If the final scene of Burn After Reading is the clearest explanation of the Coens’ moral sensibilities, that people act selfishly and often stupidly in pursuit of selfish, superficial things, then the entirety of A Serious Man functions as a portrait of their worldview. Maybe.
Their recent work seems to be more comfortable drawing from personal experience, and this film apparently draws heavily from the Coens’ childhood memories of growing up in Minnesota. They paired this seemingly focused and introspective setting, operating on a modest budget, and blew it up to biblical proportions, turning the story into a kind of retelling of the story of Job. It’s a deeply Jewish movie, one that seems to provide an explanation for their frequently schmucky characters, amounting to a disinterested universe and a response of “eh.”
The vast majority of movie universes are alien to our own. They seem to operate in an orderly fashion, based on a set of rules and principles that are somehow indicative of a central purpose or cause or deity. A Serious Man’s brilliance is that its world is chaos and randomness. It’s Chinatown but with Jews. Forget it Larry, it’s God.
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