Inside, Inside Llewyn Davis

Inside-Llewyn-Davis

The line of dialogue that starts and ends Inside Llewyn Davis is this: “If it was never new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song.” Llewyn Davis lives a life kind of like that. He’s drunk a lot, and he ignores things people tell him, so he’s consistently surprised by the way people react to his presence. And yet at the same time, it’s nothing new. Llewyn pisses people off so often that there’s a sort of resigned acceptance he’s affected w/r/t the world’s disappointment in who he’s become. “I’ve heard great things about you from Jim and Jean,” a stranger tells him. “There’s no way you’ve heard anything good about me from Jean,” he says back, flatly (or, even better, later on he tells his nephew, “Your uncle’s a bad man,” and his nephew just kind of shrugs, presumably because he’s been told this information before).

Inside Llewyn Davis is a brutal portrait of a difficult human being. The problem is that too many reviews have focused on the “difficult,” and not enough on the “human being.” Because the Coen brothers, normally criticized for being cold-blooded, are at their most humanist here. While the film doesn’t make Llewyn likable by any means, it wants you to see that he’s a person in such a total way. Llewyn does bad things, but he always regrets them. Sometimes he makes half-hearted attempts at redeeming his oversights, as when he loses his friends’ cat, and then takes care of the one he finds in its place. Even then, though, the Coens don’t let you (or him) off the hook, because a person like Llewyn cannot take care of another living being (he can barely take care of himself), so eventually the cat…well. You’ll see.

Llewyn is not a complete jerk. He’s just ornery. He’s difficult to get along with, but not so much that he can’t stay afloat on a series of friends’ couches. He’s a decent enough guy (and musician) for his more successful friend Jim to throw him a gig as the backing guitar on his latest single. But he’s also the kind of person who’s gotten Jim’s girlfriend Jean pregnant. But he’s also the kind of guy who’s at least dependable enough to spend his last few cents on an abortion, when she asks him to pay for it—because she knows that he’s also not the kind of guy who’ll be able to be any kind of father. “If you ever have sex again, which, as a favor to females everywhere you should definitely not do, but if you do, you should wear several condoms. And duct tape them on,” she tells him—and it takes Carrie Mulligan to show us that Jean is not just a harpy but actually a frustrated person, yet another person in Llewyn’s life who’s realized she can never, ever count on him.

The middle section of the film finds Llewyn trying, once and for all, to break from the career rut he’s been in since his singing partner killed himself. In order to do this, he takes a road trip to Chicago to audition for a producer played by F. Murray Abraham (who’s, no surprise, excellent). Llewyn shows up and is given exactly one (1) shot to impress the producer, a setup we’ve seen in countless other musical films. Llewyn sings his heart out, and as he belts out the tune, we see a look come over his face that we haven’t seen until then, and we understand exactly why Llewyn is living the miserable life he’s living: he’s an artist, in love with music, and he plays music because he can’t not. This is why it’s all the more brutal, raw, and heartbreaking when the song ends and Abraham tells him, matter-of-factly, “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

Llewyn is good at music. He just isn’t great. It’s appropriate that Abraham plays the producer who forces him to acknowledge it, since Abraham of course played Salieri in Amadeus, and Llewyn himself suffers a problem similar to Salieri’s.  Llewyn has an ear for music, and can easily pick up on how and why certain folk songs are terrible, when they are, and this is a kind of torture for him. He knows he’s better than the generic crap, and certainly better than the novelty songs like “Hey Mr. Kennedy” that he’s reduced to playing backup on. But he also knows that no one else can really tell the difference between good and bad, so he has a bitch of a time distinguishing himself. And worst of all, it’s not even like he’s that great, just good enough. It’s every artist’s nightmare, and we can start to understand why Llewyn is the way he is as the film looks at him so unblinkingly.

It ends almost perfectly. I won’t give anything away (it’s not like it’s a big surprise or anything), except to say that it smartly drives home the point that everything’s new to a guy like Llewyn, a guy who’s always in such a haze that he can barely remember what he did ten minutes ago, and yet nothing’s new either. It’s all just the same cycle.

Inside Llewyn Davis is the best film of the year. The lush, velvety visuals are such a Coen staple that they’re easy to take for granted. Don’t. The performances are great (yes, Russ, John Goodman is fantastic). But most importantly it is a sincere film, in a season when even the best films (like American Hustle and Wolf of Wall Street) are lacking in that quality. It’s honest, and it’s true, and it means what it says.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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