Inside Llewyn Davis

Much like most other movies by the Coen's, this seemed very different to everything else they have done. Before seeing it, I expected it to be a sincere attempt at portraying a Dylan-like figure, with a heavy focus on the music itself, and also with a whole lot of nostalgia. This is kind of true, but these are not the aspects of the film that'll stay with you (even though the music was really good!).

There's not really much of a plot in this movie, but it's so well crafted that you hardly notice. Llewyn has a goal, but it's obvious from the start that this movie is not about reaching that goal, but rather about his every day struggle, and the life as a folk musician in an almost mythical period of music history. Llewyin is an interesting character, flawed but easy to like. His struggle feels real, and plays into an overarching theme of how your fate can be out of your hands, but also how perseverance can lead to something good.

The movie is similar to road movies in that it features a lot of different characters that Llewyn meets and interacts with. Some of these are very much Coen-esque, and I'm always amazed by how Coen manages to establish such layered side characters, despite them only appearing on screen briefly. Bot casting and writing must be stellar to be able to do this, and they seem to do it all the time.

It ends in a way that makes the movie more than just a mood piece, and opens up for some interesting discussions. Once again, they've managed to make a brilliant film.

At some point of this the folk singer we've been following is stranded at night by the side of the road in a car with possibly a dead man and a cat, another man has just been arrested by police for not much of a reason. He gets out to hitch a ride and there's only a cold, indifferent night with strangers in their cars just going about.

This is the worldview the Coens have been prodding, sometimes for a laugh, sometimes not. I can't fault them, it does seem to be inexplicably cold out there some nights. They're thinkers first of all, intellectuals, so it stings them more so they try to think up ways of mocking that thinker who is stung by the cold to amuse themselves and pass the night.

So this is what they give us here. A joyless man for no particular reason, who plays decent music that people enjoy or not for no particular reason, who the universe has turned against. The Coens don't pretend to have any particular answer either of why this is, why the misery. It might have something to do with having lost a friend, something to do with not having learned to be simply grateful for a small thing. It might have something to do with something he did, the initial beating up in the alley is there to insert this. Sometimes it's just something that happens as random as a cat deciding to step out of the door and the door closing before you can put it back in. Most of the time it all kind of snowballs together.

It's a noir device (the beating - cat) bundling guilt with chance so we'll end up with a clueless schmuck whose own contribution to the nightmare is inextricable from the mechanics of the world. The Coens have mastered noir so they trot it here with ease: the more this anti-Dude fails to ease into life the more noir anomaly appears around him.

Of course the whole point is that it's not such a bad setup; people let him crash in their apartment, a friend finds him a paying gig, somehow he ends up on a car to Chicago where he's offered a job. It's not great either, but somewhere in there is a pretty decent life it could all amount to, provided he settles for less than his dream. (This means here a dream the self is attached to). I saw this after a documentary on backup singers, all of them profoundly troubled for having settled for less, all of them nonetheless happy to be able to do their music.

Still, 'The incredible journey', seen on the Disney poster, may in the end amount to no more than an instinctive drive through miles of wilderness. The Coens are cold here even for their standards. I wouldn't be surprised to find it was Ethan, the more introverted of the two, ruminating on a meaningless art without his partner.

Is there a way out in the end? Here's the trickiest part, especially for an intelligent mind. You can't just kid yourself with any other happiness like Hollywood has done since Chaplin. You know it has to be invented to some degree, the point of going on, yet truthful. Nothing here. More music, a reflection. It's the emptiest part of the film as if they didn't know themselves what to construct to put him back on stage. Visually transcending was never their forte anyway. They merely end up explaining the wonderful noir ambiguity of that first beating.

Still they are some of the most dependable craftsmen we have and in the broader Coen cosmos this sketches its own space.

This Coen brothers take on the legendary US folk scene in the early 60s, through a down on his luck protagonist, gives nice touch of Greenwich village atmosphere and struggles of an aspiring musician. The musician, based on some of the later famous folk personalities whose music was used, is talented, not mediocre or anything like that, though he has had a tough moment in his life, losing his singing partner to suicide, due to cruelties that he is also exposed to. He struggles without money, and amused Coens take a dark look at the heroic battles of an aspiring artist, who finds little understanding and all the condemnation in his surroundings. Judging by the many condemning comments on this site, subtleties have been lost on the masses. It is a cruel society that equates success with moral virtue, and considers poverty as a moral sin. The artist due to his integrity refuses some chances for commercial success, but even that is construed as his failing by some of the comments, and therefore much of vulhgar mob. Thus, the joke is again turned on the shallow members of the public, who celebrate reality stars while condemn a clearly virtuous, but struggling actor, just because he lacks success. In the end, we get a glimpse of Bob Dylan, who had a powerful gift that was ultimately not possible to deny, but only after he was discovered by some wise people, and who famously snubbed the booing mob and the shallow journalists and could afford to follow his own path. Instead of celebrating the success, Coens shed light on the struggle, and provide an opportunity for the unsophisticated non-creative consumer mob to demonstrate their monstrosities and in some case appallingly complete lack of empathy and absolute inability to distinguish poverty from lack of virtue, bad luck from lack of talent, terrible circumstances from moral deficits. The conclusion is again, that people who do get, through the sheer combination of power of their talent, personality and good luck, to the top, have every reason to shun the shallow hating mob that would, no doubt, shred them to pieces with gusto if they had fallen to bad luck.

Saw the prescreening at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, MI with average expectations, this is my reaction:

This film is an experience, but not for any sort of superficial special effects, action or CGI. It's an experience in which you will feel fear, joy, hate, hope, sorrow and contempt all within an hour and 45 minutes that feels more like 15 minutes. We are sidelined, watching a short snippet of Llewyn's seemingly dismal life, drudge on by, yet we are drawn. We connect with Lleywn's anger and struggles, as if we too are burdened by his failures and challenges. But amongst the bad, there are moments of cheer, and laughter and peace reminding us that good still exists. What dominates is power, balanced by music, money and pride, yet this movie is better served as a reminder that life is an experience, and individualistic. We are reminded that more often than not, things do not fall into place and luck is rarely on our side. But no matter how many times people fail you, one should never fail, before one's self. This movie is an experience, it indirectly breaths life into each of our souls, and should appeal to anyone in touch with the most crucial human emotions: compassion and empathy. Hold on tight, because it is one experience that will remain with you long after the credits are through. Perfectly casted, perfectly scripted, perfectly filmed; perfectly entertaining.

No doubt: Llewyn Davis is a loser. First, his career as a folk singer is going badly: his duet partner committed suicide, his record isn't selling, he makes so little that he cannot afford his own apartment but has to move from friend to friend, or rather from acquaintance to acquaintance. Secondly, as far as human relationships are concerned, he is a total failure. His ex girlfriend despises him, one of her predecessors faked an abortion to have him out of her – and the mutual child's life – people who are sympathetic to him, get a rather rude treatment on a daily basis. After A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have again chosen to depict a man on the wrong side of luck. Only this time, one might say he deserves it. Or maybe not, for he has one redeeming feature. The film opens with a long scene in which Davis (Oscar Isaac) performs a sad old folk song. The camera gently hovers around him, catches the hushed, intensely attentive atmosphere of the smoky basement club, while he sucks his audience – us – into the dark, sorrowful world he creates in his song, hinting at a depth he so often will not show in "real life". It is this contrast, the dialogue between the sadly funny tale of a modern Don Quixote and that other, older, tenderer story, the music tells. For as much as this is Llewyn's story, it also is that of the redeeming power of music. For even if Davis is the same at the end as the story comes full circle and returns to its opening, as he once again gets beaten up and is succeeded on stage by a young, cocky folk singer with a nasal voice who will soon change music – and not just folk music – forever, there is just the tiniest hint that this Llewyn Davis might have some sort of promise after all, maybe not as a successful singer, but as a human being. Inside Llewyn Davis is inspired loosely by the story of Dave van Ronk, a star of the Greenwich Village folk scene around the time of Bob Dylan's arrival there in 1961. Dylan learned a lot from van Ronk and stole some of his most promising songs, but that is a story to be told another day. This one is about a man lost in a world that hasn't been waiting for him, who has a mission that is entirely his own. The lengths to which he goes to show the world he doesn't care are astounding. And yet he craves love. Oscar Isaac is a miracle: even in his most repelling state, in his most rejecting attitude, there is a flicker of sad longing in his face, his eyes, a face the Coens show us much of. It is one you need to dive into, closed to the casual observer but hiding so much pain and uncertainty and desire to live one sometimes thinks it must explode. The Coens' cinema is one of subtlety, of nuanced, of shades of grey between the black and white. In Isaac, they have found their perfect actor, heading a stellar cast including Carey Mulligan, John Goodman and Justin Timberlake. As so often, the Coen brothers are masters at creating an atmosphere, a universe of its own, unique as well as absolutely consistent. It is a world of the night, in which grey shades reign, days are pale and dust is everywhere. Even in the open there is a sense of narrowness, of tight spaces, lightless basements that are cage and protective space in one. It is the tiny holes that provide the only rooms for creativity, for the soul to speak. And so it is that the dark world of the underground gradually regains some warmth and coziness, the dark becomes a zone of comfort, while everything else becomes cold and distant. Having said all this, Inside Llewyn Davis is first and foremost a comedy in the Coenesque sense of the term. It is a Quixotic tale full of quirky characters at time bordering on the fairy-tale like – especially true for the sequence around Goodman's character, a trodden-down mixture of villain and clown that calls up associations of the expressionist nightmare world of their earlier film Barton Fink. The other foot of the film is firmly on the ground, in the existential struggle of a man the world won't welcome. But there is still that third element: music, that timeless realm of love and pain and suffering and hope. It is here the film is anchored, it is here this Don Quixote conquers his windmills, armed solely with his guitar. It is here it all comes together. Tragedy, comedy, fairy tale, social drama, held together by the softest of touches. Another Coen brothers masterpiece. What else could be expected?