Larry Gopnik is a strict and serious man, he teaches physics at the university, lives with his wife and two children in a beautiful house in the suburbs, his family's Jewish community provides him with emotional communication and spiritual encouragement, he is down-to-earth, hardworking, meticulous, such a man deserves to live happily for the rest of his life.
The problem is that when he takes life seriously, life doesn't seem to take him seriously. Suddenly, "everything I had thought was like this changed into something else": a South Korean student tried to bribe him to get credits, and the student's parents threatened to sue; someone regularly wrote anonymous letters to the school's tenure employment committee to covertly slander him; a record club kept calling him to pay for records he hadn't bought at all; his wife suddenly filed for divorce at home, and in order to marry "one of his best friends", the children quarreled with each other, and a neighbor occupied the lawn land. The mistress of another household tried to seduce him, and his brother, who lived in his house, was targeted by the police for alleged gambling!
When so many events were happening at the same time, Larry felt the foundations of his life shaken. The problem is not how hard these things are to deal with, but rather that he thinks it doesn't make sense for them to happen to him. He was a serious man, shouldn't he be taken seriously? Why is it like God is playing him like a clown?
A distraught Larry turns to the Rabbi of Judaism for answers, and all the characters in the film, all the events that happen, don't tell you the answer, but the directors, the Coen brothers, write the answer directly at the beginning and end of the film. Through the tornado at the end of the movie, the Coen brothers seem to be saying that life may have its own laws, but life may still encounter many illogical and unreasonable things, just like there will be a tornado in the weather, so how should people (and Larry in the movie) face it? The Coen brothers answered the question with the subtitles at the beginning of the film, the words of the famous Rabbi Rashi of Judaism: Accept everything that happens to you with a simple heart.