I know what I don't know.
It's been said of Robert Altman that "actors could do whatever they wanted in the sandbox, but it was his sandbox." In that same vein, I am struggling to describe the sandbox of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man. And I am suspicious of my efforts to analyze the components (acting, sound design) because they will be more clever than smart.
Strangely, A Serious Man, a Jewish American story, reminded me of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a colonial Irish story. So let me defer to a greater mind, writing about the experience of being a minority in a different time.
"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause." - James Joyce
