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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Ten Part Three

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11 years ago

March 7, 2016

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Pulling At The Heart Strings

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Earlier today we took a look at their fourteenth film A Serious Man (2009) and their fifteenth effort True Grit (2010) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their sixteenth and most recent film up to this year’s Hail, Caesar!, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).

Inside Llewyn Davis

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman

Three years after the lacklustre True Grit, period drama Inside Llewyn Davis saw the Coens keen to return to elliptical narratives and opaque, withdrawn storytelling.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 boyfriend 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.

Inside Llewyn Davis is an absorbing, at times beguiling experience, while Isaac makes for a highly credible central character. There’s clearly a lot more ambition here than was evident in the perfunctory True Grit, but then this film is set in the benighted Kafkaesque hell that is Coenworld, after all. Not as memorable as A Serious Man but it did show that the Coens still had their artistic integrity very much intact.

JOEL MEADOWS