*SPOILERS FOR INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS AHEAD*
The Coen Brothers’ latest movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, ends with Bob Dylan playing a track called ‘Farewell’. I’ll get to why that’s funny in a minute.
First, though, the Coen Brothers. They’ve made a pretty good career out of telling stories about not-particularly-virtuous people being caught in spirals of indignity and injustice. There’s exceptions, obviously – The Hudsucker Proxy and True Grit aren’t really in that mould, tied instead to the narrative traditions of the screwball comedy and the western; I maintain to this day that Burn After Reading is really about Richard Jenkins’ oblivious but fundamentally decent gym manager Ted; then there’s The Dude, but he goes without saying. Overall, though, from Blood Simple to A Serious Man, the Coens have been consistently occupied with the small selfish man under siege from a world of misfortune.
And so it is with Davis. Resident in Greenwich Village, the hotbed of American folk music in the early 1960s, Oscar Isaac’s Llewyn Davis is a musician possessing of the traits the Coens frequently explore – he’s selfish, elitist, reckless, shiftless, aggressive, a bit of a prick.
But he’s also a man who feels deeply, who’s trapped in a cycle of grief and fears irrelevance, a future of couch-surfing and sets at the Gaslight Café (or worse). Isaac plays both parts of the man, the external arrogance and the internal strife, with deft skill, drawing his heartaching renditions of folk standards, like ‘Hang Me Oh Hang Me’ and ‘Fare Thee Well’, from the same emotional place as his less admirable moments.
Davis plays our knowledge of Dylan’s future success as a punchline; he’s just another casualty of the industry, a figure unthreatening enough for there to be money in him.
The film doesn’t let up on him, though – like Barton Fink or A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik, bad things just keep happening to Davis, whether he deserves them or not. The world gets in its final blows in the last scene – after Isaac’s most soulful, painfully open performance, he’s drawn outside to meet an ‘old friend’, a suited man who beats him up for heckling the night before. Meanwhile, a young man by the name of Bob Dylan takes the Gaslight stage, the start of a career Davis has spent the entire film fruitlessly pursuing.
Davis has a lot of affection for the Greenwich folk scene, its assholes and its curios (a barbershop quartet in matching white jumpers singing ‘The Auld Triangle’ is one of the bizarre highlights). But the film’s not shy about the scene’s insularity, earnestness and sketchy authenticity, and it has a particularly barbed attitude towards the industry that the Greenwich players tirelessly courted – Justin Timberlake’s more-wholesome-than-thou Jim ‘sells out’ with an absurd novelty single; much is made of record heavyweight Bud Grossman signing the equally inoffensive and slightly slow Troy Nelson; Davis’ own attempt to win over Grossman is shut down with the brutal words “I just don’t see much money in this.”
Davis plays our knowledge of Dylan’s future success as a punchline; he’s just another casualty of the industry, a figure unthreatening enough for there to be money in him. And as the Coens continue to revisit their Old Reliable narrative structure, it’s stuff like that Dylan joke that keeps it fresh – the sharp humour, the way it ties into their increasingly complex portraits of the unlucky and quixotic. Much like folk music, it’s no longer new, but it’ll never get old.
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