Inside Llewyn Davis (4/5 Stars)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Comedian Patton Oswalt once described what made a Coen Brothers movie special: Most movies are like a small tent with a carnival barker in front of it. You pass by on the street and the barker yells, “Come see the super exciting special blankety-blank!” You pay your ticket and enter the tent. There is the blankety blank just the way the barker described it. There is nothing else in the tent. A Coen Brothers movie is like a huge warehouse. It’s got one of those large roll down metal garage door entrances. The entrance rolls up without revealing a vast space with all sorts of machines and contraptions dispersed throughout. The warehouse contains no barker, no guide, no suspiciously over-friendly attendant. Come inside or stay without, don’t care. Take a glance around or stare for hours, feel free. There is plenty of stuff inside but it’s anybody’s guess whether it is what you are looking for. Hopefully you are the curious type. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is just like that.

If I were a carnival barker I could describe the plot in a sentence or two. It is about a week in the life of a folk singer named Llewyn Davis (played and performed by Oscar Isaac) circa the 1961 NYC Greenwich Village folk scene. He is good at his job but his job isn’t commercial. He sleeps on the couches and floors of the people he has known for a while or just met. He accidentally lets a calico cat out of one of the apartments and spends a good deal of movie time carrying it around with him. There are also a lot of folk song performances and a trip to Chicago to audition for a big time producer. At the end of the movie he is back exactly where he started having not really gotten anywhere. Not much happens really and what does happen is generally profoundly sad, like a good folk song you know.

But that is not why you want to see this movie. You want to see it because it is an exquisitely refined work of art and perhaps the best movie ever made about an unsuccessful folk singer in 1960’s Greenwich Village. It’s also the only movie I’ve ever seen about that topic, but give that a point for originality if nothing else. 

Let’s start with the music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is not a musical in the sense that characters burst out into singing, but it does have several songs performed in their entire length by the characters on stage or anywhere else you can fit an acoustic guitar. The most comparable movie to this one is the Coen’s earlier effort “O’ Brother Where Art Thou,” which had a wall-to-wall soundtrack of largely forgotten Old Tyme music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” has a great soundtrack of largely forgotten Folk music. Some of these are very very good songs. My favorite has to be ‘Dink’s Song’ which is the main song of this movie as it is played as a duet in the beginning and in a solo performance at the end. Oscar Isaac performs both of the songs and Marcus Mumford of the band “Mumford and Sons” sings the other part of the duet. He does not show up in the movie because his character commits suicide sometime before the story starts. “Dink’s Song” in addition to beautifully arranged in harmony or without is also especially sad. It is about a woman who loved a man who impregnated her and left. As far as we know the song has always existed. A musician once overheard a woman (named Dink) singing it while doing laundry in a nearby river in the very early 1900s. Noone really knows if she wrote it herself. “If the song isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” says Llewyn Davis. All the songs were produced by the legendary T. Bone Burnett who has catalogued an impressive array of different kinds of folk songs. The Llewyn Davis character’s style is based off a folk singer named Dave Van Ronk, but there is also a ‘Peter, Paul, and Mary’ type of band headed by the supremely competent Justin Timberlake (what can’t that guy do?) who also spends a scene recording with a reluctant Llewyn Davis the annoyingly catchy “Please Mr. Kennedy.” A mariner’s song, a travelling song, and a song about death in childbirth are also included in the mix. Hard living, that is what folk songs (and let’s face it, old songs in general) are about. When the country went rich and memories of the Depression and WWII faded, they were forgotten. Now that the money is gone in our time, perhaps we will be seeing a greater revival of them.

A footnote: This will be hilarious come Oscar Time. Certainly the Academy will want to recognize this movie for its music, but as it is limited to recognizing original music, it will be surely be forced to nominate “Please Mr. Kennedy.” The joke is that it is a hokey song that the main character hates and just the type of shit that will become a hit while his soulful music goes unrecognized.

The movie looks great. It looks like someone took the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and colored the entire neighborhood with it. It’s a faded color with many greens, whites, and grays. It is beautiful absolutely beautiful. The perfect landscape to go with a song like “Green, Green, Rocky Road.” Surprisingly the cinematographer for this movie is not Roger Deakins, the longtime collaborator of the Coen brothers as he was working on James Bond when this movie was made. The cinematographer here is Bruno Delbonnel. The framing of the scenes are just absolutely perfect. All the corners of the screen are filled in with the correct details. Nothing is left out and nothing is included that shouldn’t be there.

Footnote: Ironically, this movie could very well win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, which would be hilarious given that Roger Deakins has been nominated and not won so many times for his work in Coen Brothers films in the past. Now, if a Coen Brothers movie finally wins this time, he won’t be on the stage to accept it. Ho, ho, ho.

The characters in this movie are so well defined that it seems like that they existed before the movie’s camera got there and continued with their lives after the movie left. One in particular, the sister of Llewyn Davis, Joy, played by Jeanine Serralles, sounds just like my grandmother and not just in the way she speaks, but the particular words she uses. The attention to phrases is so detailed. She only has two scenes but speaks like nobody else in the movie, which makes sense because she lives in a totally different part of town from everybody else. Justin Timberlake continues to impress me. His physicality is so specific it speaks paragraphs. Take a look at his reaction to Llewyn Davis’s query during the recording session. It is about half a second but boy that says everything doesn’t it. John Goodman jumps into a car for the road trip to Chicago, knocks all of his lines out of the park and exits just as quickly. Then there is F. Murray Abraham as the producer Bud Grossman. For lovers of movies, Abraham will forever by remembered as Antonio Salieri, the jealous court composer of “Amadeus” who uses his political power to destroy the career of Mozart. And here is Salieri two hundred years later telling Llewyn Davis that his songs aren’t commercial enough. “I don’t see that much green here,” he explains matter-of-factly. Sometimes being good is just not good enough.

Footnote: Somebody should make a YouTube compilation of Coen Brother's secretaries. They always seem to find the most interesting looking people to sit at desks in little scenes. The little old lady in the agent's office is no different in this one. 

The Coen Brothers are an anomaly of filmmaking. Here are two writer/directors who always made just enough money to never ever have had to compromise with their artistic vision. Hell, even Scorsese had to make the “The Color of Money.” The Coens have never had to do that. Their good luck does not seem to be lost on them. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is about a musician who does not want to compromise and goes broke and beaten in the process. It is an utterly uncommercial premise for a movie and if the backers get their money back any time soon it will probably be due to past goodwill connected with the Coen Brothers. But it was made and it was made well. So for all us losers out there we now not only have folk music, but this movie as well.

See You Next Tuesday (1/5 Stars)

"I used to encourage everyone I met to do art. I thought everyone should do it. I don't really do that so much anymore."
- Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop

Nebraska (3/5 Stars)

I’m not entirely sure what Writer Bob Nelson's and Director Alexandar Payne’s relationship with the north middle of the country is, but they sure don’t seem at all impressed with it. For example, the film is shot in black and white but this doesn’t have anything to do with a particularly dark plot or mood. Instead it seems to be a judgment on the location of the movie, the empty spaces and depressed towns between Billings, Montana and Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s like Payne didn’t think they deserved color. Nothing is going on so you might as well not try to liven it up.

“Nebraska,” is a comedy and as the comedy it is trying to be it is perfect. The little hitch is that it is attempting to satirize sparseness and boredom and even a perfect satire of such subjects will invariably move slow and contain fewer jokes than the usual comedy. We are treated several times to scenes of people drinking beer, watching TV, or both. This reviewer finds that such scenes lend an odd feeling of unaccomplishment. The characters are doing exactly what I myself am doing while watching it. 

At times though the movie rises from its slumber to deliver some really good material. My favorite involves the introduction of Woody Grant's overweight nephews, Bart and Cole to his son David, played by Will Forte. David is not the most successful man in the world and sheepishly explains that he only sells stereo equipment in Billings. The nephews don’t respond because they don’t have jobs. After an awkward pause, Woody’s brother speaks up. "Bart here did some jail time.” Such is the excitement in ‘Nebraska’ where nothing happens, everyone is unemployed and overweight, and alcoholism is rampant because, fuck it, what else is there to do. In the end though, this is what keeps ‘Nebraska’ from being a ‘must-see’ movie. That is unless you are actually from Nebraska, than I guess you would have to see it because, I guess, what other movie is set in Nebraska. Then I suspect the people in the middle of the country would hate this movie. I remember raving about "Fargo" once to someone from North Dakota only to find out that everyone there despised the movie's portrayal of their accents. This movie may work the same way, though I suspect the people who deliberately left the place for greener pastures may absolutely love it. 

The plot is set in motion when the octogenerian of the family, Woody Grant, gets it in his head that he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes competition. He can’t drive and he won’t trust public transportation so he attempts to walk to Lincoln, Nebraska where the company is located. His sons, David and Ross, played by Bob Odenkirk, try to explain to him that the newsletter is a complete scam meant to sell magazine subscriptions. “I didn’t even know they still did this,” David states. He’s right. I haven’t seen one of those ‘You may have already won a million dollar’ junk mail letters in about a decade. Nothing will dissuade Woody though from setting out time and again on foot and in bad weather. 

David finally agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska because the man is really old and doesn’t have anything else going for him. A pit stop in Woody's old hometown becomes a much longer detour. Father and son walk around and take a look at the old haunts. Everything is changed and nobody recognizes Woody. Except at the bar. People recognize Woody at the bar. Woody tells everyone in the town that he has won a million dollars and for some incredibly odd reason everybody believes him.

Here, Payne’s satire of Middle America perhaps becomes too mean. It may be a little too much to believe that everyone believes Woody’s story about winning the lottery, even after his sons try to explain that it is all just a scam, but these apparently are really desperate people living in really quiet desperation. The family descends on Woody complaining about how his alcoholism cost them money over the years and demanding that they get a share of the winnings. They won’t take any talk of a scam for an answer. Everyone really really needs the money.

The performances are great, and especially noteworthy because they represent some of the finest performances in several careers, one of which is an especially long career. That would be Bruce Dern, who at 77 years old, is in his first lead role in a good movie for the first time. His Woody Grant is a alcoholic mess of well-meaning dementia. Dern does a particularly good job of seamlessly interweaving Grant’s lucid moments in with his delusions so they really seem like they are coming from the same very old person. We learn a lot about Woody Grant in this movie and by the end you sort of hope he gets his money, not for him but for what he wants to do with it. Will Forte does a great job as well in the thankless task of the straight man holding together a cast of crazy characters. Will is mainly known for comedy, notably SNL and 30 Rock, and is yet another example of a comedian ably putting together a dramatic performance. Then there is Bob Odenkirk, who has done better things (Mr. Show, Breaking Bad) but is always a delight to see on screen in any incarnation. Final mention of the two nephews played by Tim Driscroll and Devin Ratray. They gather some of the best laughs by just sitting next to each other and grinning. It's good stuff.

I expect the Academy will love this movie way out of proportion because it is about an old white person, which coincidentally is the majority demographic of the Academy. I bet they all like it even more because it is in black and white even though there is no particular reason for it. The last movie Alexander Payne made about an old white person was “The Descendants.” That won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which was just a really terrible thing to happen. I have the sneaking suspicion that the writing for this one will be similarly nominated. It’s good writing, but it’s not great because it can't be. There isn't the ambition that is generally needed to make the writing great. Here’s hoping that it at least won’t win anything.