Movie Review No. 1 of 2014: Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen Brothers deconstruct and demythologise fame and fortune against the backdrop of the 1960s folk music scene. The result is a ton of great music and a ton of solid story.
You’ve never heard of folk singer Dave Van Ronk till today? You’ve never bothered with folk music, even with the recent wave of artists flooding the radiowaves with three-chord guitar-based melodies and more facial hair than you thought was possible to grow? Do not fret. The Coen brothers’ movie, although drawing deeply from Dave Van Ronk’s autobiography, and lovingly portraying the period and its folk music, tackles themes that have a greater modern appeal. Their latest film is wholly absorbing and introspective.
This is not a biopic that cleaves close to historical reality. (The Coen brothers, intelligently, never give us a facile text-filled frame to imply that any of this is What Actually Happened.) This is purely fiction, undoubtedly inspired by Van Ronk’s own writings, but fiction nonetheless.
We first meet the protagonist in the winter of 1961, as he is singing in the Gaslight Cafe, a celebrated locus of the American folk revival. But for most of the movie, Llewyn is playing music outside of this fabled milleu:. We watch him hustling to get a few bucks as a last-minute session guitarist, and we see his pain and ambivalence as he is asked to play a song during a dinner party in the Upper West Side. And during each of these performances — pulled off with great talent by Oscar Issac and his co-stars — the Coen brothers show Llewyn cracking a little. As the (glorious) music fills the air, we hear and see the familiar refrain: the struggle between artistic integrity and commercial viability, the tension between professional performance and emotional honesty.
And so we follow Llewyn as he sleeps on couch after couch, hitchhiking from New York City to Chicago, hoping for an audition to open doors, trying to move on from not-too-distant traumas and family issues, wondering if certain people from his past might not hold some hope for him. The nub is this — Llewyn Davis is a homeless man still chasing the glittering American dreams of fame and fortune despite having supposed to have achieved it. He’s already had two records under his name (one as part of a folk duo, a second one as a solo act), but he remains unrecognised and penniless.
Llewyn’s dreams are like a housecat (un-intentionally inherited from a well-educated upper-class couple) he attempts to care for — always evading his grasp in the subway and on the street, he freely feeds it while simultaneously wanting it off his hands, yet he can’t recall its name (or its gender).
“ ... If it was never new, and it never got old, then it’s a folk song.” Llewyn Davis
For a movie about musicians, the music they play rightfully takes centre stage. All the songs (with the exception of one) were recorded live, and are performed in full. Oscar Issacs puts his considerable vocal and guitar-playing skills on display — his Llewyn Davis reveals more of himself behind a guitar than through normal conversation. His homeless minstrel, however, looks a bit too well-groomed even after consecutive nights of travel and insufficient sleep. His portrayal brings across an anti-hero in Llewyn; we sympathise with his problems, even if we can’t quite get behind the ways he solves (and/or evades) them.
Carey Mulligan plays Jean, who sings like an angel, and swears like a sailor — the bulk of expletives in the script, I believe, comes from her mouth. The rest of the supporting cast is hard to fault as well: Justin Timberlake is easy to watch as Jean’s husband and bandmate, a bright-eyed sweater-donning folk singer, while John Goodman steals his scenes as a cynical and narcoleptic jazz musician. One of the more memorable scenes has to be Garrett Hedlund’s character (a monosyllabic band mate of John Goodman) reading aloud from Peter Orlovsky’s “Clean Asshole Poems” at some highway rest-stop in the middle of the night — a clear nod to Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets.
Unlike Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers and the cast of this film will obtain the recognition they deserve for this work. But it might do us well, in the spirit of this story, to wonder about the hungry and homeless folk singers who were happy to play for whatever change that night’s audience would leave in their hat, whose names we might never know.
