the movie quite a bit.

At first I assumed it was directly connected - these people were ancestors of Larry. Then I wondered if they were more emblematic Ashkenazim. Now I dunno what the point was either, especially since it was left unresolved whether the old reb was in fact a dybbuk or maybe the wife was a wacko.

The more I think about it the more I think they were another anecdote in the long history of Yiddish wisdom that finds its outlet (in this film at least) in Rabbi Nachtner's "who knows; who cares" parable of the goy with the letters on his teeth (I loved that - and it only got better when the Adam Arkin character asked Larry about whether the rabbi told him the story of the goy's teeth.)

But it is all those things, as well as sad and disturbing and about as nonjudgmental as only the CoBros can be. The things that beset us aren't mad at us, there's nothing personal really - like Anton Chigur in "No Country" or Gaer in Fargo (or Margie in Fargo, for that matter) it's just the force of nature - the way things are. Shrug it off, move on.

*for those who haven't seen the film it opens with a story in Yiddish, set in an old-country shtetl, with some Ashkenazic Jews, an old reb who might be a dybbuk and a wife who stabs the dybbuk/reb with an ice pick.

I recommend "A Serious Man" a lot; lots of great actors you recognize but can't quite put your finger on like Richard Kind, Adam Arkin and George Wyner.