Roderick Jaynes is 'A Serious Man'

By Sarah Sluis

A Serious Man is the latest from the Coen Brothers. It's a maddening look at Jewish life in the Midwest in 1967, and our critic Ethan Alter called it "one of their very best...films to date." It opens tomorrow in

New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis (where the film was shot).

I went to a screening myself last night, and was amused to find the following bio in the press pack for the Coen Brothers' editing pseudonym:

RODERICK JAYNES (editor)

Roderick Jaynes began his career minding the tea cart at Shepperton Studios in the 1930s. The U.K. native eventually moved into the editing department, where he worked on some of the British film industry's more marginal features from the 1950s and '60s.

With the demise of the Carry On series, he retired from film editing, only to emerge from retirement to work on Joel and Ethan Coen's first feature Blood Simple. He has since worked on most of their films.

Mr. Jaynes resides in Hove, Sussex, with his chow Otto. He remains widely admired in the film industry for his impeccable grooming and is the world's foremost collector of Margaret Thatcher nudes, many of them drawn from life.

As a footnote, Roderick Jaynes also holds the distinction of receiving an Oscar nomination for editing in 1997 with Fargo and in 2008 for No Country for Old Men.

As for A Serious Man itself, it's another classic Coen Brothers movie, with its characters panting to keep up with the break-neck pacing, their misfortunes piling up higher than they can deal with them. In this case, it's middle-class Jewish professor Larry Gopnik, whose wife has just left him for another

man. He also has self-absorbed kids, is burdened with a criminal, mildly insane brother, and faces mounting professional problems. The movie is pesteringly elusive (the Coens certainly love to torture their audience--or at least viewers like me), and in the end we're left asking the same questions as Larry. Why did this happen? Did he do something wrong? Was there some kind of curse?

One of my favorite parts of the Coens' movies are the supporting characters. They're always given specific character traits and pieces of business that add a bit of the absurd to the goings-on: in A Serious Man, for example, the uncle is always draining his sebaceous cyst, hogging the bathroom or using his portable suction unit in the living room, a detail which I'm sure will inspire many more people to see the movie--so watch the trailer instead, which is the best one I've seen in awhile (read about the making of the trailer here).