Actors: Fyvish "Picket Fences" Finkel, Adam "Sons of Anarchy Arkin, Richard "Bob Newhart Show" Kind, etc. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen ("No Country For Old Men")
At the beginning of the movie, set about a hundred years ago, some Russian Jews invite a bearded old man into their home who may or may not be a "dybyk" (a demon from Jewish folklore). The husband treats him as a guest, but the suspicious wife, suspecting the old man is a "dybyk", stabs him in the chest. The old man just laughs, and as blood starts to flow he wanders off into a blizzard.
Immediately after this occurs, the film cuts to the late '60s. A teenage slacker listens to Jefferson Airplane on a portable radio while he is supposed to be preparing for his Bar Mitzvah in Hebrew class. All he seems to care about is getting high on pot, watching "F Troop", and avoiding a Hebrew class bully he owes money to who may be his cannabis dealer.
The boy's father, Larry Gopnik, is a Jewish physics professor at a small university who all kinds of bad things are happening to. Someone is writing anonymous notes badmouthing him to the tenure board. His jobless ne'er-do-well brother (Richard Kind) moves in and is under suspicion by the police. His wife leaves him for a widower and wants a Jewish-approved divorce and he moves into a motel with his no good brother. His daughter may be stealing money from him to save for plastic surgery, a non-Jewish neighbor bothers him, and a female neighbor entices him by sunbathing in the nude. When things start to improve, some further bad news comes, courtesy of his doctor. This movie is a semi-autobiographical film about a Jewish man and his family. Perhaps as a non-Jew I didn't understand it as much as I would have liked to. I think it may have been about a potentially unjust, uncaring or absent God, or maybe I just read that into it.
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