Review of A Serious Man (2009) by Dustin M — 09 Feb 2011

Life can't be chopped into neat episodes or clear-cut parts. The stream of life, however, can be highly interesting to live and follow, even if one doesn't always know how something significant started, or how some seams and stories of life will end. I've always said that movies should abandon the canonical story structures and film scripts ought to reflect this web-like quality of life. What would a film need an ending for??

Now the Coen brothers seem to have taken my rhetorical, conceptual quip too literally, and made a movie without an end. Doesn't work. If you want to know why, ask my deeper consciousness, not my mind which is trying to come up with new perspectives and new ways of doing things. I even rewatched the end, but it still left me puzzled, in a negative way.

The 1967 setting is great, I just love credible depictions of past cultural eras. Acting is solid, and although one couldn't expect anything less, in my opinion Fred Melamed as Sy Abelman stands out.