This is a review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
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16 February
This is a review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
* Contains spoilers *
It seemed inevitable that Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) would bear resemblances to Woody Allen’s 1997 film Deconstructing Harry, if not in terms of the nature of the soundtrack (the film’s title was also asked to serve as the name of the character’s debut solo album, or vice versa¹) : however, unlike Harry Block (writer’s block ?), Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) seems to come to a rather slight realization of his nature, and the film prefers to take comfort in the ploy of using one version of the film’s ending to open it, and then lead us back unawares (on which, more below), as if it is the greatest of ploys.
Either that or it is a Sisyphean world-view, which endorses both Beckettt’s choice of Giambattista Vico as a precursor of James Joyce and his then ‘Work in Progress’ (which became Finnegans Wake) and Stephen’s assertion, in Dimensions (2011):
Now, I believe that every single possible combination of events has happened already, is happening right now, and will happen again in the future
An unexpected attack (which we are made to wait to learn is for insulting someone’s wife) takes us right back to George Bailey, in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), sounding off down the phone to his daughter’s teacher, and then getting a sock in the jaw from her husband in Martini’s Bar, and there are instances where, as Bailey’s do, Davis’ meanderings go from bad to worse – just when it could not be conceived that they can : perhaps this is where the Joycean notion fits in, with Davis having his own (extended) Bloomsday (both are Jewish ?), since this film’s principal cat is called Ulysses ?
Likewise, the upsets that befall Allen’s Block (also Jewish) on his journey, and which – to a very appropriate track – even have him being led down into Hell. Of course, there will almost always be parallels, since no work, even if it aims at originality, exists in a cultural vacuum and can easily claim uniqueness. Whereas, to provide a background to the cat’s reappearance (and, perhaps, to dispel the whiff of the end of the same year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)), The Coen Brothers seem unable to resist invoking The Incredible Journey (1963) with its Disney animals travelling 200 miles across Canada, even if blows the idea that we are really in 1961…
In Inside, though, the cat (the wrong cat) has no choice about travelling, and we are also in the territory of On The Road (2012), its particular company of grotesques as travelling companions being a driver grunting monosyllables or John Goodman’s forthright, stick-wielding jazzer. The contrast with Davis is unmistakeable – Roland Turner is an established artist, and, as so many of the great jazzers were, can afford to be a monster, unimpressed by Davis’ three-chord tunes, and probably, for Davis, sufficient reason to strand him in the car when the driver gets pulled in².
The nomadic life of Davis even reminds of that of Frances Ha (2012), down to the fact that his Chicago is her Paris, his Mike her Sophie (she goes to Tokyo, rather than dying). As with Frances vaguely hoping to meet a friend in Paris (to substitute for Sophie ?), it simply does not bear thinking about why Davis does not post his LP to Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), in case it went astray : for, when he has got himself there with Grossman in Chicago, other than a foolish crack about ‘That’ll be five dollars’ when he hands over the record, Davis seems to have nothing prepared.
As Davis is ‘in the business’, one might think that he would not just have no notion that Grossman is likely to want to hear something or what that ought to be, rather than expecting him to be impressed by being handed yet another record (this is where we learn its title). This half-hearted Davis is the same person makes bold claims to his sister about understanding the music industry when she shows him some embarrassing early recording that he wants to disown.
One might as well turn up for an audition or screen-test without having thought through some of the things that one might be asked to do (as in the embarrassing audition scene in Staub auf unseren Herzen (2012)) – Davis sings well enough³, but he has chosen something that comes from (or sounds as though it does) the older tradition of folk song. Given that he did even know what he was going to perform until he started, he has scarcely calculated his opening gambit, by knowing his audience, in trying to get coverage or representation from Grossman.
In these respects, the meeting, though the song is pleasant enough, mirrors the trouble that Neo, in The Matrix (1999), has to go to reach The Architect, only to find that doing so was only an intermediate goal, and to be told that, after all, he is not The One : yet Davis seems to ingest fully what he is told, and it is only one of his own booby-traps that prevents him going back to sea. As a slice of life, do we believe that he then had a good gig and, despite being beaten up, things are on the up ? Maybe, maybe not, but do we care any more ?
For we have seen the rumpus that he caused at The Gorfeins’⁴ when, perhaps through grief at being reminded of his partner Mike Timlin’s death or perhaps at recalling his loss of a meal-ticket (since Grossman declares him not a frontman), he violently challenges Lillian Gorfein harmonizing ‘Fare Thee Well’ and petulantly objects to the idea of having been asked to give a song at all – not as if he had not (thought they do not know it) lost their cat, and, as it turns out, brought them someone else’s.
In the scene immediately after her screaming ‘Where’s its scrotum ?’, he is seen, as if he does not have wits to do anything else with it, getting into the car bound for Chicago with it – when he first lost Ulysses, he did not have any notion of what to do (with the problem that he had created, allegedly humorously) other than take it across town to Jim and Jean’s⁵. Definitely plot driving character, for, however much fun it is to see him with the cat and people’s responses to that situation, he did not seek far for solutions, let alone where the time goes (unless he rose very late) between leaving The Gorfeins’, leaving the cat at Jim and Jean’s (as if he can, just because he has the need), seeing his agent Mel, and arriving to be confronted with Jean’s hostility.
Reading between the lines of her anger, and her affront at his saying that ‘It takes two to tango’, Davis seems to have forced himself upon her (maybe worse), which later, when she (Carey Mulligan) is on stage with Jim (Justin Timberlake) at The Gaslight Café, he brags about : no other explanation seems likely to explain what she says about Davis.
In Frances Ha, she smacks of something like borderline personality disorder (which therapy can help, and so make the ending less implausible), whereas, with Davis, it could be something in the nature of narcissistic personality disorder, which may be less amenable to change.
At any rate, Davis is not very likeable, he seems to have the same vividly dark beard without ever needing to groom it, and expects the world to revolve around him (he has paid his back dues, but seems to think that, having settled the debt, he can just ask for it back), to the extent that he is always after favours, and blames his sister for his lack of thought when she throws out his box of things when he tells her to.
There are nice touches with him thinking that he has found the cat again, with learning later why Jean is angry with him, and with Pappi claiming that Jean slept with him to get Davis a slot, but they are not enough to support the piece, or its structure. And does even this have significance ? : as against at the beginning (where it finishes with 'Hang me, oh hang me' (Trad., arr. Isaac & Burnett), at the end of the film, Davis concludes his set with a further song, ‘Fare Thee Well’ (Trad., arr. Mumford, Isaac & Burnett), the song that he recorded with his former musical partner Timlin. Also, unlike the opening version of the attack, which ends with him on the floor, he is shown staggering to the top of the alleyway after he has been attacked, and seeing the man get into a cab. He mutters to himself – is it in some recognition that, at some level, he deserved what happened for his coarse heckling of the man’s wife ?
On balance, for depth, balance and musicality, another film about a musician who has a lack of empathy and warmth is far more compelling than this one, Daniel Auteuil in Un Cœur en Hiver (1992), and without the gimmicks or the feeling of being derivative.
Post-script
An interestingly negative review, somehow classified by www.rottentomatoes.com as 'fresh' when it is 'rotten' to the core (not that tomatoes have cores), is by Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman. Mark Kermode's review, in The Observer, also has criticisms to level, but maybe giving 3* counts as being positive...
End-notes
¹ Calling a film Inside Llewyn Davis offers the obvious prospect of getting under the skin of a man with a made-up Christian name (as far as one can tell), but, when one realizes that it is the exercise in PR that is an album-title, maybe one lets go a little of such expectations…
² As if he would be, without resolving the problem that had led to his arrest of the vehicle being inappropriately stopped…
³ Unlike some of the other numbers, where the disjunction between the full-stereo studio sound and the visible acoustic makes one aware of the artificiality, this sounded to be miked / recorded fairly naturally. That said, the songs are, apart from providing the background to the realized image from the poster of a guy loping around with a cat, really the best thing about the film.
⁴ Who seem enlightened in their willingness to entertain not only contact with him a matter of days later – but they are supposed to be intellectuals, who do not bear grudges – but also to put him up again.
Then again, at The Gaslight, Pappi is not an intellectual, but allows back as a performer a man whom he had thrown out the night before.
⁵ He keeps trotting out, as if this both explains and excuses his behaviour, that it is not his cat, it is The Gorfeins' cat.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
