No one succeeds at failure like the Coen Brothers. From exuberant comic dazzlers (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski) to muted character studies (The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Serious Man), their lead characters are expert underachievers, whose relentless, blackly humorous misfortunes are lovingly detailed by their unforgiving makers. The Coens, unlike their creations, get the job done.
Like Bob Dylan, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a Minnesotan Jew who headed to New York – just like the Coens themselves – striving to make it in the early 1960s folk music scene. He’s already cut a record as part of a duo (Marcus Mumford, minus Sons), whose partner killed himself and now he’s left peddling a solo effort, Inside Llewyn Davis, around Greenwich Village, scraping together coffee shop gigs, getting stiffed by his penny-pinching manager and, in an early scene, beaten up for seemingly no reason. If you’re meant to suffer for your art, then Llewyn Davis should be destined for all-time greatness.
That he isn’t of course, is the great cosmic joke the Coens play, though arguably with more overt heart and empathy than before. If Dylan is the self-confident joker flipping lyrics cards in the video to Subterranean Homesick Blues, Llewyn Davis would be skulking around in the alley behind him, like Allen Ginsberg, stranded in the shadows.
It’s not that Davis has no talent: the atmospheric opening scene, all spotlight and cigarette smoke, with Isaac doing his own impressive singing, makes that clear; but he can’t seem to catch a break. Oh, and he’s a bit of a jerk – an abrasive, anti-social freeloader. “You don’t want to go anywhere, and that’s why all the same shit is going to keep happening to you,” rival folk singer Jean Berkey (Carey Mulligan) rants at him. “And also because you’re an asshole.”
Jean has a particular beef with Llewyn, as it may be him and not her sweetly naïve husband / musical partner Jim (Justin Timberlake), who made her pregnant. But there’s a wider malaise going on here. As Llewyn couch-surfs around town, even the small task of looking after a ginger tabby cat proves beyond him. The muted, wintry landscape, beautifully rendered by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (expertly subbing for the Coens Bond-bound resident visual genius Roger Deakins), spreads a paralysing chill.
But this makes Inside Llewyn Davis seem far more downbeat than it is. As ever the Coens have created not just a dead-on detailed world of the ‘60s before they became “the ‘60s” and populated it with vivid supporting characters who pinball off their unfortunate lead. Mulligan and Timberlake, both in good voice, are fine but even better is Girls star Adam Driver, whose standout rockabilly-inflected number ‘Hey Mr. President’ will be going viral at a website near you any day now.
John Goodman returns to the Coens fold for the first time in 13 years in full scene-stealing mode as a dyspeptic, sermonizing jazzman who shares a Chicago road trip and some of the best barbed insults with Llewyn. That they’re driven by a grunting Garrett Hedlund – last year’s Dean Moriarty no less, is surely another witty in-joke. But it’s Isaac’s movie. Looking like a young Scorsese, he makes a seemingly unsympathetic character, a tortured masochist, fascinating and heartbreaking.
The music, supervised by Mumford and T-Bone Burnett, who did such a great job on Jeff Bridges’ Crazy Heart film, is a joy, and don’t be surprised if it repeats the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou’s bluegrass soundtrack. This is what sets the Coens apart from so many other chroniclers of their times. They prove they can play it straight, with note-perfect versions of the folk scene tunes; but they still twist the entire landscape to their own wry, occasionally surreal vision.
In fact Llewyn Davis is so low-key, you can easily miss just what a high-wire balancing act it is. Tone is everything. The pursuit of the cat never gets as slapstick as Raising Arizona’s dog/diaper/cop chase; the road trip with Goodman doesn’t go as over the top as the climax to Barton Fink; and yet, there’s no one else whose unique melan-comic world this could be.
The Verdict
At this stage, the Coens are working with a confidence and a maturity stripped of a need to razzle-dazzle. While their protagonists often find no direction home, they transport you again and again. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly minor key; just because Inside Llewyn Davis doesn’t have the genre trappings of a Fargo or No Country for Old Men, or the Lebowski catchphrases, this is one of the finest works by – let’s just call it – the most consistently innovative, versatile and thrilling American filmmakers of the last quarter-century.
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The published article can be read on IGN – The Awards They Are a-Comin’