Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

It's like a gust of wind that never stops. I was altered, disturbed and amused by the clarity of this poets. From Joel and Ethan to Bruno Delbonnel, Oscar Isaac, to T Bone Burnett and everyone who enters, even for an instant, this sublime, unique, startling P.O.V. Aware but never condescending to the audience. No explanation as to why this story deserved to be told. The answers are private, deeply personal, enlightening and, at times, chillingly transparent. The face of Oscar Isaac, my God! For me one of the most enthralling discoveries of 2013. At times it reminded me of an updated character in an Italian Neo-realistic film, others one of those images from one of Martin Donovan's sessions. I sat through Inside Llewyn Davis twice in a row. I can't wait to repeat the experience soon again.

Fmovies: Inside Llewyn Davis is a hard film to quantify. It is very much a Coen Brothers movie, and it is very much its own thing. I did not know the history of the story. I did not know the story behind the Gaslight club in New York nor did I know of the famous figure who started at the bar back in 1961 when the film takes place. I found out after the film was over. However, not knowing that, I still thought this was an incredible movie.

There are oddly poetic scenes in the film. There is a scene where the main character Llewyn Davis hits a cat with his car. As he watches the cat limp away into the darkness injured, I felt that it was an interesting image that seemed to mirror Llewyn's life in the film. Although I was aware of the poetic aspect of the film, I did not feel that they were forced moments. In interviews the Coen Brothers always seem to play dumb. In an interview for this film the Coen Brothers talked about the cat in the movie, and how they didn't know what to do with the story, so they threw in a cat. Anybody who has seen a Coen Brothers movie can appreciate that this is far from the truth. Every moment and image seems to be very specifically placed, and that was the case for this movie as well.

You can't judge this movie the same way you would judge every other film this year. It's almost as if the Coen Brothers have their own language that they are speaking, that the audience does not fully understand. We catch some things, and even with those few moments, I was mesmerized. Sometimes I really notice their style like in their film A Serious Man, and I find myself confused and bored, but this film felt very true to me. I sympathized with the main character and his struggles, perhaps because I consider myself a creative person as well, so I know how hard it is. At one point Llewyn says, "I'm just so f-ing tired," this line says a lot more than just I want to sleep. It is something we can all relate to, a feeling of just wanting to give up, and in this way, the story is a universal one, but then again it's the Coen Brothers, so automatically I know some people might not like it, but I loved it.

At some point of this the folk singer we've been following is stranded at night by the side of the road in a car with possibly a dead man and a cat, another man has just been arrested by police for not much of a reason. He gets out to hitch a ride and there's only a cold, indifferent night with strangers in their cars just going about.

This is the worldview the Coens have been prodding, sometimes for a laugh, sometimes not. I can't fault them, it does seem to be inexplicably cold out there some nights. They're thinkers first of all, intellectuals, so it stings them more so they try to think up ways of mocking that thinker who is stung by the cold to amuse themselves and pass the night.

So this is what they give us here. A joyless man for no particular reason, who plays decent music that people enjoy or not for no particular reason, who the universe has turned against. The Coens don't pretend to have any particular answer either of why this is, why the misery. It might have something to do with having lost a friend, something to do with not having learned to be simply grateful for a small thing. It might have something to do with something he did, the initial beating up in the alley is there to insert this. Sometimes it's just something that happens as random as a cat deciding to step out of the door and the door closing before you can put it back in. Most of the time it all kind of snowballs together.

It's a noir device (the beating - cat) bundling guilt with chance so we'll end up with a clueless schmuck whose own contribution to the nightmare is inextricable from the mechanics of the world. The Coens have mastered noir so they trot it here with ease: the more this anti-Dude fails to ease into life the more noir anomaly appears around him.

Of course the whole point is that it's not such a bad setup; people let him crash in their apartment, a friend finds him a paying gig, somehow he ends up on a car to Chicago where he's offered a job. It's not great either, but somewhere in there is a pretty decent life it could all amount to, provided he settles for less than his dream. (This means here a dream the self is attached to). I saw this after a documentary on backup singers, all of them profoundly troubled for having settled for less, all of them nonetheless happy to be able to do their music.

Still, 'The incredible journey', seen on the Disney poster, may in the end amount to no more than an instinctive drive through miles of wilderness. The Coens are cold here even for their standards. I wouldn't be surprised to find it was Ethan, the more introverted of the two, ruminating on a meaningless art without his partner.

Is there a way out in the end? Here's the trickiest part, especially for an intelligent mind. You can't just kid yourself with any other happiness like Hollywood has done since Chaplin. You know it has to be invented to some degree, the point of going on, yet truthful. Nothing here. More music, a reflection. It's the emptiest part of the film as if they didn't know themselves what to construct to put him back on stage. Visually transcending was never their forte anyway. They merely end up explaining the wonderful noir ambiguity of that first beating.

Still they are some of the most dependable craftsmen we have and in the broader Coen cosmos this sketches its own space.

Inside Llewyn Davis fmovies. There have been movies made about musicians, both real and imagined, from End of the Century through I'm Not There, taking in The Future is Unwritten and A Mighty Wind. We've had almost every conceivable approach, from straight-up documentary through imagined version of events as well as completely invented bands, singers, songs, and concerts. Yet, I don't think that anyone has ever managed to do what the Coen Brothers have produced with this tragic, comedic, touching piece.

Which is to essentially transport you into the grooves of an LP, Inside Llewyn Davies, and bring you a beautifully realised portrayal of the eponymous hero as he trudges his weary way through the greys and greens of Greenwich Village in a cold New York. And it is so reminiscent of the experience of listening to your favourite vinyl album from track one, side one to the final track of side two, whilst curling up on the couch with a cat in your lap, listening to a selection of melodic, melancholic, traditional, and new folk music.

The music binds this movie together and Oscar Issac inhabits the title role in a world-weary way that aches with ennui and longs for something never expressed. We follow his tramping travails through a range of vignettes that build subtly towards creating a quite compelling picture of the man behind the music. He sometimes does what we expect and at other junctures, veers off in a mad new direction. There is little explanation for any of the decisions that he does, or doesn't, take. He's searching without any clear idea of the quest.

Along the way, we meet a wonderfully diverse bunch of supporting characters, from the biting Jean, acerbic tongue and acid looks, through the snoring bully Roland Turner and his valet Johnny Five, as well as Mitch and Lilian, the Upper West posh couple, but especially Ulysses, our hero's apparent companion over the week (or was s/he?). They all offer opportunities to understand Davies' psyche slightly more, albeit admitting that not even he appears to be fully cognisant himself.

It's a lovely looking film, beautifully shot and much more enjoyable that I would have believed possible from watching the trailer previously. T Bone Burnett has done a sterling job on the soundtrack, it's so affecting and the way that the songs are all allowed to play out saw the audience in the cinema in which I saw this mainly remaining seated through the end credits as well. Which brings me back to the vinyl album sensation. You don't pick up the needle when your favorite record is playing the final track, because you want to get on with something else instead. No. You let it run right to the end of the groove and then your heart fills with an equal mixture of pleasure and joy, sorrow and sighs, as the last bars fade to quiet and all that's gone before becomes a memory that's so strong and so addictive that you want to turn it over and put the needle back into the groove all over again.

This movie is precisely like that sensation and I loved it, from first frame to last. A quiet understated tragi-comedy, dark in places, and shadowy in others, but with a humanity and a compassion that you cannot avert our gaze from. Hell, it's even got a coda of a scene to be dealing with, which at the end takes your mind back to the start of the production and forces one to reexamine what has just passed before your eyes. Recommended.

Saw the prescreening at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, MI with average expectations, this is my reaction:

This film is an experience, but not for any sort of superficial special effects, action or CGI. It's an experience in which you will feel fear, joy, hate, hope, sorrow and contempt all within an hour and 45 minutes that feels more like 15 minutes. We are sidelined, watching a short snippet of Llewyn's seemingly dismal life, drudge on by, yet we are drawn. We connect with Lleywn's anger and struggles, as if we too are burdened by his failures and challenges. But amongst the bad, there are moments of cheer, and laughter and peace reminding us that good still exists. What dominates is power, balanced by music, money and pride, yet this movie is better served as a reminder that life is an experience, and individualistic. We are reminded that more often than not, things do not fall into place and luck is rarely on our side. But no matter how many times people fail you, one should never fail, before one's self. This movie is an experience, it indirectly breaths life into each of our souls, and should appeal to anyone in touch with the most crucial human emotions: compassion and empathy. Hold on tight, because it is one experience that will remain with you long after the credits are through. Perfectly casted, perfectly scripted, perfectly filmed; perfectly entertaining.

Inside Llewyn Davis is an intimate, well-executed, and honest slice of life. It features a humanistic, heartfelt performance by Oscar Isaac as the titular folk singer, arresting cinematography, and a sharp, tight-fisted script by the Coen brothers, who also directed.

It's Greenwich Village in the early sixties, when folk music was either coming into its own or ready to be usurped by a more mainstream genre. Llewyn has no home, drifting from gig to gig and crashing on couch after couch as a matter of design; is vagrancy is his life's plan. Llewyn is at turns a noble soul who exists for the sake of making the music he wants to make and a resentful twerp who mooches off friends just to sustain his unsustainable lifestyle.

The movie is only somewhat linear, with closing scenes mirroring opening scenes, and it is told entirely from Llewyn's point of view. The Coen brothers masterfully show us not only Llewyn's perspective but also an outside perspective; this allows us to feel both empathy and loathing toward him.

Llewyn is nothing if not complex. The movie does a terrific job of avoiding the usual clichés, such as a down-on-his-luck musician catching a lucky break, or a bitter man having a quick change of heart. It's not that Llewyn is constantly sneering at everyone, holding his poverty up as both a shield and a trophy, it's that he is so multilayered that when he does a kind act or offers some praise or thanks, we don't feel that his doing so is in any way out of character. Llewyn is a self-tortured soul, but unlike caricatures of wandering folkies, he is at his center a realist, albeit a prideful one.

During his travels and travails, Llewyn encounters people ranging from the genuine (his singing friends Jim and Jean, played by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan) to the absurd (a rotund, blustery John Goodman). Oh, and a cat that travels with Llewyn - at least until he can get him or her back to the owner. The encounters with the genuine folks feel just as normal as if you or I encountered them; those with the more absurd of the lot feel perfectly surreal, and when they do end one almost wonders if we've all imagined the encounters through Llewyn himself.

The music is beautiful and moving. Isaac himself performs Llewyn's songs, with a sweet, vulnerable voice that offers a touch of soul to Llewyn's otherwise-bleak surroundings. When Llewyn is really on, you can feel his pain leap right off the screen into your brain; when he appears to be going through the motions and not singing from his heart, you can feel the lack of depth that his intended audience also feels. Isaac is just flat-out terrific.

Ultimately, it is Isaac and the music that push this film into the territory of great cinema. The story itself is stark, moody, unyielding - just like a New York City winter, really. And the movie, like Llewyn's own life, appears to have no point - except to illustrate just how pointless Llewyn is making his life, through his stubborn marriage to his craft and a desire to stay uprooted