Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) *****/*****
There was a brief period, back around when they were making films that were a bit more mainstream-aimed than their usual output, like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, when pundits were starting to wonder whether or not Joel and Ethan Coen had lost it as filmmakers. Since then they’ve made as powerful a movie as has ever been filmed in No Country for Old Men, a small and contemplative art piece in A Serious Man, and one of the most broadly appealing Westerns there’s ever been in True Grit though, so it turns out any notion that the Coens had reached their creative zenith and were now on a creative downslope were completely misguided. In fact, this brother duo’s filmography is now so vast, so diverse, and so consistent in its quality (even The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty look a lot better now, after being separated from expectation) that they have to be considered to be among the greatest filmmakers who have ever lived.
Because of the Coen’s legendary filmography, it’s true praise when I say that their newest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, is among the very best out their output — top tier Coen brothers material right up there with the likes of Barton Fink, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. And seeing as this is among the very best Coen brothers films, and we’ve already agreed that the Coens are among the very best filmmakers, I guess that would also mean that Inside Llewyn Davis is pretty much one of the best movies that you could see, period, wouldn’t it? That’s some heavy stuff.
The story here centers on a struggling vagabond named Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), who’s trying to make it as a folk musician in the Greenwich Village music scene of 1961 — which was a scene that was just a year or two away from launching folk as the next big thing in mainstream music. Davis is a prickly sort of fellow, and a bit of a sad sack, but there’s a wit to his prickliness and enough legitimate reasons for him to have a can’t win attitude that he’s never a protagonist who you’re unable to sympathize with. As a matter of fact, the more you get to know him and the more you get to explore the world he inhabits, the more you not only sympathize with Davis as a sort of doomed doormat who’s raging against the dying of the light, but you also start to identify with him as someone who reflects the darker feelings you have about your own life. This is good, because Inside Llewyn Davis is a slice of life story that’s basically all about getting to know the Davis character better. Well, it’s about that and the struggle to return the Gorfeins their runaway cat, which is a struggle that eventually comes to represent all sorts of things regarding people and their relationships, so long as you’re the sort of person who isn’t put off by looking for things like symbolism and metaphors in movies.
The filmmaking here, predictably, is skillful and dazzlingly entertaining. Everything the brothers makes looks great, and their setting a movie in 60s-era New York yields just about as much visual pleasure as you’d imagine it would. All of their scripts are subtle and interesting and full of wildly unique and entertaining characters and dialogue, so that’s also the case here. If you’ve ever seen a Coen brothers movie before, you know that there’s a sensibility and a skill-level present in all of them that marks them as being something uniquely Coens, no matter what the subject matter happens to be, so there’s probably not much need at all to talk about the filmmaking. It’s top notch, dig?
Instead, let’s focus on the performances, because there are a couple here that are just excellent. First and foremost is Isaac playing the Davis character. Here’s an actor who, in just a few lines and a few contortions of his face, is able to convey the sardonic wit and the standoffish nature of the Davis character, as well as the pain and loss that he’s masking and the longing he feels to connect to something greater than himself, as well as the deep love of music he has and the struggles he faces when it comes to deciding what exactly it means to be an artist, how important it is to maintain a certain level of authenticity, whether or not there’s even anything authentic about what he does, and how many artistic compromises can be made in the service of putting food on the table before one can’t be considered an artist anymore. Oh, and also he sings and plays the guitar. Like an angel. If Davis wasn’t so nuanced and affecting in this role, if he didn’t show so much range as a leading man in the movies, then it would probably make sense for him to just start touring as a folk singer. He’s that good, and seeing as the music in this film is so important to what it is, and so important to the character’s doomed attempts at connecting with the people around him, his skill ends up being one of the most important assets the Coens are exploiting.
Carey Mulligan is also really good in a supporting role that appears to be smaller on the surface than it really is, and that grows in importance and complexity the more you think about it. At first it appears that she’s mostly here to be comic relief and to sing a song, but by the end of the film you realize just how much depth she gave you in between the lines of the performance as it initially read — depth that gets revealed almost like a magic trick. John Goodman is about as reliable an actor as you can get, and something of a Coens regular, so it’s probably no surprise to hear that one of the highlights of the film is when Davis gets trapped in a lengthy road trip alongside a motor-mouthed jazz musician who he portrays as well as a near-silent driver/poet who’s portrayed (and get this, memorably) by Garrett Hedlund. Goodman’s character comes and goes without having too direct an impact on the plot of the film, but he certainly makes the most of the time that he’s given, and it’s likely his character will be the one who people find themselves quoting as they think back on the things they liked about Inside Llewyn Davis.
When you throw in fun and authentic performances (both acting and musical) from current It boys like Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver, and the usual host of unforgettable and endlessly amusing character performances that the Coens always get out of their true character actor finds (especially Stark Sands and Sylvia Kauders this time around), suddenly Inside Llewyn Davis starts to look much more like an ensemble piece than it did at first glance. It’s true that the story here is firmly about Davis, and the weight of the acting load is largely on Isaac’s shoulders, but all of the characters he meets along the way play important parts in defining the world that the story is taking place in, and they all play equally important roles in the change the Davis character experiences over the course of the narrative, so it was actually fairly important that each role, no matter how small, got perfectly cast, and a large part of the reason why the film was able to be so successful as a whole is that they were.
Probably at this point you’ve noticed that I keep throwing around words like complex and subtle, and that’s because Inside Llewyn Davis is so much these things that to not use these words would be an exercise in futility. The Coens’ writing and direction never gives you a roadmap to exploring the world they’ve created here, but they’ve created a world that’s layered and nuanced nonetheless. There’s death and doom hanging over this entire story, but there’s also a warmth to the period and the music that makes this one of the most easily enjoyed Coen brothers movies to date. The effect is similar to that of Llewyn spending his days traversing the frozen streets of New York without a winter coat, and his nights finding warmth and respite on someone’s couch, or on the stage of a candle-lit cafe. It’s similar to how the character of Llewyn Davis can be so cold and guarded in his daily life, but how he desperately feels the need to connect people to his music. Inside Llewyn Davis is, at the same time, sad and funny, and it tells a story that appears at first blush to be fairly simple, but that finds new complexity in the backstory behind a lingering look, or a missed subplot in an urge that doesn’t get acted upon.
Because of this, the sort of moviegoer who only watches things on a surface level is likely to walk away from this one thinking that it was slow and boring, and that “nothing happened.” Nothing could be further from the truth if you do the work to get to know these characters and figure out why you’re being shown what you’re being shown though. The more you think about it, the more Inside Llewyn Davis reveals itself to you, and the more it reveals itself to you, the more sad and beautiful it becomes. If that sounds too much like homework, don’t worry, it’s not. The characters and dialogue that the brothers have written here are just as novel and entertaining as any they’ve written before, so to take the time to properly explore the film is never anything other than a complete joy. I liked Inside Llewyn Davis coming out of my first screening of it — more so after I thought about it for a day or two. After my second screening I absolutely loved it, and after another day or two of sitting with it, it finally became my favorite film of 2013.
