Release year: 2013
Directors: Joel & Ethan Coen*
Running time: 110 minutes
“I do this for a living… this is how I pay [the rent],” says this film’s titular character in one of my favorite movie scenes of all time. He is referring to his “career” as a folk singer. Llewyn Davis is a man who plays his guitar in reluctant venues for a complacent record label; he is down on his luck every day of his life; he is a perfectly common relic of American history. The Coen brothers give their audience a raw, gritty look inside his life, and the experience that results is a masterpiece that I enjoy profusely.
From a historical perspective, Inside Llewyn Davis captures a significant, painfully beautiful, yet overlooked sanction of American history: the folk movement that reached an apogee in the early ’60s. The movement embodied American virtues like honesty and diligence, but also plenty of struggles. This comes mostly from the fact that success in the music business is already rare and can be demanding to the point of destruction, and the fact that folk singers had to abandon popular rock-and-roll, “electric” culture to put their hearts on the line in a conversely trendy niche of show business. Being a folk singer was hard, and no aspect of Llewyn’s life lets the viewer forget that.
Now for the cinematic quality of the movie. The color palette of Llewyn’s endeavors throughout New York and to Chicago is very drab and plain, yet so vibrant that the monotone (but not monochromatic) somberness becomes familiar rather than unsettling or unfitting. The film is very comfortable with itself, but Llewyn is anything but. His experiences are expertly timed and sequenced to make sure the viewer is being shown the raw truth of his annoyingly hard life, but in an organic way that refrains from being overly sentimental or melodramatic.
This film has one of the best casts I’ve ever seen, from a subjective point of view and from witnessing everyone’s perfectly imperfect placement and actions throughout this movie. There are characters the viewer will come to love, hate, and everything in between, as each one materializes into personalities that, dare I say, at times feel like real people. It does not take long before their personalities are so convincingly fleshed out by the actors’ mannerisms, movements, and words, and they are each uncannily subject to consistency or change: whatever the narrative entails. Oscar Isaac, an actor I’ve come to admire for a variety of spectacular performances, nails the role of Llewyn in a believably grounded exploration of such a normal character. The movie entirely warrants the character study it launches, as Isaac brings Llewyn’s struggle to life.
Llewyn is a very realistically flawed human being, and unfortunately one of his flaws is a product of one of the movie’s, and that is the harsh language that especially permeates the beginning of the film. I understand the inclusion of such foul vocabulary: every character is under some kind of great pressure, most have been hardened by city life (or even just the cold weather…), and the central character is one with a temper and a poor outlook on the world. The profanity is an understandably realistic reflection of these characterizing, contextualizing elements and is even reprimanded a couple times, but if one thing slightly took me out of the experience of enjoying this movie, the language was it.
The movie is indeed an adventure, however. An adventure into ordinary life, surrounded by an era one likely doesn’t know very well, but an adventure nonetheless. This is accomplished largely by such entertaining music that gives the movie intimate, insightful life. Not one song is wasted and everyone who undertakes one proves themselves to be very talented. The result is one of the greatest original soundtracks of the decade and an element of emotion that the movie does not take lightly. The Coen brothers really know their stuff, and can possibly ignite an affinity or at least an interest in folk music for the average viewer who was not previously acquainted with this aspect of the film.
Inside Llewyn Davis is a deep masterpiece that flies by but is strategically filled with natural depictions of life and loss, and it remains potent rather than pretentious in doing so. It is one of those movies like The Accountant that makes me have an “Oh, I love this scene” moment at pretty much every scene. It is brilliant how an examination of the dull points of life… is quite frankly never dull. The movie is melancholy and endearing in good proportion, with the ability, but not the demand, to make the viewer think about life. It tests one’s sympathy. It makes me want to seek contentment with even the mundane, because sometimes that is all my circumstances will leave me, and it gives me perspective of how important it is to sympathize and connect with others. Those were my takeaways from a journey Inside Llewyn Davis.
*A pair of my favorite directors
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