Review of A Serious Man (2009) by Sonny B — 29 Nov 2010

A very interesting movie about the perennial question of how to live a life whose turns are fundamentally unpredictable.

(Don't watch the movie as a substitute for your favorite James Bond flick - it's the antithesis of that: Intense and thought-provoking; and very good at that.).

The main hero, an accomplished physics professor, can fill blackboards with equations that can make extraordinary predictions about nature's minute particles but, alas, cannot predict whether he will get tenure, his wife will divorce him, her lover will have a car accident, etc. etc.

Which, in fact, is exactly what happens.

Religion cannot offer solace to the hero's plights. It simply unasks the questions, rephrases them, or naively diverts attention away from them. Perplexed by questions of whether he deserves his bad fortune or whether others (his gun-loving neighbor, an ethically challenged international student, or his wife's lover - a personal friend and recent widower) are evil towards him, the hero himself has no qualms trying to get intimate with the nude sunbathing lady next door whose husband is on a business trip.

Things do get much better at a certain point, unexpectedly of course, until they take another turn again, as the unpredictable web of life unfolds.

Could it be that I saw more in the movie than its makers had intended? Perhaps, but even so, I enjoyed it a lot.