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