 |
| Winter is coming for Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis. |
««« Inside Llewyn Davis. Written by Joel &
Ethan Coen. Directed by Ethan & Joel Coen. At select theaters.
In America, artists
succeed wholesale but fail retail. While the winners are more or less public
property—the "break-out stars" and the "sleeper hits" and
the celebrities on the road to "inevitable" stardom—we more or less
only encounter failure on an individual basis. On one hand, we all squeal and
adore Taylor Swift, and on the other we vaguely recall that cousin who almost
made it onto American Idol but
didn't, or the former classmate who washed out of film school, or that uncle
who quit his job to write a novel that never found a publisher. Depending on
your level of cynicism, it's either charming or delusionary that, in our minds,
the successes of people we don't know outweigh the failures of people we do.
Hand it
to the Coen Brothers to wring poetry out of the spectacle of artistic failure.
Their Inside Llewyn Davis isn't just
the story of a struggling folk singer (Oscar Issac) in and around Greenwich
Village in 1961. It's a odyssey of hard luck in every guise it can visit a
poor, talented schmuck with a guitar. In a society that's convinced it's
"got talent", this is a pretty rare choice, to give a showcase to a
character whose sole distinction is his failure to earn distinction.
Fair
warning: Llewyn Davis is bleak stuff.
We're talking about Fassbinderish, Ken Loachian levels of dreariness here—the
kind of story that seems like it was shot in stark black and white even though
it's actually in color. As such, it is not recommended for those with affect
disorders, who have suffered a recent breakup, or are looking for something to
watch on a frigid winter night.
The
script finds Llewyn bumping along the trough of a personal low that doesn't
seem to end. The rump end of a folk duo whose lead man jumped off the George
Washington Bridge, he plays gigs at a few venues that keep him in pocket money
but not much more. To his ex-lover (Carey Mulligan), his given name is
"asshole". Making his rent is a remote dream, so he makes the rounds
of his friends' couches. It's winter in NYC, and he doesn't own a warm coat. And
it pretty much goes downhill from there.
For
those looking for "that Coen Brothers feeling" they got from Fargo, Barton Fink, and O Brother,
Where Art Thou?, Davis will come
off too dry by half. In tone and purpose, it most resembles their 2009
serio-comedy A Serious Man, which was
also about a character with the temerity to believe he'd suffered all he could
suffer.
What
makes this film better than A Serious Man,
though, is the fact that Llewyn is not just some nebbishy loser, but a guy who
can actually sing and play the guitar. As hauntingly played by Isaac (Agora), he's a genuine artist with a
sweet, heart-felt style that makes people sorry they can't reward him more. The
difference between him and Bob Dylan isn't really musical talent, and it isn't
how much pain they've suffered. The difference is actually not much: a point
the Coens drive home when they have Llewyn finish his last set at the Gaslight
Café just as the young Dylan comes on to do his first.
This is
the story of the guy who went on just
before Bob Dylan. Between greatness and obscurity, just a few ticks of the
clock. And in that dark, narrow gap, there's a kind of poetry winners' stories rarely touch.
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
No comments:
Post a Comment