Inside Llewyn Davis

This is the first time I've felt compelled to write a review for on IMDb. There are only a few movies in history that have impacted me as much.

The first time I saw Inside Llewyn Davis, it left me feeling empty and confused. While I appreciated the music, the acting, and the cinematography, I couldn't understand why anyone would love this movie (and I am a huge Coen fan). After all, it's just scene after scene of a jerk getting beaten up by life with no real plot progression and no real reason to care about any of the characters.

I then came across the movie again on TV and decided to give it another chance.

After this second viewing, the movie's themes connected with me in a big way. After my third and fourth viewing, it shook me to my core.

This movie is almost too realistic. It follows none of the conventional "rules" and there is no winner or hero. There's no real drama. There's no "silver lining". There's only struggle. And then acceptance.

For every one Bob Dylan there are myriad Llewyn Davis'. Really talented musicians and artists that work really hard and simply don't catch the lucky break. People go under the radar, under-appreciated and overlooked. People that never make it big and therefore question whether they should be doing it at all.

This is a film for the everyday folk; a beautiful empathetic look at art, music, and everyday struggle.

This Coen brothers take on the legendary US folk scene in the early 60s, through a down on his luck protagonist, gives nice touch of Greenwich village atmosphere and struggles of an aspiring musician. The musician, based on some of the later famous folk personalities whose music was used, is talented, not mediocre or anything like that, though he has had a tough moment in his life, losing his singing partner to suicide, due to cruelties that he is also exposed to. He struggles without money, and amused Coens take a dark look at the heroic battles of an aspiring artist, who finds little understanding and all the condemnation in his surroundings. Judging by the many condemning comments on this site, subtleties have been lost on the masses. It is a cruel society that equates success with moral virtue, and considers poverty as a moral sin. The artist due to his integrity refuses some chances for commercial success, but even that is construed as his failing by some of the comments, and therefore much of vulhgar mob. Thus, the joke is again turned on the shallow members of the public, who celebrate reality stars while condemn a clearly virtuous, but struggling actor, just because he lacks success. In the end, we get a glimpse of Bob Dylan, who had a powerful gift that was ultimately not possible to deny, but only after he was discovered by some wise people, and who famously snubbed the booing mob and the shallow journalists and could afford to follow his own path. Instead of celebrating the success, Coens shed light on the struggle, and provide an opportunity for the unsophisticated non-creative consumer mob to demonstrate their monstrosities and in some case appallingly complete lack of empathy and absolute inability to distinguish poverty from lack of virtue, bad luck from lack of talent, terrible circumstances from moral deficits. The conclusion is again, that people who do get, through the sheer combination of power of their talent, personality and good luck, to the top, have every reason to shun the shallow hating mob that would, no doubt, shred them to pieces with gusto if they had fallen to bad luck.

Like almost everyone who loved or hated this film, I do generally like the Coen brothers and am not against having to do work to enjoy and appreciate a film. This is an important thing to say because Inside Llewyn Davis is certainly not a film to come to as a casual viewer just looking to kill a few hours – not as a snobby thing of "you'll not appreciate it" but just a reality that the film does almost nothing to help the viewer. The plot involves struggling folk musician Llewyn Davis in the Greenwich Village scene of the early 1960s; he is not particularly commercial, is irresponsible, downbeat and cannot look after others or even the cat belonging to others. We follow him over the course of a week which will change his life and see the world around him change too.

I really did want to like this film because at times there is a certain beauty to it in the pained reality of its lead character, his situation and his gradual realization of where his life is and where it is going. Unfortunately this is generally spread very thin and instead of having a structure that supports this, we instead get an episodic approach that makes the "week" feel like months, sees characters just come and go whether we have an interest in them or not and generally doesn't allow you to do more than grasp at metaphors which drift by – usually resulting in the people who love the film the most being those who brought a lot of their own selves to the table, leaving us who look to the film to at least help, feeling left out in the cold and even a little bored.

The music is beautiful when it comes and the cinematography is excellent as it captures and shapes the feel of the film and the character – it is bleak to look at for sure, but it is suitable and effective for what the film is. The same could be said of Isaac's performance because it is what the film needs him to do but the downside is that it isn't really what the viewer needs him to do. His personal journey (physical and emotional) is made harder b the coldness of his character – there is really not much to grab hold of here and he is generally difficult. As often is the case with the Coens, we have characters drifting though the story usually in a colorful fashion – the times it has worked in other films has been frequent but here I didn't think it did at all, with nobody seeming to add much. As writers of the material and directors of their cast the "blame" (depending on your view) belongs with the Coens as they have made this film very difficult to get into.

Full of supposed metaphors and with a sadness which is put in the distance look of its title character rather than in his heart or in the audience's line of sight, the film drifts along with a general sense of sadness and change which always interested me but just seemed deliberately out of reach and distant. I'm sure if you "get it" then it is a film to adore, but for me it just didn't work at all.

There have been movies made about musicians, both real and imagined, from End of the Century through I'm Not There, taking in The Future is Unwritten and A Mighty Wind. We've had almost every conceivable approach, from straight-up documentary through imagined version of events as well as completely invented bands, singers, songs, and concerts. Yet, I don't think that anyone has ever managed to do what the Coen Brothers have produced with this tragic, comedic, touching piece.

Which is to essentially transport you into the grooves of an LP, Inside Llewyn Davies, and bring you a beautifully realised portrayal of the eponymous hero as he trudges his weary way through the greys and greens of Greenwich Village in a cold New York. And it is so reminiscent of the experience of listening to your favourite vinyl album from track one, side one to the final track of side two, whilst curling up on the couch with a cat in your lap, listening to a selection of melodic, melancholic, traditional, and new folk music.

The music binds this movie together and Oscar Issac inhabits the title role in a world-weary way that aches with ennui and longs for something never expressed. We follow his tramping travails through a range of vignettes that build subtly towards creating a quite compelling picture of the man behind the music. He sometimes does what we expect and at other junctures, veers off in a mad new direction. There is little explanation for any of the decisions that he does, or doesn't, take. He's searching without any clear idea of the quest.

Along the way, we meet a wonderfully diverse bunch of supporting characters, from the biting Jean, acerbic tongue and acid looks, through the snoring bully Roland Turner and his valet Johnny Five, as well as Mitch and Lilian, the Upper West posh couple, but especially Ulysses, our hero's apparent companion over the week (or was s/he?). They all offer opportunities to understand Davies' psyche slightly more, albeit admitting that not even he appears to be fully cognisant himself.

It's a lovely looking film, beautifully shot and much more enjoyable that I would have believed possible from watching the trailer previously. T Bone Burnett has done a sterling job on the soundtrack, it's so affecting and the way that the songs are all allowed to play out saw the audience in the cinema in which I saw this mainly remaining seated through the end credits as well. Which brings me back to the vinyl album sensation. You don't pick up the needle when your favorite record is playing the final track, because you want to get on with something else instead. No. You let it run right to the end of the groove and then your heart fills with an equal mixture of pleasure and joy, sorrow and sighs, as the last bars fade to quiet and all that's gone before becomes a memory that's so strong and so addictive that you want to turn it over and put the needle back into the groove all over again.

This movie is precisely like that sensation and I loved it, from first frame to last. A quiet understated tragi-comedy, dark in places, and shadowy in others, but with a humanity and a compassion that you cannot avert our gaze from. Hell, it's even got a coda of a scene to be dealing with, which at the end takes your mind back to the start of the production and forces one to reexamine what has just passed before your eyes. Recommended.

No doubt: Llewyn Davis is a loser. First, his career as a folk singer is going badly: his duet partner committed suicide, his record isn't selling, he makes so little that he cannot afford his own apartment but has to move from friend to friend, or rather from acquaintance to acquaintance. Secondly, as far as human relationships are concerned, he is a total failure. His ex girlfriend despises him, one of her predecessors faked an abortion to have him out of her – and the mutual child's life – people who are sympathetic to him, get a rather rude treatment on a daily basis. After A Serious Man, the Coen brothers have again chosen to depict a man on the wrong side of luck. Only this time, one might say he deserves it. Or maybe not, for he has one redeeming feature. The film opens with a long scene in which Davis (Oscar Isaac) performs a sad old folk song. The camera gently hovers around him, catches the hushed, intensely attentive atmosphere of the smoky basement club, while he sucks his audience – us – into the dark, sorrowful world he creates in his song, hinting at a depth he so often will not show in "real life". It is this contrast, the dialogue between the sadly funny tale of a modern Don Quixote and that other, older, tenderer story, the music tells. For as much as this is Llewyn's story, it also is that of the redeeming power of music. For even if Davis is the same at the end as the story comes full circle and returns to its opening, as he once again gets beaten up and is succeeded on stage by a young, cocky folk singer with a nasal voice who will soon change music – and not just folk music – forever, there is just the tiniest hint that this Llewyn Davis might have some sort of promise after all, maybe not as a successful singer, but as a human being. Inside Llewyn Davis is inspired loosely by the story of Dave van Ronk, a star of the Greenwich Village folk scene around the time of Bob Dylan's arrival there in 1961. Dylan learned a lot from van Ronk and stole some of his most promising songs, but that is a story to be told another day. This one is about a man lost in a world that hasn't been waiting for him, who has a mission that is entirely his own. The lengths to which he goes to show the world he doesn't care are astounding. And yet he craves love. Oscar Isaac is a miracle: even in his most repelling state, in his most rejecting attitude, there is a flicker of sad longing in his face, his eyes, a face the Coens show us much of. It is one you need to dive into, closed to the casual observer but hiding so much pain and uncertainty and desire to live one sometimes thinks it must explode. The Coens' cinema is one of subtlety, of nuanced, of shades of grey between the black and white. In Isaac, they have found their perfect actor, heading a stellar cast including Carey Mulligan, John Goodman and Justin Timberlake. As so often, the Coen brothers are masters at creating an atmosphere, a universe of its own, unique as well as absolutely consistent. It is a world of the night, in which grey shades reign, days are pale and dust is everywhere. Even in the open there is a sense of narrowness, of tight spaces, lightless basements that are cage and protective space in one. It is the tiny holes that provide the only rooms for creativity, for the soul to speak. And so it is that the dark world of the underground gradually regains some warmth and coziness, the dark becomes a zone of comfort, while everything else becomes cold and distant. Having said all this, Inside Llewyn Davis is first and foremost a comedy in the Coenesque sense of the term. It is a Quixotic tale full of quirky characters at time bordering on the fairy-tale like – especially true for the sequence around Goodman's character, a trodden-down mixture of villain and clown that calls up associations of the expressionist nightmare world of their earlier film Barton Fink. The other foot of the film is firmly on the ground, in the existential struggle of a man the world won't welcome. But there is still that third element: music, that timeless realm of love and pain and suffering and hope. It is here the film is anchored, it is here this Don Quixote conquers his windmills, armed solely with his guitar. It is here it all comes together. Tragedy, comedy, fairy tale, social drama, held together by the softest of touches. Another Coen brothers masterpiece. What else could be expected?