{"id":1441,"date":"2014-02-15T17:24:50","date_gmt":"2014-02-15T17:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1441"},"modified":"2014-02-15T17:24:50","modified_gmt":"2014-02-15T17:24:50","slug":"at-the-movies-inside-llewyn-davis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/02\/15\/at-the-movies-inside-llewyn-davis\/","title":{"rendered":"At The Movies – Inside Llewyn Davis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Inside<\/a><\/p>\n

I was surprised that this didn\u2019t sneak into the Best Picture nominees. Ever since 1996\u2019s <\/span>Fargo<\/i>, the Academy has tended to appreciate the Coen Brothers’ efforts, nominating <\/span>True Grit<\/i> in 2010, <\/span>A Serious Man<\/i> in 2009 and <\/span>No Country for Old Men<\/i> which won in 2007. I was even more surprised given the near-universal critical acclaim it received, and since I\u2019ve enjoyed almost everything the Coens have produced, I fully expected to love this one. Having seen it, I\u2019m no longer surprised that it wasn\u2019t nominated and even more startled at the unstinting praise it seems to have garnered.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So far, so good. We are offered a bracingly unlikeable hero, struggling for meaning and identity in a heartless universe \u2013 see also Barton Fink, Larry Gopnik and to some extent, even Fargo<\/i>\u2019s Jerry\u00a0 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 \u2013 Llewyn\u2019s opportunity to return to the navy, the Gorfein\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t time, so it\u2019s left to a clumsy revisiting of an earlier flash-forward to try and give this narrative porridge some sense of structure. It\u2019s worth noticing that this is the third rather episodic film I\u2019ve seen in a row to use this device and here it\u2019s done particularly pointlessly. The sequence we have to watch twice is hardly any more interesting or significant than those around it, and it\u2019s 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<\/i> when suddenly it starts happening again.<\/p>\n

I can certainly see what other critics liked about this \u2013 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 \u201cso-what\u201d, but the whole is so wilfully disorganised and uninterested in cause-and-effect that it just starts to become tedious. If you can\u2019t be bothered to arrange the episodes in your story to create some semblance of relevance, I\u2019m not sure I can be bothered to watch.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s the last straw.<\/p>\n

I return briefly to some points I made about 12 Years a Slave<\/i><\/a>, while noting that Llewyn Davis<\/i> is by far the lesser film. It is certainly arguable that the events depicting in the Coens\u2019 film are much more like real-life. But it\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cfuck this\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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<\/em><\/span> 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\u2019t for the life of me understand why everyone else seems to love it so much.<\/p>\n

It occurs to me that I am pretty much a Coen completest, so for context, here\u2019s a quick rundown of my take on their other movies.<\/p>\n

Blood Simple<\/b>
\nPowerful, brooding, brilliantly plotted and properly nasty. The low budget shows from time to time, but with a script and performances this good, who cares?<\/p>\n

Raising Arizona<\/b>
\nTheir 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\u2019t love it the way some people do, but I like it a lot.<\/p>\n

Miller\u2019s Crossing<\/b>
\nAmazingly complicated film noir with classic scene after classic scene. Just great.<\/p>\n

Barton Fink<\/b>
\nJust possibly my favourite \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The Hudsucker Proxy<\/b>
\nMaybe 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.<\/p>\n

Fargo<\/b>
\nA masterpiece of atmosphere, characterisation, plotting and cinematography. Earns all the praise the gets lavished upon it.<\/p>\n

The Big Lebowski<\/b>
\nSprawls where Fargo<\/i> marches relentlessly, bloated where Fink<\/i> is lean and focused, but by combining the life-and-death stakes of Fargo<\/i>\u2019s kidnapping plot, with Hudsucker<\/i>\u2019s charmingly naive characters, the Coens fashioned another classic which won them armies of new fans.<\/p>\n

O Brother Where Art Thou?
\n<\/b>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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

The Man Who Wasn\u2019t There
\n<\/b>Powerful stuff to begin with, but the plot runs out of steam and eventually turns into the same pointless slurry as Llewyn Davis<\/i> only without the songs. My least favourite of their films by quite a distance.<\/p>\n

Intolerable Cruelty
\n<\/b>The reviews of this were so bad, I had to stay away. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Ladykillers<\/b>
\nJust 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\u2019t There<\/i> is Tom Hanks as The Professor. He is electrifying throughout.<\/p>\n

No Country for Old Men<\/b>
\nFrustrating, 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.<\/p>\n

Burn After Reading<\/b>
\nSomewhat trivial, but bouncy and fun. Very happily passes the time.<\/p>\n

A Serious Man<\/b>
\nA very similar theme to Llewyn Davis<\/i> 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\u2019s life doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t much matter what he or anybody else does, because no idea carries over from one scene to the next.<\/p>\n

True Grit<\/b>
\nA 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<\/i> though, this felt a bit workmanlike.<\/p>\n

Next up, Spike Jonze\u2019s Her<\/i>\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was surprised that this didn\u2019t sneak into the Best Picture nominees. Ever since 1996\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[35,161,378,13,19],"class_list":["post-1441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-cause-and-effect","tag-coen-brothers","tag-narrative","tag-oscars","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-nf","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1443,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1441\/revisions\/1443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}