I just love films that are self-referential. Rango, Seven Psychopaths, stuff like that just makes me super happy. I don't know what it is about it, but I just find it absolutely .
This is another self-referential film, and I really realized just how much it is on this viewing. The main character in the film, Larry Gopnik, is experiencing many troubles in his life, and is trying to interpret the meaning of this 'tsuris' in his life, and what Hashem is trying to tell him through it.
Meanwhile, many have mused over this film, and what the Coens are trying to tell us in it. The ending stumps many, and there are many interpretations to it. And that is the point of the film, as the mentaculus proves: We can't ever really know what's going on.
The film would actually, in an ethical way, make a very good prequel or double feature with Inside Llewyn Davis, another Coen brothers film focusing on a character having trouble accepting the things that happen to him (though he learns his lesson by the end).
A Serious Man asks itself the question many will ask about it, and is brilliant in doing so. It's a commentary on interpretation of film, at least I think so. But I don't know, because I can't know, and I'll likely never know. But, as the quote at the beginning of the film states, we should accept with simplicity all that comes to us. As McConaughey tells us in Dazed and Confused, we've just got to keep L-I-V-I-N.
Some may say that this is the Coens at their most pretentious, at their most overdramatic and at their most obnoxious. But I believe it is them at their most philosophical, at their most thoughtful, and at their most intelligent. This film perfectly exemplifies their stubbornness in creating odd stories that can be interpreted in numerous ways. It's just absolutely brilliant all the way through, and one of the most comedic works of intelligent art I've ever seen. It's a charmingly perplexing, infinitely evasive and hilarious film.
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