Folk, Felines And Failure In The Coen Bros’ Inside Llewyn Davis
The cult directors look at selling out and dropping out in their new film.
Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a loser. A mean, snobbish loser. A hopeless non-possessor of life skills. A crafty, cynical exploiter of friends and acquaintances. A failure as a son, brother and father. As his sometime lover Jean (Carey Mulligan) rages, “Everything you touch turns to shit. You’re like King Midas’s idiot brother.”
Loosely based on Greenwich Village folk fixture Dave Van Ronk (who narrowly missed out on being in Peter, Paul and Mary), Llewyn is a struggling folk singer who was once part of an up-and-coming duo. But his musical partner Mike has killed himself, and Llewyn’s solo debut album Inside Llewyn Davis is selling so poorly he’s reduced to crashing on friends’ couches.
Cinema loves to suggest that mavericks succeed if they maintain their moral integrity amid corruption and capitulation. That holy fools transform the lives of the ordinary folk they encounter. That spectacular failure can be as honourable as success. And that love will save the day. Real failure — the cheap, mundane kind we know and fear — is much less glamorous.
And as Joel and Ethan Coen chronicle a week in Llewyn’s life in February 1961, he’s cruising for just this sort of failure. This beautifully acted, gorgeously crafted, richly symbolic film is unforgettable because Llewyn’s struggle isn’t to avert failure, but to accept it. “Au revoir,” he murmurs ironically in the film’s final moments. But to what, or whom?
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The Sisyphus of Greenwich Village
Because Inside Llewyn Davis contains so many diegetic songs — almost all recorded live in single takes — and because its music producer T-Bone Burnett had previously worked on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, it’s being compared to the Coens’ Depression-era odyssey. But the brothers have always deployed genre and setting in the service of mood. Inside Llewyn Davis shares its elegiac DNA and its creeping sense of imminent crisis with Barton Fink and especially A Serious Man.
Llewyn is like Sisyphus, the deceitful king punished by the gods by being made to roll a heavy boulder up a hill every day for eternity, only to watch it roll back down. The very structure of the film shows Llewyn’s life going round in circles, looping from an opening scene in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse to its reiteration at the end.
He defines a folk song as something that “was never new, and it never gets old.” Performed and recorded over and over by different artists, the songs travel round and round. But they aren’t taking Llewyn anywhere. Instead, he is circling a drain.
By contrast, his clean-cut friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) — Jean’s husband and creative partner — has happily sold out by penning an irresistibly corny novelty song, and has kindly invited Llewyn to the recording studio as a session player.
It’s the most A Mighty Wind moment in the film. My friends and I can’t stop singing “Uh-oh!” like Al Cody (Adam Driver), the urban Jew who affects a cowboy schtick.
While Inside Llewyn Davis takes place in a music scene about to go mainstream, it’s not just about folk music. Llewyn could be anyone who aims for posterity, but condemns themselves to obscurity by refusing to do things differently. As the clichéd maxim has it, expecting success from within a rut is the definition of insanity.
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Save The Cat!
O Brother, Where Art Thou was inspired by Ulysses, the ancient Greek trickster striving to find his way home. Here, Ulysses is a ginger cat belonging to Llewyn’s friends Mitch (Ethan Phillips) and Lillian Gorfein (Robin Bartlett), an ageing academic couple in whose comfortable apartment he crashes.
Llewyn ends up toting the ginger cat around New York, then on a road trip to audition for Chicago folk impresario Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), car-pooling with cantankerous jazzman Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his morose beat-poet chauffeur Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund, who is surely stunt-cast here on the back of his role in On The Road).
For me, that cat is the film’s most evocative and poignant symbol. I can’t describe how anxious I was about the welfare of this oddly stoic animal while watching the film. There’s a tantalising suggestion that it plays a mystical role in Llewyn’s life: that he’s somehow choosing his fate by the way he treats it. If Llewyn can safeguard it throughout his travels, he secures a homecoming.
The Simon and Garfunkel song ‘Homeward Bound’ — recorded in 1965, when the folk music revival was hitting its peak — seems uncannily to reflect his predicament:
Tonight I’ll sing my songs again
I’ll play the game and pretend
But all my words come back to me
In shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony
I need someone to comfort me
The harmony in Llewyn and Mike’s signature song, the folk standard ‘Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)’, is empty after Mike’s suicide. In one fraught scene, Llewyn chastises poor Lillian Gorfein for daring to fill it in; in the ensuing fight, he storms out of the apartment, taking the cat.
As well as the absent Mike, the cat and its promise of homecoming seem linked to Akron, Ohio, where Llewyn’s ex-girlfriend is now living. And it circles around Jean. After she’s grudgingly agreed to let it into her apartment, her gaze falls implacably on Llewyn as she sings, “Lord, I can’t go back home this ole way.” She’s there when the cat escapes, and when Llewyn recaptures it.
Death and loss are often treated sardonically in Coen films, but here they are a kind of dreamy, bittersweet ache pervading everything, like mist beside a lonely highway. Whenever Llewyn picks up a guitar, he comes alive… but he’s singing of bereavement. “Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone,” he sings in the opening scene. And for his climactic Chicago audition, he chooses the personally resonant ‘The Death Of Queen Jane’.
What makes this film so haunting is its ambiguity. I’m still not sure whether Llewyn, like Sisyphus, will become trapped in a hell of his own making, or if he’ll get the homecoming he desires. None of us are ever sure if this is the end, until it is.
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Inside Llewyn Davis is now showing in cinemas nationally.
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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She is the founding editor of online pop culture magazine The Enthusiast. Her debut book, Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion and Fit, is out now.