please, accept the mystery

I love Joel and Ethan Coen a lot, and their newest offering A Serious Man is one of their best yet.  The film follows Minnesota physics professor Larry Gopnik, played by the brilliant Michael Stuhlbarg, as he goes through a bit of rough patch in his life.  He is a good man but beset by unfortunate circumstance, and as his certainty starts to unravel he seeks advice from a series of rabbis, each one of them more useless to him than the last.  The trademark Coen black humor is fully present, as are their hilariously over-the-top characters.  Their camerawork is also fantastic throughout, and the scene pictured here where Gopnik perches on his roof and surveys his neighborhood in all of its 1967 Robert Bechtle splendor took my breath away.  But the film is also a rich, multilayered investigation into Jewish identity in particular and the human condition in general, and in the end there are no easy answers either for our hero or for the audience.  A Serious Man might be biblical in scope but is no pat parable, and its complexity is exactly what makes it so great.