Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Directed by Joel Coen
In Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, gifted but volatile folk musician Llewyn Davis struggles with money, relationships, and his uncertain future.
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23 films that influenced Inside Llewyn Davis
What critics say influenced Inside Llewyn Davis
There are other films where the intensity of being inside someone is delivered: in so many Robert Bresson films—like Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket—we inhabit the spiritual suspense of the central characters.
There are other films where the intensity of being inside someone is delivered: in so many Robert Bresson films—like Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket—we inhabit the spiritual suspense of the central characters.
It's maybe the first Coen Bros. film that seems to settle into sampler territory — it has the frustrated creative protagonist from Barton Fink , the Odyssey references and period-music revivalism of O Brother, Where Art Thou? , the John Goodman character role from, well, several of 'em.
From a distance, this feature by Joel and Ethan Coen might resemble the brothers' 1991 farce Barton Fink: like the earlier movie, it evokes a specific showbiz milieu (Greenwich Village in the early 60s) as it follows an aspiring artist (a down-and-out folkie played by Oscar Isaac) who's based on a real-life figure (singer-guitarist Dave Van Ronk).
Turturro starred as another sort of Jew in Barton Fink, which, set in 1941, staged a virtual death match between two then potent stereotypes—the vulgar Hollywood mogul and the arty New York communist—without any hint that their minstrel show battle royale was occurring at the acme of worldwide anti-Semitism.
Despite the burnished setting in a place that actually existed, “Inside Llewyn Davis” has a hellishly surreal quality that recalls the Coens’ “Barton Fink,” which also featured an ominous, narrow hallway.
But the story of B-list folkie Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) plays out as a quintessentially Coen-esque fable, reminiscent of their darkly funny character studies Barton Fink and A Serious Man .
Narratively it seems to suggest a meeting point between the nightmarish, existential and creative struggles of Barton Fink and the old-timey Southern folk vernacular of O Brother, Where Art Thou? , but that doesn’t even begin to capture the misty, lovely melancholia evoked here.
There is also an orange cat who becomes a prominent character, including a road trip, that made me suspect that the Coens brothers were paying sly tribute to the 1970s road trip film Harry and Tonto.
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Written by the Coens, the film is also a kind of mash-up of the 1963 Disney kiddie film “The Incredible Journey,” a tale of two dogs and a cat, and the 2011 PBS documentary “The Legends of Folk: The Village Scene.”
The movie definitely takes the romance out of living in Greenwich Village in the old days; its set in 1961, not even a decade after the events of Paul Mazurskys wistful memoir Next Stop, Greenwich Village, but the winter air is thick with the desperation of the talented to break out.
A road trip later in the picture offers a change of pace, but this is a slice of life of one of many trying to make it on the folk circuit, and the Coens capture every detail, acknowledging their fondness for their era, while being able to laugh at it as well (though without getting as broad as Christopher Guest's "A Mighty Wind," the last major folk movie).
Folk music is beautiful wherever it is sung, even in the kind of homogenized, commercial versions looked down on by Davis (and gently mocked in “A Mighty Wind”).
While there’s humour to be found in the various depictions of folk music in the film, it’s no A Mighty Wind, and the patience afforded to showcasing Isaac’s several, stirring, heart-stopping performances conveys sincerity and respect on the Coens’ part.
While the musical influence may remind audiences of the great O Brother Where Art Thou and the pitch black humor is in the same vein as A Serious Man , Inside Llewyn Davis is unlike anything the directors have made and is a phenomenal piece of art.
But the story of B-list folkie Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) plays out as a quintessentially Coen-esque fable, reminiscent of their darkly funny character studies Barton Fink and A Serious Man .
For me it was more reminiscent of “A Serious Man,” one of the Coens’ smaller examinations of misery and unhappiness, but a brilliant one.
At the end of the day, there’s not really much thematic difference between Llewyn and Larry Gopnik, the put-upon suburban Job of A Serious Man.
The urge to play capricious deity is occasionally suppressed, but it’s striking that with regard to A Serious Man , the movie they considered their most personal, Ethan Coen bragged or confessed that “the fun of the story for us was inventing new ways to torture” their Job-like anti-hero, Larry Gopnik.
Why make a movie about Llewyn (or Barton Fink, or Larry Gopnik, the mathematician non-hero of A Serious Man)?
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This is a device unworthy of the brothers’ usual ingenuity, though it does link Inside Llewyn Davis to another 1961 pop-cultural artifact: the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which the true soulmate of Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) is a cat named Cat.
With his thick, unruly black hair and scruffy beard, he evokes Lenny Bruce and Al Pacino circa Serpico—countercultural touchstones.
He wins our hearts as the down-and-out Llewyn, and his dark, soulful eyes, akin to Al Pacino circa “Serpico” or Bruce Springsteen on the cover of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” tell us that something deeper is simmering beneath the surface.