The All-Encompassing Art of the Folk Song

Inside Llewyn DavisDirected by Joel & Ethan Coen
Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

The great films begin small and become large. They begin with merely a story and come to see the big picture. The great ones, it has been said, always seem to be about everything. The Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” begins as an evocation of the early tremors in 1961 Greenwich Village that gave rise to the folk music renaissance of the early sixties, permanently shifting the direction of popular music, and graduates into a stunning portrait of the pains and perils of purpose. It is funny and frightening and melancholy, and permeated with moments of deep disquiet and mystery. You know, a little bit like life.

The narrative is circular, ending where it began, which is useful because it is about man who goes so far and yet seems to go nowhere at all. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a struggling folk singer in New York, solo now after his partner Mike (who is only heard and seen on an old vinyl) committed suicide. Llewyn lives on the couches of friends and acquaintances. His manager never seems to have money for him. He’s a fixture at the Gaslight Lounge (A real place, and considered integral to whatever troubling of the waters happened in Greenwich Village at the time) but not a star. His good friend’s wife is pregnant, and the child is possibly his. The early moments recall the Coen’s earlier “A Serious Man”, another film about a man adrift in a universe that seems to harbor designs against him.

Llewyn’s lifestyle denotes an air of temporariness, and we sense that he is quickly drawing near the end of its sustainability. So much of this film is centered on waiting – Llewyn waiting for the music to take off, Llewyn waiting for the royalties to come in, Llewyn waiting for Bud Grossman to get back to him about that gig in Chicago, We as an audience waiting for Llewyn to make a move. He finds himself suspended on a self-imposed knife edge of sorts, towing the line between what he refers to contemptuously as “Careerism” – succeeding as a commercially viable artist, and significance – reaching an audience and provoking a cultural paradigm shift. It is an impossible standard to keep, and it is at times tough to discern to what extent Llewyn realizes that. He does not lack for vision, but perspective may be an issue.

The film seems to change pace for a cryptic interlude that occupies much of the central act, when Llewyn hops a ride with an old jazz musician named Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his valet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund) on their way to Chicago. Turner is an overweight and sickly blowhard, Johnny an impossibly beautiful, tragic boy with James Dean hair and distant eyes and a cigarette that seems as though it had always been there. He’d used to be an actor but couldn't make it, and had resigned himself to escorting the incapacitated Turner around the country. The two assume the two sides of the precipice upon which Llewyn has placed himself – on one side self-indulgent and pretentious hedonism, on the other broken and defeated meaninglessness, a destructively stubborn persistence chasing a phantom dream.

This a beautiful movie, perhaps the most visually arresting film the Coens have made (which is saying something). They employ a palette of pastel greens and browns and grays. There are the cavernous depths of the Gaslight, where a movement of organic music was born of the soil. There is the way the streets of Greenwich Village seem to disappear into the cold, New York morning sun. There is the perfect silhouette of Llewyn Davis on an Ohio interstate, framed by headlights in the foggy twilight. Every frame assumes a sort of timeless, painterly quality. Llewyn’s dark complexion seems an extension of his landscape.

What begins as a film about folk music becomes something cosmic. Llewyn is a cryptic antihero (dare I say a folk hero?), a cipher for our headlong need for purpose, for misplaced passions, for our futile efforts to refashion the steadfast direction of society as we see it. The final moments reveal a familiar face and a familiar voice, and we sense, in a way, a world that will simultaneously barrel over Llewyn and drag him along. For Llewyn is like anyone else, beholden to the consequences of all of us, contributing, resisting, miniscule. The universe perhaps conspired against him, but he was there, in the right place at the right time, buried within the current, screaming change at a world that was changing anyway. Does this universe vindicate him or cast him aside? Or does he merely exist?