(2009; English, Yiddish, Hebrew) If you are seriously rational and religious, then the whole world probably seems Jewish. "Jesters do oft prove prophets" (from Shakespeare's King Lear). Is that what we have here, from Joel and Ethan Coen, writers, directors, and producers of this complicated film that opens with a quote from Rashi, "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you" - a pair of motley fools who speak wiser than we're aware of?

Everything is other than it appears for Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor, who should not be so surprised. Beneath the surface of the ordinary illusions of everyday life, modern science - the theory of relativity and quantum physics - has revealed the actual, fundamental (micro and macro) operations of the universe, visible only through mathematics.

In the vignette at the film's outset, a Jewish married couple, Velvel and Dora, in a 19th-century East European shtetl, receive a visitor, Reb Goshkover, whom Velvel has just met on his way home and invited for soup; but before his arrival Dora exclaims: "God has cursed us!" For she knows that Reb Goshkover died of typhus three years earlier. Into their home enters a dybbuk.

On the chalkboard Prof Gopnik rapidly scrawls equations for Schrödinger's paradox, a fable of physics, involving a cat simultaneously dead and alive ... A dybbuk. Dora stabs the old man in the chest, causing him to rise and say: "One knows when one isn't wanted." … until one actually makes an observation, causing the wave function to collapse. "We are ruined!" wails Velvel, a rational man, to which his wife replies: "Good riddance to evil."

Inside the outer case of the portable cassette player, with which he's listening through an earpiece to Grace Slick singing with Jefferson Airplane - "When the truth is found to be lies / And all the joy within you dies" - during his Hebrew lesson in the synagogue in preparation for his upcoming bar mitzvah, Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff) has tucked a twenty-dollar bill he owes to big Mike Fagle for pot; the instructor, discovering the cause of Danny's inattention, confiscates the device and hands it over to the rabbi. Danny, who stole the $20 from his older sister Sarah (Jessica McManus), who swiped it from her father's wallet, is now fearful of Fagle.

Following a medical exam, the physician, after lighting up, offers his patient Larry a cigarette. "You can't understand the physics without the math," Larry says to Korean student Clive Park, who's failing the course and pleads for a passing grade to avoid shame; after the student departs his office, Larry discovers an envelope left behind filled with cash.

Into their suburban home somewhere in Minnesota in 1967 (Danny enjoys watching F Troop on TV from reception through a roof antenna, which occasionally requires adjustment), Larry has brought his ne'er-do-well brother Arthur (Richard Kind), who sleeps on the couch and is forever in the one bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst, an unwelcome guest to his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) and their two children.

When Judith announces that she has been drawn close to widower Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed) since his wife's death three years ago and wants a gett, a ritual divorce permitting her to remarry in the faith, Larry declares: "I haven't done anything." There are sins of omission as well as commission. There are moral consequences to bribery, Larry tells Clive.

Awaiting a determination from the tenure committee, Larry says to colleague and committee member Arden (who mentions anonymous letters accusing Larry of "moral turpitude") when asked if he has anything to add in his favor, such as publications, before the final decision: "I haven't done anything." A representative with the Columbia Record Club, Dick Dutton, repeatedly calls about nonpayment for music albums shipped to his address (which Danny ordered), Larry says with exasperation: "I haven't done anything."

A female friend urges him to view his rupture with Judith as "an opportunity to learn how things really are." After observing from his roof his new next-door neighbor Mrs Samsky, whose husband is often away on business trips, sunbathing in the nude, Larry fantasizes about her.

"It proves we can't ever really know what's going on," Larry says, lecturing to his students (as well as the audience, one may presume) about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: "So it shouldn't bother you, not being able to figure anything out." (But that doesn't preclude a midterm exam over the material.) But it bothers Larry enormously.

Brought home from The North Dakota bar by law-enforcement authorities and in need of an expensive criminal attorney, Uncle Arthur, who doesn't drink alcohol, accused of sodomy, defends himself by saying: "I didn't do anything." Other than his working on the Mentaculus, an intricate "probability map of the universe," which he's successfully used in gambling, Uncle Arthur hasn't done anything with his life.

Faced with a mortgage, Danny's bar mitzvah, the additional expense of living at the Jolly Roger Motel (whereto he and Arthur have been banished), a threat of a lawsuit from Clive's father (culture clash), and the costs for Sy's funeral, killed when both were involved in simultaneous but separate car accidents, Larry meets with rabbis and lawyers.

Speaking of how one should see Hashem (Jewish name for God), Junior Rabbi Scott recommends taking a fresh ("Look at the parking lot"), right perspective; Rabbi Nachtner attempts to answer Larry's question of possible cosmic communication (the two automobile accidents) - "Why does he make us feel the questions if he's not giving us any answers?" - by relating the story of Sussman the dentist who discovered Hebrew letters spelling out "Help me" on the insides a goy patient's teeth but nowhere else: "What can such a sign mean?" The rabbi's solution: treat the mysterious like a toothache that eventually fades away.

In a dream Sy appears to Larry in his classroom, commenting on the subtle cleverness of the lecture on the Uncertainty Principle, but questioning the validity of the mathematics: "Except that I know what's going on."

Speaking to his distraught brother, Larry tries bucking him up by saying: "sometimes you have to help yourself." In another nightmarish dream Larry and Arthur are at a lake on the Canadian border where they become Jewish quarry for his goy neighbor, an avid hunter.

Attempting desperately to gain admission to see the aged, venerable Rabbi Marshal, Larry pleads with his secretary: "I've tried to be a serious man…. I need help." What's next? "You better find somebody to love."

(By the way, when Rabbi Marshak quotes the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's song, he substitutes "hope" for "joy.") Some interpreters of the film have suggested that Larry's denying any responsibility for Santana's Abraxas and Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory, prominent among the albums sent to his home by the Columbia Record Club, represents his subconscious rejection of any type of divinity.

According to Wikipedia, the Gnostics employed Abraxas "to indicate the supreme entity of our cosmic hierarchy or its manifestation in the human being which they called the Christos. Abraxas has the value of 365, based on numerical equivalents of the Greek alphabet." Similarly "Cosmo's Factory" might be taken to mean God's universe. In any respect, both recordings weren't released until 1970, three years after the events in the movie supposedly take place, thus they may have been intentionally inserted as a tantalizing clue rather than a chronological goof. However, Cosmo and Abraxas also appear as superheroes in Marvel comics during the first decade of the 21st century.

Furthermore, the Coen brothers wanted to assure their religious brethren: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture."

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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