Old Yorker

  • Inside Llewyn Davis

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joel and Ethan Coen (2013)

    There’s much to admire and enjoy, especially in the first half.  Why is Inside Llewyn Davis unsatisfying?  Anthony Lane is right that it’s partly to do with Oscar Isaac in the title role.  The struggling folk singer Llewyn is by so far the biggest part that Isaac is expected to carry the film, and he’s not able to.  He can sing, he can act – but his face doesn’t speak to the camera.  The other problem is the Coen brothers’ inveterate tendency to overstress their view that life is something that kicks you in the teeth, and to use physically ridiculous people as illustrations of the human condition as a bad joke.  The film begins and ends with Llewyn getting beaten up round the back of the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, where he regularly performs.  His assailant is a man in a suit whose face you never see; once Llewyn is on the ground, groaning and winded, the man disappears.

    The movie is evidently inspired by the life of the folk singer Dave Van Ronk.  The title, which refers to Llewyn’s first solo album, nods to one called Inside Dave Van Ronk, although this was actually released in 1964:  Inside Llewyn Davis takes place in February 1961, before folk singers were big. Van Ronk, according to Wikipedia, was both a more influential and a more amiable character than Llewyn Davis but the Coens’ basic idea – to tell the story of a man who was in the right place at not quite the right time – is a good one.  February 1961 was the very month in which Bob Dylan started playing in clubs in Greenwich Village:  the singer who follows Llewyn onto the Gaslight stage near the end of the film, although unnamed, is unmistakably the young Robert Zimmerman.

    The Gaslight was a real place (it closed in 1971) but its name is appropriate to the Coens’ subject, suggesting that folk music at the time inhabited a somewhat obscure part of New York City, far from the neon lights of celebrity.  The visual scheme of Inside Llewyn Davis is nothing if not coherent.  The production designer, as usual in a Coens’ movie, is Jess Gonchor but Bruno Delbonnel, instead of Roger Deakins, is the cinematographer.  The film’s colours are desaturated:  you can pick out Llewyn’s and the other faces but the light in Delbonnel’s images always appears to be in a different place from the protagonist, not necessarily far away but inaccessible for all that.  The trouble is, the Coens can’t resist presenting Llewyn not only as a man before his time but as a failure even within the group of not especially high achievers in the music world he moves in.  His friend Jean Berkey, who’s worried the baby she’s carrying may be Llewyn’s rather than her husband’s, tells Llewyn he’s a loser and the Coens evidently share her impatience with him.   Other than when he’s singing, Llewyn is energised only occasionally:  when he’s deplorably rude to his indulgent middle-aged academic friends, Mitch and Lillian Gorfein, at one of their dinner parties; when, upset after a visit to his ailing father in a care home, he goes to his sister’s apartment and takes out his misery on her; when he cruelly barracks a nervous, desperately self-conscious middle-aged woman making her hapless debut onstage at the Gaslight Café (the dark figure who assaults him in the final scene accuses Llewyn of insulting ‘my wife’).  This is meant to be appalling behaviour, and to reduce your sympathy for Llewyn, although the Coens have also already done their bit to poke fun at the people whom he savages.

    For a while, I was getting hopeful that minor characters in Inside Llewyn Davis might overcome being the butt of their creators’ jokes.   Although Llewyn’s agent and his secretary in their dim, poky office appear to be familiar Jewish cartoons, the actors playing them (Jerry Grayson and Sylvia Kauders) have absorbed these characters more fully than is often the case in the Coens’ films.   A clean-cut young army type called Troy Nelson performs with Jean and Jim Berkey at the Gaslight and sleeps over on their couch while Llewyn kips on the floor.  In the morning, Troy is up bright and early and slurping his breakfast cereal noisily as Llewyn comes to; Stark Sands’ empathy and precision as Troy make him likeable rather than laughable.   Then there’s the Gorfeins’ cat.   Llewyn, after staying with them the night before he goes to the Berkeys, manages to let the cat out as he’s leaving the Gorfeins’ apartment.   He takes the animal with him on his subway journey to Jean and Jim’s; next morning, it jumps out of a window that Llewyn has left open and disappears down the fire escape.   Sitting in a café with Jean some time later, Llewyn sees a ginger cat in the street outside, runs after and catches it, and returns it to the Gorfeins.

    It’s not clear whether Mitch and Lillian Gorfein were friends primarily with Llewyn or with his former singing partner Mike, who’s recently committed suicide, but Lillian Gorfein persuades Llewyn to sing ‘Fare Thee Well’, which he used to sing with Mike.  Lillian then starts to sing Mike’s part and causes Llewyn to lose his temper with her and the rest of the company.  Mrs Gorfein flees to her kitchen in tears then screams off-camera.  She returns to the dining room and pronounces that the cat Llewyn has brought back is not her cat – not even the same gender as her cat:  ‘Where’s its scrotum, Llewyn?!’ she yells.  This improbable line elicited a loud laugh from the woman in front of me at Curzon Richmond.  The laugh seemed to proclaim, ‘I’m a Coens fan, this is a classic Coens one-liner and I’m going to show that I know it’.  At this point, I stopped feeling optimistic about the film – although in fact there’s plenty of much better dialogue throughout.  The Gorfeins are well played by Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett; their guests are well played too, both in this scene and at another dinner party later on – but the Coens mean you to sympathise with Llewyn’s increasing impatience with the lot of them, if not his eventual fury.   These people all have looks to make you snigger and the Coens are consistent in this department.   Back at the Gaslight, there’s a male a cappella quartet in white sweaters.  The one worn by the fat, ugly member of the group is unremarkable – he looks daft enough without the help of wardrobe.  The better-looking crooners wear more elaborate, ridiculous tops to compensate for not having ludicrous faces.

    Llewyn’s misadventures with the Gorfeins’ cat were part of what made the early scenes of Inside Llewyn Davis compelling for me.  The slender, long-legged, hook-tailed ginger, slithering too swiftly down the fire escape, is brilliant – even though he doesn’t look that happy on the subway, eyes widening as he stares out of the train window.  (I may be wrong but I think that the cat Llewyn sees on the street is the right one though it’s definitely a different animal that he returns to the Gorfeins.)  There are other good performances too.  The Coens’ casting of Carey Mulligan as Jean is smart:  she smiles sweetly and swears viciously.  Mulligan has demonstrated before a vocal power which, thanks to her demure appearance, is surprising – even so, when Jean lambasts Llewyn it’s really startling, as well as funny.  Carey Mulligan is also sensitive enough not to make Jean entirely angry – there’s an occasional look in her eyes which reminds you that she’s attracted to Llewyn.  Justin Timberlake, as Jean’s husband, has a relatively small role but he’s alert and amusing in it – gently lampooning but also showing the appeal of the kind of performer Jim Berkey is.  The singing of ‘Five Hundred Miles’ from the Gaslight stage by Mulligan, Timberlake and Stark Sands is charming.  The novelty number ‘Please Mr Kennedy’, which the Coens wrote with, among others, Timberlake and T-Bone Burnett (who produced the music for the film with Marcus Mumford) is performed in a recording studio by Oscar Isaac, Timberlake and Adam Driver, and this too is good fun.  (The events of the film take place of course in the weeks following JFK’s inauguration.)  F Murray Abraham delivers a terrific cameo as the music producer Bud Grossman whom Llewyn travels to Chicago to meet and audition for.   Abraham’s inscrutable, magisterial stillness as he listens to Llewyn sing gives Grossman’s eventual pronouncement – ‘I don’t see a lot of money here’ – a quietly devastating, Olympian authority.   As, respectively, a drug-addled jazz musician and a taciturn beat poet with whom Llewyn drives to Chicago, John Goodman and Garret Hedlund are playing more familiar types from the cultural world of the time although they both do so well.

    In the relatively short time he’s on screen, Justin Timberlake shows that he can sing and act and connect with the camera.  Oscar Isaac somehow seems to be avoiding it.   The difference between them and the fact that Timberlake really is a big recording star have the effect of emphasising, I assume unintentionally, Llewyn Davis’s loser quality.  It’s hard to tell how much of Llewyn’s melancholy is caused by Mike’s suicide – because Oscar Isaac looks fed up in the same way throughout, he doesn’t provide any clues.  As the impoverished Llewyn’s fortunes continue to decline, the winter weather gets worse.  (The snow falling on a dark, empty highway is beautifully mournful.)  Plenty is made of Llewyn’s not having a winter coat although he doesn’t look freezing cold much of the time.

    Llewyn’s journey to Chicago is fruitless but, when he goes back to the Gorfeins’ place for the second dinner party, he learns their cat has found his way home and that the animal has the prophetic name of Ulysses.  Homer’s Odyssey may not be as essential to Inside Llewyn Davis as it was to O Brother, Where Are Thou? but it’s certainly a significant element.  In Chicago, Bud Grossman is based at somewhere called The Gate of Horn.   Like the Gaslight Café, this was a real place and is a gift to the Coens.  As I learned from Clive Sinclair’s review in the TLS, there are gates of horn and ivory in the Odyssey.  It’s true rather than false dreams that come through the former but that’s not much help to Llewyn Davis.  After leaving the Gorfeins’ for the last time, Llewyn notices that the Disney film of Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey is playing at a cinema.  This isn’t a gift to the Coens: it’s a cheat.  The book wasn’t published until 1961 and the film was released in 1963.

    28 January 2014

  • Casanova (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    John Glenister, Mark Cullingham (1971)

    Casanova, screened weekly on BBC2 in six episodes in late 1971, was Dennis Potter’s first serial drama for television.  The whole thing lasts 325 minutes and watching it at BFI last week, as a feature in the last segment of their Potter retrospective, I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t meant to be seen either in one sitting or on a cinema screen.  Potter, nevertheless, over the course of his television drama-writing career, made an important contribution to the metamorphosis of the TV play into the TV film and it’s hard not to feel that Casanova is often trying to be cinematic.  Take, for example, the repeated montages of key images from the story, playing in the mind of the title character.  In 1971, it wasn’t that unusual to see this kind of thing from your seat in a picture house but it was an innovation to see it from a chair in your living room.  Some of the ‘filmic’ elements look primitive now.  Casanova combines material shot on location with studio recordings.  At the start of the first episode, a gondola carries representatives of the Venice Tribunal along a canal.  Their late-night destination is Casanova’s apartment, the purpose of their visit to arrest him for atheism, blasphemy, fornication, etc.  The dark canal has a stygian quality; on the soundtrack, the water doesn’t so much lap as slurp; the overall effect is sinister and vaguely disgusting.  But this opening sequence is unusual:  too often there are shots of the city that don’t tell us more than that the BBC did some filming there.  The memory montages tend to be obvious and sometimes lurid – as when the screams of a woman achieving orgasm are juxtaposed with those of a man being publicly flogged to death.   In the final episode, in which the ageing Casanova is working at his memoirs, a draught in the room (aka the cold wind of time) scatters the leaves of paper from the table – a venerable Hollywood cliché.  In spite of this, and though it takes a while to get used to the switches between celluloid and videotape, the studio sections stand up, in technical terms, very well.  The lighting, set decoration, costumes and make-up compare very favourably with, say, the BBC’s I Claudius, which was made five years later.

    I was fifteen coming up sixteen when Casanova was shown in 1971 and I think I saw most, if not all, the episodes.  Its subject and nudity predictably offended Mary Whitehouse and my recollection is that the serial got a lukewarm reception from television critics.  It’s acquired a higher status in retrospect and in the context of the Potter oeuvre as a whole:  W Stephen Gilbert, in Fight and Kick and Bite, his 1996 biography of Potter, judges it ‘a pivotal piece’ and its protagonist ‘unique among [Potter’s] driven characters in not being racked by guilt’.   Potter was first drawn to Giacomo Casanova as the subject of a television drama when book-reviewing for the Times and asked to review the first volume of a new translation of Casanova’s memoirs.  Potter’s psoriatic arthropathy had been getting worse for several years and he clearly sympathised with Casanova’s plight – locked up by the Tribune in ‘the Leads’ (‘i piombi’) of the jail in the Doge’s Palace and not knowing how long he’ll have to stay there.   W Stephen Gilbert notes that Potter, when he began to write Casanova, was ‘more imprisoned than ever by his illness in his Ross-on-Wye fastness’.  Kept under lock and key and, years later, when his health is failing, Casanova finds salvation in reading and writing.  In one episode, his body has developed lesions that require gruesome and painful treatment:  this obviously links to Potter’s condition and anticipates the main character’s illness and treatment in The Singing Detective.

    BFI sensibly included two intervals – the first of twenty minutes after episode two, the second of forty minutes after episode four.  So the whole show ended six hours and five minutes after it began.  It may seem no more than an obvious reaction to such a marathon to say that Potter takes his time telling Casanova’s story.  But I do think the total length of Casanova is out of proportion to its limited plot and themes, even though the piece is chronologically quite complex.  The six episodes include two that alternate between Casanova’s incarceration and his former life, and four that move between the prison cell and his life after prison.   The highlight montages, which accrue new images as the story progresses, are a feature of every episode.  (The success of all kinds of regular television programmes, then and now, depends considerably on repetition.  Casanova may have been a nearly unprecedentedly ambitious television drama but the montages come to seem increasingly like the routines expected by the audience of a weekly TV comedy or variety show.)  In the parts of the story describing Casanova’s post-jail experiences, we soon discover that the ‘impious libertine’ isn’t chastened by his punishment.  He’s all the more committed to sensual pleasure, anxious not to waste a moment of the time that he has left to experience it.  Once the viewer knows this, it increases the pressure on the prison scenes to be compelling per se and, from midway through, these sequences tread water.  ‘I resolve to escape’ becomes close to a mantra in the last episode and a half:  it feels wrong that one’s main interest by this stage is in how Casanova will escape from his physical prison.  Of greater interest is his desire to escape from himself – his appetites – but this is usually asserted in monologue rather than dramatised.

    Women’s bodies – often naked, sometimes sexually abused – became an increasingly controversial element of Dennis Potter’s television drama.  (In response to accusations of misogyny, Potter insisted that his purpose was to expose and deplore misogyny.)  Bare breasts are on display throughout Casanova and particularly well represented in the repeated montages.  It’s not easy, seeing the serial in long retrospect, to keep some of Potter’s later work – Blackeyes, in particular – out of your mind but I think the camera’s gaze on exposed female flesh is defensible here.  This isn’t so much because it’s what you’d expect in the story of a legendary rake but because of the rich complexity of Casanova’s character – a complexity that is thanks partly to Potter’s writing but thanks more to Frank Finlay’s brilliant and fearless performance.   Finlay achieves and sustains a series of remarkable contrasts:  between Casanova’s ardent anticipation of seduction and post-coital cafard; between his arrogance and his self-reproach; between his angry, funny sang-froid in deriding antagonists and the exposed vulnerability of his look when he’s alone in captivity.  He speaks his lines not only with great verve, suppleness and wit but with a vocal musicality that makes him sound Italian, even though he never resorts to aiming for this effect by doing-an-accent.  His voice, in conjunction with his unusual, compelling facial features, creates a convincing exotic.   You’re very conscious of the shape of Finlay’s head, especially his jawline:  his sophisticated, superbly accomplished libertine has a bestial quality and this Casanova, even bewigged and with cologne on his cheeks, gives off a stink of mortality.  Finlay suggests an almost prehistoric skull beneath the skin.  Potter and the directors set their leading man a huge task in the later prison scenes:  he has to work hard to keep them dynamic but you never stop admiring his inventiveness.

    The artistry of Finlay’s Italianate Casanova leaves the other men in the cast looking and sounding emphatically, crudely English.  You’re especially aware of this in the fifth episode, when Casanova travels to England (the people in London are no different from those we’ve encountered in Venice and Grenoble), and in Norman Rossington’s contributions.  His main role is as the Venetian jailer Lorenzo but he’s also Casanova’s English travelling companion on a coach journey to London.  Rossington plays Lorenzo with obvious, unvarying vigour and Cockney vowels:  after a while, the jailer’s daily repetition of phrases and routines starts to work for the actor – you have to acknowledge Rossington’s stamina, anyway.  In the final episode, Graham Crowden is an exception to the anglicising rule but his all-stops-out caricature of a rule-bound German is quickly wearying.  It may be unfair to single out for praise Norman Tyrrell, since he plays an Englishman, but his cameo, as another coach passenger in the English episode, is perfectly judged.  Very few of the young actresses in the roles of Casanova’s conquests went on to better things so it’s important to record how individual and poignant some of them are – particularly Zienia Merton, Brigid Erin Bates, Caroline Dowdeswell and Lyn Yeldham.  (Merton, along with Bates, has kept an acting career going over the decades but it’s hard to ignore the information on IMDB that her next job after Casanova was in The Benny Hill Show.)  In the last part of the last episode, an actress called Gillian Hills is beautifully effective as the German girl who grants Casanova’s carnal deathbed wish, and prays that God remember this as an act of charity on her part.

    Directing duties were split between John Glenister and Mark Cullingham.  (Glenister directed the first, second and fourth episodes and Cullingham the other three.)   They do a decent job although there are times when their attention seems to be so absorbed in mise-en-scène that there’s a loss of dramatic focus.  (For example, episode three begins with a painstaking reconstruction of a commedia dell’arte show but the kerfuffle caused by Casanova in the audience is very sloppily staged.)   It was Dennis Potter, according to John Glenister, who decided on the Vivaldi theme music.  Watching the serial in 1971 was the first time that I’d heard Four Seasons.  I have to admit I’ve continued ever since to think of it as the Casanova music.

    5 July 2015

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