Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, Justin Timberlake, F. Murray Abraham, Stark Sands, Jeanine Serralles, Adam Driver, Ethan Phillips, Alex Karpovsky, Max Casella, Benjamin Pike.
Inside Llewyn Davis may as well be subtitled, How to fall in love with the Coen Brothers again. Joel and Ethan Coen, never short of a brilliant idea it seems and certainly never suffering from an attack of the cinema graphic nerves, return to form with this wonderful and enlightening film which takes a look at the exploding Folk scene that made Greenwich village the place to be in New York after the pain and suffering of World War Two. The peddlers of a kind of truth in which pessimism, distrust of the Government and suspicion of the what the future would hold reflect the natural elegance in which films such as the brilliant O’ Brother Where Art Thou and The Big Lebowski made the Coen Brothers the film makers they are.
If a week is a long time in politics, then for a struggling Folk musician who is dealing with the death of his music partner, a habit of getting his friend’s wives pregnant and the lack of exposure, then a week is an eternity and yet throughout it all this discontented and disconnected struggling musician, for all his obnoxious behaviour, manages to make the audience go along with him on the journey, the unobtainable always kept out of sight from both the audience and Llewyn Davis.
Oscar Isaac’s captures the part of the angry and frustrated Llewyn Davis perfectly. The need to be true to his calling and yet not seeing beyond the thought of instant success and the requirement to have a wider audience who will buy into his music so that he can stop bumming a place to sleep, a cigarette to smoke or even a meal and most of all to stop the thought of having to be around people he doesn’t even truly like, is etched all over the actor’s face as the film continues in its narrative. It is a role, no matter the artistic calling anybody might feel, be it art, music or theatre, that any performer and those who love being in their company might recognise.
The interplay between Oscar Isaac and the obnoxious Roland Turner, played by the superb John Goodman on absolute sparkling form, sees the music scene that divided the artistic nature that New York faced. A music civil war in which Jazz, long after the commercial heyday of 77th Street, felt the need to teach the post-war bleakness and cynicism that they perceived Folk to offer in its dominion around Greenwich Village a lesson. The journey the two undertake to get to Chicago is one that is riven in strife, antagonism and borderline hatred as the two genres battled it out for something that would disappear itself in another decade, it is entertainingly uncomfortable and compelling to witness.
With some great performances by Britain’s Carey Mulligan, a very cool Justin Timberlake perhaps in a more natural environment rather than the feeling of being miscast and lost in action films, Stark Sands as the very talented but regimented army lance Corporal and the aforementioned John Goodman, it is a cast that gets the whole melancholic and inwardly comforting approach to film making that the Coen brothers bring to cinema.
Inside Llewyn Davis is a touching, absorbing film that fills a void in the sometimes oversaturated gloss offered by other films in the life of New York’s music scene, the stark reality in which so many talented artists find as they go from gig to gig, never quite being noticed for what they offer in a market that is full and overflowing and in which there are still too many people willing to stop at home rather than go out of their front door and take in the heart and soul of another person’s thoughts and ability.
Ian D. Hall