NYFF 2013: "Inside Llewyn Davis"

Talking, quite a few years ago, about his high regard for  hor­ror movies, Martin Scorsese allowed that he “like[d] Mario Bava’s films very much: hardly any story, just atmo­sphere, with all that fog and ladies walk­ing down cor­ridors.” Now it would be inac­cur­ate to char­ac­ter­ize Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis as hav­ing “hardly any story;” in point of fact, it’s got story com­ing and going, and I mean that lit­er­ally. But the real story is told in implic­a­tions and infer­ences; the lead char­ac­ter is mostly seen deal­ing with the con­sequences of irre­spons­ible and/or out and out bad beha­vi­or (the one instance in which he’s depic­ted act­ing inex­cus­able is, while inex­cus­able, at least under­stand­able, and it does­n’t occur until near the movie’s end), and what we gen­er­ally refer to as “plot” does­n’t “func­tion” in this movie. A little iron­ic­ally, giv­en its title, Inside Llewyn Davis is a movie in which atmo­sphere does almost all of the import­ant work. And that atmo­sphere is chilly: bare trees, near-empty streets, cloudy breath, gray skies and gray­er road­ways. Everyone in the movie has a sal­low com­plex­ion, except for Carey Mulligan’s Jean, who’s so milkily lumin­es­cent that she could in fact be a ghost. 

The Coen’s vis­ion of the bur­geon­ing folk scene in Manhattan of 1961 has­n’t got a single hint of A Mighty Wind and not all that much of the redol­ence of the Coen’s own O Brother Where Art Thou. Even when the title prot­ag­on­ist is depic­ted being roped into join­ing a trio cut­ting a folk-novelty stinker under the aegis of a Columbia record exec (Ian Jarvis) who’s pretty plainly styled after John Hammond, the movie stu­di­ously avoids pas­tiche. The authenticity-in-art bug­a­boo was par­tic­u­larly pro­nounced, of course, dur­ing the real peri­od depic­ted here, but the Coens nev­er address it head on, and it’s to the movie’s cred­it that it con­tains no heated debates about “real” folk music. Instead, it depicts Llewyn, still too young to have earned the “jour­ney­man” tag, scru­pu­lously if not stub­bornly hoe­ing his own roe row, which hap­pens to be an old-school one, and learn­ing in incre­ments that he’s nev­er going to get any­where by doing so. 

At the press con­fer­ence after the New York Film Festival screen­ing, the dir­ect­ors were asked, not for the first time, why they make movies about “fail­ures,” and Joel Coen replied, not in a par­tic­u­larly sar­cast­ic way, that “all the movies about suc­cesses have been done.” The thing about Llewyn, who’s played with spec­tac­u­lar under­state­ment with Oscar Isaac, is that he’s not depic­ted as par­tic­u­larly hav­ing it com­ing. He is hardly untal­en­ted. And he’s not a pom­pous blow­hard like the Coen’s Barton Fink; when he makes a slight balk at the afore­men­tioned nov­elty song (an anti-space-travel ditty called “Please Please Mr. Kennedy” that’s all the more, um, humor­ous for protest­ing against rock­ets while Vietnam is just around the corner), he’s not strictly wrong, and he does back off when he real­izes that he’s insul­ted the actu­al author of the tune. And, yes, he does get the wife of a friend preg­nant, and yes, he’s screwed up that way before. He’s irre­spons­ible, but not glibly so, and his adven­tures with a friend’s cat that he feels oblig­ated to look after because it slips out of a door he’s held open provide a par­able that’s a ter­ribly sad reflec­tion of not just the char­ac­ter but of his circumstances. 

This is a genu­inely glum movie, for as many com­ic scenes as it con­tains (although when you get right down to it, it does not con­tain a huge num­ber of them; most of the char­ac­ters main­tain an under­tow of sar­don­icism via dia­logue how­ever). “As one day fades into another/as the past gets filled up with fail­ure,” goes a lyr­ic by David Thomas’ Pere Ubu; Llewyn’s past is filled not just with fail­ure but with genu­ine tragedy. He’s griev­ing, and not just for his non-thriving career. And with every step he takes, he fails again. During a dis­astrous road trip to Chicago, he’s bedeviled by a malevol­ent jazzbo (John Goodman) who threatens him with voo­doo he learned from Chano Pozo (nice ref­er­ence) after Llewyn has the temer­ity to bite back at the man moun­tain’s lit­any of insults. Goodman’s char­ac­ter is grot­esquely revealed to have feet of clay, but this provides Llewyn with little sat­is­fac­tion; and after he sep­ar­ates him­self from the man, and his Beat-Generation-boy-toy “valet” (Garrett Hedlund), he promptly soaks his left foot in a snowy puddle. Sipping cof­fee at a diner counter, he keeps tak­ing his foot out of his soaked shoe and press­ing it against the footrest, try­ing to squeeze some of the cold cold water out of it. This shot struck me as a cent­ral image, a numin­ous one even, cent­ral to the movie’s wintry poetry. Granted, giv­en recent events in my own life, it’s entirely pos­sible that I’m unusu­ally recept­ive to a movie in which the cent­ral char­ac­ter sits in a pub­lic toi­let stall and is a little unpleas­antly stunned to see this graf­fiti text carved into the paint on the wall that holds the toi­let paper: “What Are You Doing.”

And for all that, and des­pite the ever-so-slightly on-the-nose evoc­a­tion of a world his­tor­ic­al cul­tur­al phe­nomen­on at the movie’s end, Inside Llewyn Davis is an entirely exhil­ar­at­ing exper­i­ence. I’m quite eager to see it again.