It feels like it has always existed, just waiting to be
brought into being. Inside Llewyn Davis
casts a spell of tone and mood like the best folk songs. It’s plaintive
melancholy, a sustained sense of a soul laid bare before our eyes,
introspective and yearning. Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen are masters of
films – from Blood Simple and Fargo to Raising Arizona and A Serious
Man – that suggest as much as they show, creating convincing worlds much
like our own, richly populated with eccentric individuals and a sly
determinism. Their characters want better lives and are frustrated when they
come up short. It makes notes of triumph all the sweeter, but Llewyn Davis
(Oscar Isaac), a struggling folk singer in 1961 New York City, is rubbing up
against the end of his rope. Triumph, for him, seems perpetually out of reach.
In this film we watch him circle around the city, begging a night’s sleep on a
variety of friends’ couches. His music career is going nowhere fast, but his
big break is right there, ever so slightly out of his reach.
We know Llewyn Davis is talented, but we also are quickly aware
of his difficulties. The opening of the film is a sequence set in a small club,
Llewyn softly plucking his guitar as his voice, soft and strong, wafts out over
the audience. It’s hushed. They’re rapt. We see a glimmer of satisfaction on
his face. After the performance, he heads out to the back alley where he’s
promptly confronted by an angry man who punches him in the face a couple times,
walking away as Llewyn sits on the ground, hurting. In this opening, we have
the film in miniature. It’s a film focused on Llewyn’s quietly ecstatic musical
satisfaction, and the pain he’s constantly receiving. He’s a man for whom music
and pain are attracted to him and created by him. They’re as self-inflicted as
they are God-given. It might not sound like it, but there’s warmth to the
Coens’ approach here. Perceptive without judging, the film is a wise and
compassionate look inside this man’s emotional states and drives.
He’s capable of great cruelty – a scene in which he heckles
an older woman had me wincing – and yet he’s so precisely nuanced a frustrated
artistic type that it’s easy to feel for him as he tries to navigate a path to
the future that grows murkier the harder to tries to get there. I empathized
with him to an almost painful extent; it filled my heart even as it faintly
ached. He stubbornly works to get ahead. It’s a frustratingly circular path
he’s on – performing in clubs, lucking into some studio work for which he
short-sightedly signs away the rights to royalties, and talking to his manager (Jerry
Grayson) who looks at him with sad eyes while avoiding the inevitable “no”
answer to the question of how much he’s earned from a record well into the
process of flopping. Llewyn is struggling and getting seemingly nowhere. And
yet he’ll go on. It’s scary to go on, but it’s even scarier not to. In the
haunting lyrics of the folk song he sings that bookends the film, “Wouldn’t
mind the hanging / But the laying in the grave so long.”
Stubbornness: it’s the very thing keeping him going and a
key part of what’s holding him back. He wants to succeed on his own terms, scrambling
to come back after being thrown by unforeseen circumstances that have occurred
before the film has even begun. Two losses define him: one a girl he loved who
has moved to Akron nearly two years prior, the other his music partner who sometime
in the recent past forcibly made their duo a solo act. We never meet these
people, but we feel their absence acutely. Oscar Isaac, playing Llewyn, ably
communicates the resonant emotional wounds that have rattled him, and the
combination of talent and arrogance that drives him to continue pursuing folk
music success. It’s an interior performance that lets the inner gears turn,
expressed outward through wry speech and moving music. Isaac, doing his own
singing and guitar playing, represents the Coen’s typical ability to cast the
exact right person in each and every role.
This is a fascinating character study, bolstered by a
universally strong ensemble. It finds its characters distinct and fully formed,
situated wholly and completely in casually perfect costume and production
design. Each person who arrives on the scene – there for a moment or two never
to return, unless, of course, they do – contributes immeasurably to the
richness and depth of the world the Coens create. We meet a musical couple
(Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake) who are alternately antagonistic and
accommodating, as well as Llewyn’s patience-strained sister (Jeanine Serralles).
As Llewyn navigates narrow halls to friends’ apartments pinned and pinched in
corridors that terminate in tiny corners or heading out into the world that
opens up with snowy sidewalks and slippery highways, smoky stages and creaky
roadside cafes, he meets all manner of strangers. There’s an eerily polite
solider moonlighting as a singer (Stark Sands), a sickly old grump (John
Goodman) and his driver (Garrett Hedlund), a kind older couple (Ethan Phillips
and Robin Bartlett), a struggling solo act doing backup singing on novelty
records (Adam Driver), and an intimidating record executive (F. Murray
Abraham).
In typical Coen fashion, the dialogue is so dry it crackles.
Consider the following exchange in which Llewyn is told by his manager’s
secretary (Sylvia Kauders) that the old man is out of the office attending yet
another funeral. Why? “He likes people.” Llewyn replies, “Fewer and fewer.” The
film moves from memorable moment to memorable moment, a fascinating period
piece odyssey with not a single line or gesture out of place. It manages to
view, with Bruno Delbonnel’s exquisite cinematography, the past through
almost-hazy mists of time without glorifying or condescending to the context or
circumstances. Its imagery is at once soft and sharp, as if emerging from a
timeless place with startling immediacy, powerfully direct, as piercing and
singular as anything the Coen brothers have brought us. Inside Llewyn Davis is a masterful character study and a wondrous
and precise evocation of time, place, and music. As the film’s final sequence
unspools, I gasped at its detail as my heart swelled, at once broken and full. The
spell the movie casts in the moment lingers, stuck circling in my mind like a
great old melody that’s always been there, deep and true, ready to stay.
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