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.