By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.8 cats
Director: Ethan Coen | Joel Coen
Starring: Adam Driver | Carey Mulligan | Garrett Hedlund | John Goodman | Justin Timberlake | Oscar Isaac
Country: france, united_states
Year: 2013
Running time: 105
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2042568/combined
Lorraine says: “Coen Brothers’ newest. About a folk musician trying to make it in 1961. Fabulous cast and musicians. Traditional songs and ones written for the film. Music performed live on set. Strong performances.
“Loved that we are allowed to stay in whole songs. Beautifully shot. On film. Production design very strong.
”I’ve always loved folk music so really loved the music.
”Full house in Austin loved the music and filled the Paramount Theatre with laughter along the way. 5 cats”
Jason says: “INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, early on, shapes up to be the story of a house cat who escapes into a world of adventure that the title character can only see as frustration. That’s not the direction that Joel & Ethan Coen wind up going most of the time, but it still isn’t a bad way to look at it- there’s a lot of wandering, human and feline, that does have more purpose than you might have expected by the end.
“Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a folk singer in 1961 New York, formerly part of a duo but now on his own. That’s not going so hot; not only does he get punched out after a set for things he’d said the night before, but he doesn’t have a place of his own to go after that, winding up in the spare bedroom of Professor Mitch Gorfein (Ethan Phillips) – and accidentally locking himself and the Gorfeins’ cat out when he leaves. His next stop is Jean (Carey Mulligan), who is very angry to possibly be carrying his baby rather than that of her fantastically sweet boyfriend and musical partner Jim (Justin Timberlake). From there, it’s a long few days of cat-chasing, couch-surfing, and driving to Chicago, starting to wonder if this is the life he wants.
“Even though this film is set up to poke at Llewyn Davis’s brain and see what makes him tick at a potentially pivotal moment in his life, he is not necessarily a problem to be solved here. In fact, while it’s not necessarily obvious at most points of the story, there’s an interesting commitment to apparently getting nowhere to the way the Coens plot this: It’s not just that the script breaks down into chapters where the characters don’t overlap despite one setting another up directly; it’s the way Llewyn moves through the story. Sometimes he will wander into a new situation with almost no reason for him to be there, and the connection to what has happened before will seem weak even after it is revealed; other times the Coens will take a chained series of events that other writers would be proud of and quietly undercut any sense of accomplishment. The movie never stops, and the characters don’t necessarily move, but it never feels like they’re out of sync.
“One thing that obviously contributes to that is the cast of actors and characters that the Coens rotate through the move to play against Llewyn. None of the quirky characters hang around long enough to wear out their welcome, and the performances are all kind of great: Carey Mulligan, for instance, spends a lot of time playing Jean as a constant stream of anger that could become so abrasive that the way she’s hitting every funny beat in the script wouldn’t matter, but she captures the reason for that anger carefully, so that when her more appealing nature reveals itself, it doesn’t have the feeling of a contradiction. There’s a sequence with Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver that is sung-comedy gold, while Stark Sands provides a great contrast to Davis in his small part. John Goodman gets a showy part that he does great things with, and the likes of Ethan Phillips and F. Murray Abraham are just as perfectly cast. Some folks excel in the way they seem to do very little at all.
“They’re all working off Oscar Isaac, of course, and he is more than capable of holding the enterprise together. There’s a weight on Davis, even if he does put much of it on his own back, and Isaac is able to put a layer of sadness underneath Davis’s tendency toward being a jerk. There’s an isolation to the character, often expressed as self-centeredness, but what’s perhaps most impressive is the way he interacts with the other characters; there’s not much warmth to how he plays off those he knows from before the start of the movie compared to the ones he’s meeting for the first time, but the familiarity is there.
“And he works pretty well with the cats, although you never know how much of that is the trainer finding which one of the similar-looking orange cats has the best attitude for the shot. Some of the most memorable shots involve the cat, though – a low-angle shot of him walking around like he owns the place, or an impressively emotional shot toward the end. As usual, the Coens get a lot of mileage out of the things that surround the plot, stitching together moments of observation and deadpan humor. They have the help of a great team: Bruno Delbonnel photographs a beautiful movie, for instance, and T-Bone Burnett helps them put together a soundtrack that ties the film together without often directly commenting on the action.
“Despite the fact that this will be filed away by most viewers as a ‘Coen Brothers Movie’ even though Oscar Isaac’s performance is fairly noteworthy and the subject matter is a genre of its own, I haven’t said much about Joel & Ethan Coen’s direct contributions, and in a way that speaks well of both their skills as filmmakers and this film in particular: Inside Llewyn Davis is saturated with their personality, but it also stands quite well on its own as a film rather than the collage of quirk and nostalgia that such iconoclastic filmmakers could easily have delivered. 5 cats
“Seen 7 November 2013 at the Brattle Theatre (preview, DCP)”
Lorraine responds: “At the screening I saw during the Austin Film Festival there was a Q&A with Oscar Isaac. We learned there were MANY cats. Only one was chilled out and easy to work with, according to Oscar Isaac. And one very unhappy one was tied to him for the scene where he runs down into the subway. Actor and cat both unhappy. Very clearly no cats were harmed during filming but there can be no such statement regarding actors.
“More interesting, T Bone Burnett has been a Coen brothers fan since he saw clockwork orange graffiti in the bathroom during scene where guys clean up after prison break in RAISING ARIZONA. So that collaboration was years in the making and a huge element in the film.
“Oscar Isaac and T Bone Burnett collaborated on some of the original songs.”
Chris says: “With few exceptions, Joel and Ethan Coen rarely make something expected of them, so a project centered on the early ‘60s Greenwich Village folk scene and one of its struggling (fictional) talents doesn’t seem so much a departure. Still, this is by far the gentlest, dare I say most affectionate thing they’ve done, surveying and almost longing for a long lost era… but don’t call it nostalgia. The titular ‘hero’ is a talent worth rooting for, but he’s also often boorish, a nebbish, unmotivated and self-sabotaging, even though his heart’s (usually) in the right place. The character wouldn’t work without an actor as nimble and assured, as likable and arguably unknown as Oscar Isaac—like the series of cats Davis cares for throughout, Isaac carries the film. He serves as the focal point from dual perspectives of everyman and the man who never made it. By expressing himself so vividly in his art, you believe Davis really had something to say, even though he sang other people’s songs. As late-period Coen Bros go, the darker, funnier, bolder A SERIOUS MAN is still their peak; this is almost its B-side, full of the same nihilism and absurdity, but more soulful and contemplative. 4.5 cats”