Tripwire Reviews StudioCanal’s 4K Restorations Of The Coen Brothers’ Debut Blood Simple And Inside Llewyn Davis

From A Texan Modern Noir To A Greenwich Village Fable

StudioCanal has just released two 4K UHD films from the masters of modern US indie cinema, the Coen Brothers. One is their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, while the other, Inside Llewyn Davis, was released back in 2013 and here’s Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows reviewing both of them…

Blood Simple
Director: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Stars: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh

The Coen Brothers’ debut, released a staggering forty-two years ago, gave very few pointers to the style that they would adopt as their own. Blood Simple is a Brian DePalmaesque southern gothic thriller about a wealthy, jealous man who hires a private investigator (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill the man’s wife and her new lover. But as with every noir tale ever told, nothing runs according to plan.

Blood Simple feels like the sort of story that James M Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity) would have written if he had made films in the 1980s. The cast is pretty strong, with Dan Hedaya who plays Julian Marty, the man who hires private detective Loren Visser (Emmet Walsh) to take care of his cheating wife Abby (Frances McDormand, the future Mrs. Joel Coen, turning in a very watchable performance). McDormand is very good here as is Emmet Walsh, who always managed to lift any film he was in, but Blood Simple lacks the flair and invention that later Coen Brothers work possesses. Its director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld went on to carve a niche for himself as a director in his own right and he does create a wonderful sense of mood here.

It isn’t a bad film, as it does work as a meat and potatoes noir thriller, but it does feel like it is imprisoned too often by the conventions of the genre it occupies. It can still be seen as a worthwhile debut for Joel and Ethan Coen. The extras here do help to flesh out our experience with a short but fascinating interview with the Coens and short chats with Ray Getz and Emmet Walsh. The restoration is decent but since this was a fairly low-budget film, part of its charm was its lo-fi approach and taking it too far away from this defeats its purpose.

Inside Llewyn Davis
Director: Joel Coen
Stars: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman

Period drama Inside Llewyn Davis saw the Coens keen to return to elliptical narratives and opaque, withdrawn storytelling. While not quite a return to form, Inside Llewyn Davis, about the trials and tribulations of a young folk singer in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961, has enough meat on its bones to sit comfortably with the rest of the Coen Brothers’ body of work.

Isaac plays down-on-his-luck folkie Davis, who has been floundering ever since his former partner took a tumble off the George Washington Bridge. He has been trying to reinvent himself as a solo artist to no avail. So Davis is the classic Coens outcast, a man who finds himself rudderless, incapable of getting on in the competitive world of folk music. Davis is a deeply flawed yet sympathetic character: even though he has messed around with his friend’s girlfriend, rising folk star Jean (Mulligan), making her pregnant, he is a man in search of fulfillment in life. He’s an itinerant, spending the film couch surfing from friend to friend. One of the recurring devices here is a ginger cat that he is tasked with looking after, who becomes his constant companion and even serves as an avatar for his elusive fame. The cameo from Coens regular John Goodman as drug-addled jazz musician Roland Turner, who Davis meets on the way out of New York City, is brief but fairly pivotal as he lends a lot of gravitas to the film. Even Justin Timberlake turns in a solid performance as Jim, folkie and husband of Jean.

The way that Inside Llewyn Davis is shot, using muted, almost painterly tones, adds to the period feel while the cinematography from Bruno Delbonnel, who hadn’t worked with the Coens before, is subtle and understated but very effective indeed. Everything is unfocused and hazy, which succeeds in giving it an almost otherworldy and nostalgic feel. The somnolence, claustrophobic interiors and monochrome naturalism, coupled with the piece’s petty pace, all achieve the desired effect – to inform Davis’s unimportance. There is a key sense of futility in what our protagonist is trying to achieve, that even though he is prepared to endure an endless journey to audition for venue owner Bud Grossman (the excellent F Murray Abraham), he is aware that the process will end in abject failure. Mirroring Davis’s life, the viewer feels more than a little trapped in the folk singer’s predicament, supplanted as he is by labyrinthine, repeating events.

The restoration here really offers viewers an immersive experience, making it feel richer and more complex. The extras including short interviews conducted while the film was in competition at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2013 do add a little extra context to the production.

Inside Llewyn Davis is an absorbing, at times beguiling experience, while Isaac makes for a highly credible central character. Despite not quite living up to their ambition, this film is set in the benighted Kafkaesque hell that is Coenworld, after all and so it mostly works for fans of their oeuvre.

It is interesting to compare and contrast these two films, made 29 years apart, to see just how far they have come as film makers.

JOEL MEADOWS

Blood Simple 4K UHD and Inside Llewyn Davis are both out now on Studio Canal