Tom Salinsky

I was surprised that this didn’t sneak into the Best Picture nominees. Ever since 1996’s Fargo, the Academy has tended to appreciate the Coen Brothers’ efforts, nominating True Grit in 2010, A Serious Man in 2009 and No Country for Old Men which won in 2007. I was even more surprised given the near-universal critical acclaim it received, and since I’ve enjoyed almost everything the Coens have produced, I fully expected to love this one. Having seen it, I’m no longer surprised that it wasn’t nominated and even more startled at the unstinting praise it seems to have garnered.

It starts promisingly, with Oscar Isaac brilliantly portraying Llewyn Davis as a bitter, misanthropic, parasitical, drifter, permanently couch-surfing as he struggles to scratch together a few hundred bucks here and there playing folk music. On leaving the apartment of his bewilderingly benevolent uptown friends the Gorfeins, he mistakenly lets their cat out and ends up almost adopting the poor thing. From here, he ends up at Carey Mulligan’s Greenwich Village apartment and manages to make a little bit of cash playing guitar on a novelty song written by her boyfriend played by Justin Timberlake.

So far, so good. We are offered a bracingly unlikeable hero, struggling for meaning and identity in a heartless universe – see also Barton Fink, Larry Gopnik and to some extent, even Fargo’s Jerry  Lundegaard. But this is a movie trying to find a centre, a narrative thread that will pull us through. We have various plots set in motion – Llewyn’s opportunity to return to the navy, the Gorfein’s cat, his ex-girlfriend who may have secretly raised his child in Akron, the abortion which he has to procur for Mulligan, the song he has recorded with Timberlake, but they have not yet begun to satisfyingly mesh.

And suddenly, they are all, repeat all, underline all, abandoned for an entirely self-contained thirty minute stretch in the middle of the movie, wherein Llewyn shares a car with an absurdly over-the-top John Goodman, laboriously makes his way to Chicago, gets an amazing offer from record magnate F Murray Abraham, turns it down and equally laboriously makes his way back to Chicago to rejoin the movie I thought I was watching. By now, even if the Coens had been interested in joining up the plot-threads, there isn’t time, so it’s left to a clumsy revisiting of an earlier flash-forward to try and give this narrative porridge some sense of structure. It’s worth noticing that this is the third rather episodic film I’ve seen in a row to use this device and here it’s done particularly pointlessly. The sequence we have to watch twice is hardly any more interesting or significant than those around it, and it’s far from clear when we first see it that it is a flash-forward which briefly threatens to turn the whole film into Groundhog Day when suddenly it starts happening again.

I can certainly see what other critics liked about this – Llewyn is a fascinating character, brilliantly realised by Oscar Isaac and by music supervisors T-Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford. The supporting cast are all fine, and some (Abraham, Mulligan) are exceptional. Some of the episodes are diverting in themselves, others are just a bit “so-what”, but the whole is so wilfully disorganised and uninterested in cause-and-effect that it just starts to become tedious. If you can’t be bothered to arrange the episodes in your story to create some semblance of relevance, I’m not sure I can be bothered to watch.

We get to see Llewyn at his most vulnerable when his doctor friend reveals that he might have a child in Akron. It’s possibly the most powerful scene in the film. Later as he is driving back from Chicago, he passes the turning for Akron – but declines to take it. In a movie which generally has been well-structured and where the plot is strong, this would be a fascinating character beat. In a movie which is characterised by hopeful juxtaposition of unrelated cameos, it’s the last straw.

I return briefly to some points I made about 12 Years a Slave, while noting that Llewyn Davis is by far the lesser film. It is certainly arguable that the events depicting in the Coens’ film are much more like real-life. But it’s also worth pointing out that real life is frequently very boring. The job of an entertainer in a narrative medium is to cut out the dull bits and give the rest relevance and power by properly constructing the architecture of the story. It is also no doubt true that the point of the film is largely that Llewyn is fundamentally incapable of change, growth or development, but it nevertheless seems to me that the story of a character who cannot change can be much more powerfully told if placed in a context where familiar screen archetypes would change. Instead, Llewyn’s “fuck this” attitude seems to have infected the entire screenplay, resulting in a series of unrelated events which wouldn’t really have the power to change anybody.

I don’t know if this kind of what-the-hell plotting is intended to give the movie greater poignancy, significance, insight or profundity. I do know that simply typing up a handful of unrelated incidents and stopping on page 120 is a hell of lot easier than constructing a satisfying narrative, with set-ups and payoffs and cause-and-effect throughout. A major disappointment from one of my favourite movie-makers and I can’t for the life of me understand why everyone else seems to love it so much.

It occurs to me that I am pretty much a Coen completest, so for context, here’s a quick rundown of my take on their other movies.

Blood Simple
Powerful, brooding, brilliantly plotted and properly nasty. The low budget shows from time to time, but with a script and performances this good, who cares?

Raising Arizona
Their breakthrough, a sort of live-action cartoon, radically different from their debut, with brilliantly demented lead performances from Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. I don’t love it the way some people do, but I like it a lot.

Miller’s Crossing
Amazingly complicated film noir with classic scene after classic scene. Just great.

Barton Fink
Just possibly my favourite – a film only the Coens could make. A satire on Hollywood capitalism and East Coast narcissism equally which suddenly turns into a ferocious grand-guinol nightmare in the final reel.

The Hudsucker Proxy
Maybe their most charming film, although a big flop at the box office, especially compared to its more than usually lavish budget. I like it a great deal, possibly because of how unpopular it is amongst Coen fans.

Fargo
A masterpiece of atmosphere, characterisation, plotting and cinematography. Earns all the praise the gets lavished upon it.

The Big Lebowski
Sprawls where Fargo marches relentlessly, bloated where Fink is lean and focused, but by combining the life-and-death stakes of Fargo’s kidnapping plot, with Hudsucker’s charmingly naive characters, the Coens fashioned another classic which won them armies of new fans.

O Brother Where Art Thou?
A disappointment after the brilliant run of form they experienced up till now. The cheerful stupidity of the characters pulls in the opposite direction from the Homeric template they’ve given themselves and so the film lurches about a bit and goes past several possible endings. The lead performances however are great and the film contains many stand-out sequences.

The Man Who Wasn’t There
Powerful stuff to begin with, but the plot runs out of steam and eventually turns into the same pointless slurry as Llewyn Davis only without the songs. My least favourite of their films by quite a distance.

Intolerable Cruelty
The reviews of this were so bad, I had to stay away. It’s not a true Coen Brothers movie in any case, as Joel and Ethan were drafted in to doctor an ailing script and somehow ended up directing it.

The Ladykillers
Just horrible. If you have the urge to watch this film, just put on the 1955 Alexander Mackendrick version instead. Watch it all the way to the end. Then watch it again. Then destroy any copy of the Coens film in your possession. The only reason I like this more than The Man Who Wasn’t There is Tom Hanks as The Professor. He is electrifying throughout.

No Country for Old Men
Frustrating, because again any semblance of plotting is abandoned in the final third, but the shift in emphasis seems somewhat more purposeful here, and all the sequences are excellent, even if it feels a little bit like reels from two different, but related, movies have been accidentally spliced together.

Burn After Reading
Somewhat trivial, but bouncy and fun. Very happily passes the time.

A Serious Man
A very similar theme to Llewyn Davis but Larry Gopnik is basically a decent guy who makes good decisions, which makes the tiny calamities which unravel his life so much more meaningful. Larry Gopnik’s life doesn’t make much sense to him, but he notices this and complains about it, and seems to live in a narrative world where choices matter. Llewyn Davis lives in a narrative world where it doesn’t much matter what he or anybody else does, because no idea carries over from one scene to the next.

True Grit
A far more faithful version of the novel than the earlier version starring John Wayne, with better supporting performances and with better-staged action. After the intensely personal A Serious Man though, this felt a bit workmanlike.

Next up, Spike Jonze’s Her…

Four more Best Picture nominees under my belt since I last posted. Here are my capsule reviews in the order of my viewing…

Winter’s Bone
A film which entirely passed me by until it suddenly started showing up at the top of critics’ top ten lists at the end of 2010, this is based on a novel which I was equally unfamiliar with. It’s the simple story, almost thin, of a young woman in the Ozark Mountains, living in fairly desperate poverty and struggling to raise her younger brother and sister. As the movie opens, her meth-cooking father has skipped bail and if she cannot present him at the courthouse (alive or dead) she will forfeit the shack which is the only home she has. The rest of the movie is her struggle to find him, while most in the community would rather she left well enough alone. Cold, spare and featuring strong performances from Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes (both nominated), this benefits hugely from the novelty of the environment and for telling its potentially melodramatic story in an admirably simple way. But just as this approach avoids undue hysteria, it also means that the film as a whole feels like it never quite gets cooking. Add a couple of (presumably deliberate) loose ends, and the impression I get is of a slight lack of conviction, although I was entirely gripped while it was on.

The Kids Are All Right
When this was over, my first thought was “was that really one of the ten best films of 2010?”. And I guess the answer is it probably was one of the best soapy family melodramas of 2010, but I think a movie of that type probably has to do a little more to earn a Best Picture Nomination – such is the “inflation” caused by nominating ten films instead of five; this film would never have got a nomination two years ago. Not that there’s much wrong with. The “two moms” scenario is treated in a suitably matter-of-fact fashion, Julianne Moore is very good (as usual), Annette Bening is not quite as good (as usual), the kids are neither too wooden nor too winsome, Mark Ruffalo is on good form, and the story is well put-together. But once it gets going, its entirely unsurprising, with the plot unfolding in the most straightforward and obvious way possible. But where Winter’s Bone has the novelty of its setting and the urgency of its situation to elevate it, the slender storyline is a much bigger problem in this generally rather cosy, familiar setting. While the sober treatment of its lesbian lead characters is admirable, I can’t help thinking that their presence has earned this movie brownie points which it doesn’t really deserve.

127 Hours
In  his very entertaining book, Which Lie Did I Tell, William Goldman recounts one of the (many) reasons why the movie he wrote about killer lions, The Ghost and the Darkness is fatally compromised. In the true story, the white hunter waits up a tree for days, gun in hand, for the moment that his prey finally presents himself. Goldman is simultaneously in awe at this man’s courage and fortitude, but despairs that this waiting game is entirely uncinematic. But Goldman is a talented hack and Danny Boyle is a genuis, for Boyle has made that film and it’s a triumph. Anyone else would have delayed the moment when Ralston is trapped in the canyon or included frequent cut-aways and flashbacks (as Ralston himself did in the book he wrote about his ordeal) in order to have something to shoot and some structure for the narrative. Boyle and co-writer Simon Beaufoy, spend less than 15 minutes with Ralston unencumbered before the terrible accident occurs which leaves him a prisoner for five days. For most of its running time, therefore, this is Boyle’s camera and James Franco’s face and very little else, but the ordeal is brilliantly realised. As Ralston goes through disbelief, resignation, fear, determination, self-mockery, hallucination and finally auto-amputation to free himself, Boyle and Franco bring it all vividly to life. Just as a “heavy” director like David Fincher was the right choice to add power and weight to the otherwise trivial Mark Zuckerburg story, so it needed a “light” director like Boyle to nimbly add zip and fizz and kinetic drive to this entirely static storyline. Little moments of irony are handled with grace and aplomb – Ralston leaving behind his Swiss Army Knife, Boyle’s camera favouring Franco’s right arm as he shakes hands with two cute hikers before his accident, the battery on his camcorder slowly draining away – and the final redemptive scenes are meaningful without being corny or melodramatic. Ralston isn’t a different person after his ordeal, he’s just come to see a bit more clearly who he is and what living a life means. Yes, the amputation is hard to watch (and listen to – the sound effects are the worst part) but looking away would hardly be the point. This is a masterclass in movie-making and probably my favourite film of the year. It’s a crime Danny Boyle isn’t nominated for Best Director, but having won two years ago for Slumdog I imagine he’s not too bothered.

True Grit
Another inhospitable environment film, this one set in the old west. I’m a big Coen Brothers fan, but not a big western fan, so I read the Charles Portis novel and watched the John Wayne film in preparation for this one. Comparing the two earlier works, it’s very easy to see that the novel is about Mattie Ross, the young girl who hires a US Marshal to bring her father’s killer to justice. The Henry Hathaway movie is about the legend that his John Wayne, however, and so dispenses with the narration from the older Mattie as well as providing a suitably valedictory ending which also left the door open for a sequel. The Coens restore Mattie’s narration and the book’s more downbeat ending, but in many other ways this is a less faithful version of the novel, restructuring Mattie’s business deals both with the man who sold her father his horses and with Marshal Rooster Cogburn himself, and removing Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) from much of the action, where both book and Wayne movie have the three protagonists as a team for most of the middle of the movie. However, in its staging and performances, the new movie generally improves on the old – better paced, more textured, free of the Coen’s excesses, but full of their care and attention to detail, it’s a very, very solid piece of work. Hailee Steinfeld improves in almost every way on Kim Darby’s version of Mattie Ross, as does Matt Damon on singer Glen Campbell’s version of La Boeuf even though the character is somewhat sidelined. And if Jeff Bridges isn’t quite the legend that Duke Wayne was, he certainly brings his character acting chops with him – somehow managing to look even older and fatter that Wayne, despite being two years younger (he was 60 when he shot it, but the novel describes a 40 year old man, not in good shape, admittedly). A very, very good movie, then rather than an extraordinary one, and if not quite up there with Fargo or Lebowski, certainly in the top half of the Coen canon.