A Serious (Righteous) Man

Ok, maybe this wasn't a good movie to see on a Sunday - thereby overloading it with too much religious symbolism.  That, however, seems totally unavoidable.  This movie is inherently religious, that is its humor and delight, and that is the ground from which it grows.  The people who seemed to be enjoying it most were sitting behind us to our right - howling mightily - and later comparing all the religious allusions.  So what's it all about?  And is it as hilarious as a friend described it?  Does it help to be Jewish?

I think that it does help to be Jewish - I'm certain that we missed most of the cultural refrences.  I can't wait to talk about it with my friend who was raised in a Jewish household.  In my conversation with her, I will begin, I think, to understand whether the film was a knee-slapper or merely intellectually and perhaps theologically amusing. 

I so want to slap the template of Job over the script of this film.  It would work,  There are the misfortunes which seem to mount on the principal character, and even though he doesn't lose his children, they are never really there for him.  His wife leaves him for an insufferable widower, and he is left to the dubious advice of three rabbis who do no more for him than did Job's friends.  And then there is that opening scene, the one with the simple farmer and his wife and the (was it really?) dybbuk.  As a twisted form of the court of heaven scene in which Satan asks for a chance to strike at Job, the dybbuk released back out into the world seems to work.  Perhaps it is all about Job.  Or is it David and Bathsheba, or could it be Joseph (or Daniel) the dreamer?  Or is it about a seduced Joseph, or a Solomon trying to decide what grade to give to his Korean student?  All of them work, and there are more to be sure.

Or is it too much to wrest meaning from a Coen film?  Should we let the black humor and absurdity stand on its own, and just enjoy it for what it is?  I think that's the easy way out.  There is just too much material here to decode.  "Serious" in Hebrew is not the same as the word for "righteousness", but it should be.  This film left me wrestling with the main character over the ethics of changing grades, and taking the easy way out.  Was G-d really talking about karma in the commandments, when talking about the sins of the parents visiting the children to the third and fourth generation?  Perhaps the Coens know.