“What’s Going On?’

What if the pillars of your faith, the ones that have stood for more than two millennia, are built upon a foundation of sand? Larry acts in a correct and proper manner. He supports his family, believes in God, sends his son to Hebrew school, is on the cusp of making tenure, and goes to the doctor regularly. He even lets his good-for-nothing brother stay in his house until he can find a place of his own.

His best friend Sy Ableman has a minute ago stolen Larry Gopnik's wife, and at once he comforts him on his beating. Such a man is Larry Gopnik. He lectures on physics in abut of a blackboard filled with bewildering equations that are mathematical proofs approaching certainty, and in his own animation, what can be sure of? Naught, that's what. His wife is departure him for his best friend. His son is listening to rock 'n' roll in Hebrew school. His descendant is stealing money for a beak job.

Larry Gopnik : It's a long account. Sy Ableman : Do you alcoholic drink wine? Because this is an absurd bottle. This is not Mogen David. This is a - heh heh - a wine, Larry. A Bordeaux. Larry Gopnik : You know, Sy Sy Ableman : Open it.

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 oblique film since Barton Fink, A Serious Be in charge of is also the brothers' most basic examination of their Jewish upbringing after that how it crashes up against their American roots. To be Jewish is itself a paradox—an outsider always active among other communities waiting for the inevitable next exodus, an exodus that's also key to your identity.