You Don't Have to Be Jewish. . .

"A Serious Man" opens with a Zen Koan of a prologue. Back in the "Old Country"--where it always snows and everyone speaks Yiddish--a man returns home and tells his wife about his journey. On his way home, his wagon had broken down. Fortunately, Reb Treitle Groshkover happened along to help him out. The wife's eyes widen in terror: "We are cursed by God," she whispers. Reb Treitle, you see, died of typhus some three years earlier; the husband obviously just encountered a dybbuk (a Yiddish demon). There is a knock at the door. "I invited him to have some soup," the husband explains. The door is opened. Reb Treitle stands there, looking eerie in the black garb of the rabbi, but not especially threatening. He is invited in. The wife accuses him of being a dybbuk who has seized the body of the old rabbi. Treitle laughs it off. The husband tries to laugh it off. The wife plunges an icepick into Reb Treitle's chest. The dybbuk does not die. He gets up, mutters something along the lines of, "This is the thanks I get for helping your husband," and leaves. The couple stare out the door into the swirling snow, and the husband mutters, "We are ruined."

What do we make of this? Was the wife right to stab Treitle? Clearly, he was a dybbuk. But he had also helped her husband make it home on a wintry night,.Why did he help her husband? Was he a "good" dybbuk? Did he retain some of the rabbi's holiness? Or was he plotting the family's destruction? And what does all of this have to do with Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), the protagonist of "A Serious Man"?

Well, nothing, really, except thematically: The movie is a meditation on the unknowability of God's will. Larry Gopnik is a modern-day Job, a physics professor on the brink of tenure, whose wife is leaving him for a longtime family friend; he is being bribed and/or blackmailed by a Korean student who wants a passing grade; his next-door neighbor has a thing for guns and is encroaching on the property line; his brother is, well, nuts. And despite Larry's quest for understanding, the various rabbis from whom he seeks advice can offer him nothing but meaningless parables: "Look at that PARKING LOT, Larry," the junior rabbi says rapturously, explaining that happiness is all a matter of perspective, of finding wonder in the most mundane things.

Another rabbi tells a story of a dentist who found "Help me" written in Hebrew letters on the backs of a gentile patient's teeth. So what happened to the dentist, Larry asks? "What would happen?" The Rabbi replies, "Not much. He went back to work. For a while he checked every patient's teeth for new messages. He didn't find any. In time, he found he'd stopped checking. He returned to life. These questions that are bothering you, Larry - maybe they're like a toothache. We feel them for a while, then they go away." And what happened to the goy? Larry asks. "The goy? Who cares?"

Larry doesn't even make it to the most senior rabbi, but his son does. Right after his bar mitzvah, Danny is ushered into the inner sanctum of this wisest of the wise. His advice to the young man? "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope within you dies. . . .Then what? Be a good boy."

Unlike Job, Larry seems to have found some solutions to some of his problems by the film's end. Like Job, though, he finds that other, darker problems loom. And lest the message be missed, a literal whirlwind is heading into town.

While on the surface, there's nothing obviously thrilling about the story of a middle-aged Jewish man's search for meaning, this is a Coen Brothers movie. As such, it has brilliant dialogue and enough quirky moments to keep you wondering what could possibly be coming next. In the end, we're not sure what the whole movie "means," but we've enjoyed trying to figure it out.