This won't be a full-blown review, analysis, or treatise, but just an initial thought or two about A Serious Man (trailer) while it's fresh on my mind.
Maybe the "first rabbi," Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg), is right. Maybe it is all about perspective after all. That's my impression, at least right now, about what the film's abrupt, Sopranos-esque ending. Young Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff) spends the whole film worrying about preparing for his bar mitzvah, evading a beating from Mike Fagle (Jon Kaminski), and getting his head set back. In the end, however, he's left staring at a tornado a couple of blocks away and getting closer, as the Hebrew school teacher struggles to unlock the door to the basement. At the same moment, his father Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) finds out the results, unspoken but undoubtedly bad, of the medical tests he took at the beginning of the film. In the face of serious illness or even of death, everything we've seen him enduring over the course of the film—divorce, Sy Ableman, tenure, Uncle Arthur's cyst, the Jolly Roger, "culture clash" with Clive Park, the neighbor's mowing habits, unwanted mail-order records, Mrs. Samsky, the goy's teeth, and F Troop—pales in comparison. Both father and son have worried about a multitude of problems that, in those final moments, suddenly shrink to insignificance in the face of impending death. Now that's perspective.
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