Wow. What a strange one. And that's coming from someone who has watched the entirety of David Lynch's oeuvre. I like strange movies. I can get behind strange movies, even sometimes those that are being strange simply for the sake of their own strangeness. Which I would never accuse the Coen brothers of doing here, by the way. I think there is a definite method to this movie's madness, but at times I felt like I was not quite intelligent enough to put together all of the disparate pieces.
So there's this shmuck: 
He's a mentsh, mostly, although he's lacking in chutzpah, but he's also a bit of a shlimazel: his wife is leaving his for an older, more distinguished jew, his kids are estranged, his shlimiel brother who is living with them has some definite emotional and possibly psychological problems, he can't stop fantasizing about the shikse neighbor, he's agonizing over whether he'll get tenure or not and why his doctor is being so mysterious about his latest physical exam results. His goy neighbor seems to hate and distrust him. His life is looking like it might end up as bubkes. (See what I did with all that yiddish? Shows what a bad half jew I am... that took me a lot longer than I thought it would to think up.)
Is it all the result of a curse we saw possibly befall a couple, possibly his ancestors, at the beginning of the film? Is everything really falling apart? Is his foreign exchange student actually trying to bribe him into giving him an A/ruin his career? Spoiler alert: as far as I'm concerned: yeah, yes, and OH YES. The film is definitely interesting, although the extremely dramatic cues gave me the worst anxiety (as I'm sure was intended). Not really one I would rewatch, but I did enjoy the opening sequence as well as the dream sequences, which kind of tidily divvied the movie up into chapters.
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