So yeah.

So I saw A Serious Man today (and I also found out it was in limited release today... which is cool, because I feel like I have to wait around for films in "limited releases), and it's still chewing around in the back of my head.

If I were to write a "review" of it, it'd probably boil down to these four short sentences:

It's dark. It's funny. It's the Coens. It's awesome.

There's something lurking underneath that I really can't quite put my finger on, however. The tone of the movie seems unrelentingly bleak, with the overall theme of it being that " bad s*** happens, and when that boils over, even worse s*** happens." It also seems to posit that there are no answers out there and the cruelty of life is pretty much unexplainable. Yet for some reason I can't help but be oddly comforted by all this.

I'm working out the thoughts right now. A lot of this has to do with how... decent the main character (Larry Gopnik) seems to be. I know that the Coens are Atheist and everything, but the way Larry struggles with these large spiritual questions suggests the Coens have a ton of empathy for him. This guy has his life pretty much fall apart, and he thinks "well, there must be a reason that this is all happening at once." And... I mean, the way the Coens manipulate certain things as they occur (spoilers, but the mirror car scenes is what I'm thinking of), you wouldn't blame anyone for thinking something must be behind this.

I don't know. It's sort of like this to me: it's maddening as crap (and perhaps pointless) to try to figure out the answers to these huge, weighty questions... but it also seems like the easy way to simply say "there are none." And perhaps that's what the film concludes, but even as things loom even bleaker for Larry, I'm not sure if he never stops looking. And good for him, I suppose.

Hopefully at least part of that makes the slightest bit of sense.