Inside Llewyn Davis achieves something rare in mainstream cinema these days: it’s small. It doesn’t rely on anything larger-than-life or saving-the-world. It takes place over the course of a week in the life of a pretty good folk singer in New York, 1963, as he suffers some bad luck, makes some bad decisions, and ends up back where he started. I say that the movie “achieved” something because it manages to make the story engaging and meaningful on this scale. Llewyn isn’t much of a hero. He’s proud and irresponsible and inconsiderate, but we sympathize with him like we sympathize with a younger sibling when he does the wrong thing. We enjoy seeing him muddle through life like a real person and we find ourselves invested in his story.
As I said in the preview, I have been a fan of the Coens since Burn After Reading was the only good thing playing in the cinema in Hong Kong and a couple friends and I saw it every Friday for a month or so. We memorized it pretty much scene-by-scene, and I liked it so much I wanted to go out and find other movies by the same directors. The Big Lebowski, Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Barton Fink are all well-known and acclaimed. I also found myself really liking their smaller, less well-known movies, having a special affection for movies like The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, or The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Inside Llewyn Davis has that special energy of Coen films — slightly mythical; deeply, darkly funny; and possessing a feeling of layeredness. The scene with the man in the alley near the beginning, shrouded in darkness, is a scene which, in some incarnation, appears in almost every Coen brothers movie. Also representative of the Coens is the inclusion of John Goodman, who appears in many of their movies. A lot of the Coens’ movies have a sort of mythical backbone, O Brother, Where Art Thou based on the Oddessy (which is alluded to in this movie, both in the story of the cat and the trip to Chicago), Fargo claiming to be “based on a true story” but admitting at the end that it’s not, the characters in The Big Lebowski (according to some) representing different school of political thought. The Coen’s, however, tend not to express their movies in terms of only this structure, implying that their intention is to use that underlying story to give the movie a mythical power.
It shares a lot of similarities to their older movies, but, like the other movies, Inside Llewyn Davis is original. In fact, it’s difficult to even categorize. The atmosphere is funny but sad, the story dramatic but inconsequential, the character sympathetic but not likable. The only thing I can say it consistently feels like is true. The absurdity of John Goodman’s character or the incident with the cat doesn’t make the movie feel unrealistic, but rather evokes the times when “real” life has seemed just as absurd. The songs that Llewyn performs are shown on-screen in full, including a nonsensical but incredibly catchy pop song he deigns to contribute to called “Please Mr. Kennedy” (Which by the way, is a great example of this realism. It’s clearly a silly song that Llewyn looks down upon, but it’s also something one can totally imagine being briefly popular at the time. (I’ve already listened to it a couple of times today.) So it’s not simply a bad song, but it’s not a good song either. It retains the complexity of the relationship between a “serious” folk singer and a bubblegum pop song in that situation). I spent some time after the movie trying to crack the code, trying to see the exact high concept that the Coens were going for. Is it a commentary on the folk singers in the village at the time who, unlike Bob Dylan (who makes an appearance at the very end), didn’t make it? Is it just a dark, tender comedy? Is it existentialist? Maybe it’s all of these things, but all of these things being just facets of what it really is. A story. A sort of small-scale myth, to be appreciated and internalized and leave the world a little more mysterious and us a little more tender at the end.
