For Inside Llewyn Davis , the Coen brothers have taken their strange brand of tall tales to the unforgiving maze of New York’s 60s folk scene, where life feels a little like a dreary record on a relentless loop. Snail-paced and ruthlessly bleak, the pair’s latest work is a portrait of a tired but talented musician at the end of his tether, and it’s quite an experience.
We join Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) as he performs a mediocre rendition of Hang Me, Oh Hang Me on the stage of a dimly lit, smoke-filled club in Greenwich Village. Following a back-alley beating after the show – in retribution for a drunken outburst the previous night – the shaggy-haired, wistful song-smith awakes next morning to the comfort of an Upper West Side apartment.
He plays along to a few classical tunes, scrambles some eggs and pops on a vinyl before scrawling a note to his friends, the Gorfeins: “Thanks for the couch. I was a sorry mess last night.”
Clutching the couple’s cat, Llewyn makes his way into the cold city streets and across town on the subway, with the soothing number running its course on the flat’s record player. The sequence is as crisp and beautiful as anything you’ll see this year. From a brief interaction with a lift operator to a cast of station signs sliding by his carriage window, it’s a hair-raisingly sombre few minutes. Even his shuffle to retrieve the cat as it breaks down the aisle is touched with acutely-observed subtlety.
The song itself is an elegant product of the singer’s bygone collaboration with Mike, a friend who “threw himself off the George Washington Bridge,” leaving Llewyn to go it alone. It’s an early hint at a thunderous cloud of depression that hangs plump and ready to burst over just about every scene.
Shivering, he arrives at fellow folk performers Jim and Jean’s (Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan) to discover the latter is pregnant, wants an abortion and he might be the father. As his desperation is brought to boil, Llewyn hits the road for a ludicrous weekend trip to Chicago in a last ditch effort to make it big. Hitching a ride with an enigmatic poet (Stark Sands) and his huge heroin-addicted companion (John Goodman), the journey offers a blend of quirky dialogue, meditative silences and a happy dose of Joel and Ethan’s astounding cinematography.
Key to the film’s success is Isaac’s extraordinarily cute performance. So convincing is he of the under-appreciated artist’s plight that every raised eyebrow, creasing frown and cutting profanity lingers for days afterwards. His protruding paunch and deep-set eyes scream of how much a drag life has become. In conversation with his agent, Llewyn complains that he doesn’t even own a winter coat. In a crude bluff to avoid parting with any cash, the agent offers him his own. “No, no,” Llewyn repeats; it’s perfectly real.
Despite such considerable flair, the film lacks an emotional punch. This is perhaps because Llewyn is a jerk, but so might you be faced with an absurd world where fate and chance are far more pertinent than promise or talent. At times he’s just a performing monkey, laced with cynicism, trying to make ends meet. Music has taken on all the characteristics of a nine to five, drained of allure but for its capacity to provide rare moments of blissful escapism – a striking irony, you’ll agree.
In all, the visionary brothers’ latest feature is no trailblazing masterpiece, but it’s not trying to be. It’s a glum representation of one man’s struggle to keep his head above water in a cutthroat industry. It’s also a distinctly Coen example of perceptive cinema at its best – slashed with humour and poetry. Inside Llewyn Davis is a brilliantly melancholic homage to weariness and a fading dream.
