I just rented and watched this. I really like most of their other movies but this one seems to require a very high "art fag" factor to enjoy. It was still entertaining to watch though, some very good acting and quite a few compelling sequences. I was honestly starting to wonder if I had ordered the wrong movie with that beginning and while I think I "got" the ending I still found it sudden (which I'm sure they wanted) and very pretentious (which I doubt was their intention).
I went around googling for other people's interpretations of the beginning and ending and 90% of what I found wound up being idiots who were essentially spouting "I didn't understand any of it so it must be really, really good!".
To me it seemed like the yang to No Country for Old Men's yin. NCOM was in many ways a story about how everyone gets what's coming for them sooner or later, while A Serious Man was a story about how sometimes, stuff just happens. If you're superstitious you can try to divine a meaning from it but there are no guarantees anything would have happened differently if you had acted differently. Ironically, the main character would likely have coped better if he hadn't tried so desperately to find the cause of his misfortunes, since he seemed to be more harrowed by the lack of answers than by the events themselves.
- I'm giving you this one for free. - Nothing's free in the waterworld.
Author
this trailer: 
