Reel Critic: Inside Llewyn Davis

Llewyn Davis says that a folk song is never new and never gets old. If true, the same must be said for the whole of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie both about the life of a folk singer and itself structured as a folk song. The basic plot points feel like verses in a strange folk odyssey; certain ideas and phrases are echoed throughout the film and feel like a chorus. Some scenes are literally shown twice, first out of context and then in context -- even if it’s never “new” it also must be new, due to our relationships to the songs and the scenes. It’s a structure that gives Inside Llewyn Davis the same power as Llewyn’s songs, bleak and hopeful; it makes this one of the very best movies of the Coen brothers’ career.

We are given one week in the life of Llewyn, who has no money and has pissed off most of his friends for one reason or another, but is also an uncompromising, sincere, sincerely talented folk-singer in the New York 1960s. Llewyn opens the movie playing at a dark and smoke-filled coffee shop, singing “wouldn’t mind the hanging but the lying in the grave so long… put the rope around my neck and hang me.”  The movie is effectually a cinematic depiction of Llewyn lying in the grave. If he’s broken at the start of the movie, he’s barely making it through his days by the end of it. Sometime before the beginning of the film, Llewyn’s partner Mike threw himself off of the George Washington Bridge. We never see the man except on an old album cover, but his absence colors the film – actually it seems to have literally removed the color from the film as the New York streets and clubs are vapid and grey.

How much trouble will the artist bear in his life in order to produce his art? To make money at any artistic endeavor requires more than creative talent and Llewyn is pretty great example. Jeanie (Carrie Mulligan), Llewyn’s part-time lover and part-time friend’s wife, tells Llewyn “you don’t want to get anywhere and that’s why the same shit keeps happening to you.” Llewyn argues instead that trying to get to the suburbs is careerist and sad. It’s the basic question of artistic responsibility, and regardless of which position is correct, Llewyn is absolutely unwilling to compromise. Llewyn simply is a folk singer – there is not ever a question about Llewyn selling out or taking the easy road towards commercializing because he simply cannot. So, instead, we watch him battered by his profession, with only the occasional four-minute folk-song to comfort him and us.

It all sounds ponderous and morbid – of course, this is a Coen brothers’ movie and the melancholy is often jabbed away by their ridiculous dead-pan humor. Within the unique and ingenious structure of the movie there is the Coen brother’s familiar touch on each individual scene. Llewyn is punched in the face to conclude the opening sequence of the movie; that image fades into a cat lying on Llewyn as he sleeps, and soon after the cat is running all around Greenwich Village, Llewyn trying to corral. Inside Llewyn Davis is still the blackest of black comedy, but there is a welcome sympathy underlying the macabre.

It all works because of Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, who gives what has to be one of the great two-way performances in recent film. This movie asks more of one actor than seems reasonable or even possible. I’m not sure if there’s a scene in the whole film without Llewyn present.  All of these songs are performed live by Isaac, a Julliard graduate, who unlike Llewyn can do slightly more than “fake his way through reading music.”  Moreover, all of the movie’s songs (there’s probably 8-10 in total) are played from start to finish without interruption, which is a simple but critical component of the movie’s experience. Behind the bleakness of the film, there is always this music – behind all of the grief that Llewyn endures, there is the fact that he is blessed with musical talent.

The very first thing Llewyn says after playing a song to begin the movie is that line -- “it’s never new and never gets old.” Late in the film, when Llewyn makes an important change in his life, he repeats the phrase: “I’m going to try something new and by that I mean something old.” Time has been somehow altered in Inside Llewyn Davis: it is a film concerned with permanence and mortality that works equally well when viewed as some sort of musical biopic. The Coen brothers have again constructed an impossibly intricate film that happens to be hilarious, unpretentious and humane. It is one of the best movies of 2013.