An oddly melancholic film set in the early Greenwich Village
folk music era of 1961, when musicians with guitars played at coffee shops and
folk clubs, mostly singing traditional folk songs set to their own
arrangements, where some are still overly clean cut, like holdovers from the
50’s, while others click with the audience, developing an instant rapport,
while a few like Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) hold their audiences pretty much in
contempt, thinking they know squat about music, as they listen to such crappy
musical groups that are all copying the songs and style of more successful groups. While Llewyn is able to give heartfelt
performances, where there are many songs sprinkled throughout the film that
reek of soulful authenticity, he doesn’t have the overriding trust in himself
or the needed ambition to get him over the hump. Described by Ethan Coen as “An odyssey where
the main character doesn’t go anywhere,” Llewyn is constantly in motion, but it
feels like he’s moving in circles where he remains stuck in a state of
suspended animation, constantly trying to get into somebody’s door, where a
recurring motif is looking for a sofa to sleep on for the night. With no place to call home, he’s constantly
lugging his guitar around with him on the subway, hoping to catch a lucky break
somewhere. When we meet his agent Mel
(Jerry Grayson, in his last role before he died earlier this year), we know
immediately that this guy isn’t getting him anywhere, yet he sticks with him,
perhaps only because Mel is perceived to be somebody “in the business.” Perhaps it’s no accident that the Coen brothers
grew up outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, about three hours from Hibbing,
Minnesota where a young Bob Dylan grew up as Robert Zimmerman. Both moved to New York City to eventual fame
and fortune, but this film imagines someone who wasn’t so fortunate. The question the movie asks is if the 60’s era
conservatism is all that interesting, as it’s been completely overshadowed by
the late decade’s more violent Vietnam anti-war protest movements that ushered
in a new focus on Civil Rights, Global Ecology, and the Women’s movements. This film takes place before Roger Maris hit
61 home runs, during the idealism of a new era from newly elected President Kennedy,
the first Catholic to win the White House, with a youthful vigor and
fashionable wife that swept the nation, whose era of Camelot was considered a visionary
time filled with a promise for the future.
While this has a familiar ring with David Chase’s Not Fade
Away (2012), teenage kids from Jersey forming a rock ‘n’ roll band in the
late 60’s playing covers of songs admired by the Rolling Stones, where they
were confident they would hit it big, but never did, much to their personal
dismay. Dylan describes the difference
between rock ‘n’ roll and folk music in a Cameron Crowe interview contained in
the liner notes to the 1985 multi-album Biograph:
The thing about rock ‘n’ roll is
that for me anyway it wasn’t enough ... There were great catch-phrases and
driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect
life in a realistic way. I knew that
when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more
sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.
There is no question that from the opening number in the
Gaslight Café, “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” (Daniel Rossen version) Daniel Rossen
- Hang Me, Oh Hang Me (Dave Van Ronk cover) YouTube (3:22), Llewyn is a very
talented young man, more authentic and not so much a copycat as the other
groups seen, but as we soon learn, he has major character flaws that alienate
him from just about everybody. Opening
and closing at the same point, the film is a brief flashback in time
representing the travails of a few harrowing days in the life of folksinger
Llewyn Davis. While the film is a time
capsule of the era, where the Coens love to make authentic period pieces,
what’s missing performance-wise are the Beat poets that often introduce the
music in the early 60’s, and the beginnings of free form jazz from musicians
like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, often playing in the
nearby Village Vanguard. But it is Dave
Van Ronk's 2005 memoir Mayor of MacDougal
Street that inspired the Coen Brothers' latest film, as he performed in
GreenwichVillage for five decades beginning in the 50’s, where three of his
songs are heard, and the title comes from Van Ronk’s 1963 album Inside Dave Van Ronk. Other autobiographical Van Ronk tidbits
making their way into the film are spending time in the Merchant Marines (as
did Jack Kerouac), taking a trip to Chicago to unsuccessfully audition for owner/manager
Albert Grossman at the Gate of Horn, refusing to join a Peter, Paul, and
Mary-style folk trio, and complaining to his record company that he was so
broke he couldn’t afford a winter coat.
But Van Ronk was more of an established musician, where according to Elijah
Wald, who co-wrote the memoirs, “People slept on his couch — he didn't sleep on
theirs. And the reason Dave became who
he was in the Village was the way he welcomed anyone who cared about the music.
Llewyn is clearly not that guy.”
While authenticity is paramount, the Coens love to get the
details right, including the placement of Van Ronk’s collection of primitive
art from New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest into the homes of some of Llewyn’s
wealthier academic friends. Especially significant
is the film’s setting in the dead of winter, somewhat reminiscent of the 1963
cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
where Dylan’s presence lurks in the shadows, as he transformed the folk scene’s
focus from traditional songs to original compositions, leaving performers like
Llewyn out in the cold. What was more
interesting to the Coens was the period that came just before this happened,
where there were so many more that *didn’t* make it in the music business. The film is an unsparing look at one such
performer who, unlike many of his contemporaries, can’t overcome his character
flaws and remake himself in the image of someone else. Instead he’s stuck with who he is, a somewhat
gloomy guy with a flair for bad taste that eventually ticks off everyone he
meets. Often beleaguered at his status at
the bottom of the food chain, where despite his talent, he has nothing to show
for it, where he’s forced to live a hand-to-mouth existence, yet he feels he
deserves better. To his credit, his
sincerity is something he wears proudly on his lapel, but he chooses to lead a
miserable life, continually forcing others to contend with his misfortune. The problem with the film is Llewyn is a
particularly loathsome character, where there’s little emotional connection to
what happens to him. He fails to
establish even basic level relationships with friends and family, leaving him a
loner, unable to pull himself out of his predicament. Onscreen throughout the entire picture, it’s
one of the more extensive character developments in any recent Coen brothers
movie. It’s only when he takes a road
trip to Chicago that we learn a portion of his past that continues to haunt
him, that leaves him feeling like damaged goods, where he can’t help but repeat
the same mistakes from the past, which only further isolates him.
That surreal road trip, something of a hilarious satire of
Kerouac’s On the Road, where Chicago
has never been used to gloomier effect, includes two of the best secondary
characters in the film, John Goodman, terrific as always, playing a highbrow
jazz aficionado who sarcastically thinks of folk musicians as social misfits
that can’t do anything else, while his driver is Garrett Hedlund as Johnny
Five, completely silent for the first 800 miles or so until he launches into
free form Beat poetry in the middle of the night from behind the wheel. These two guys add edge, completely lost in
their own self-contained worlds, where Llewyn is a nobody in their eyes. It’s the perfect lead-in for his existential
journey to nowhere, having burned all his bridges and alienated everyone around
him. Only familiar with the old songs,
where the appeal is drying up even for Llewyn, he’s starting to hate folk music
and everything it represents, “If it’s never been new and it never gets old,
it’s a folk song,” where he can be heard screaming at one point “I hate fuckin’
folk music!” When his sister Joy
(Jeanine Serralles) asks if he might consider a life outside of folk singing,
Llewyn replies, “What, quit? Just exist?”
to which she responds, “Exist? Is that
what we do outside of show business?” Spending
a good portion of the film carrying and/or chasing after a cat named Ulysses,
even on the subway, a journey unto itself, expressed in a long and beautiful
ride through the heart of New York showing Llewyn lost in thought while the
camera captures a reflection of the cat’s ponderous stare in the window, the
film has no structured narrative, but simply provides an impressionistic mosaic
of all the things Llewyn does wrong, how he blows every opportunity, blaming
everyone but himself, alienating all his friends with his abrasive personality,
never able to successfully channel his mania for music, where he seems doomed
to wander like a Sisyphus character, waiting for a future that never arrives, becoming
another one of the classic anti-heroes in the Coen mythology, where over the
end credits an uncredited Dave Van Ronk can be heard singing The
Late, Great Dave Van Ronk: "Green Green Rocky Road" YouTube
(5:54). Somehow, the film took the
second prize with the Grand Prix Award at Cannes. Unlike O
Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which featured a musical soundtrack that
lead to a revival of bluegrass country music, folk music is slower and more
seriously downbeat, much of it a reflection of the hard years of the Great
Depression, where its era 50 years ago *before* the violent student
demonstrations of the late 60’s and before the influence of urban hip hop
rhythms is not likely to experience a similar rebirth, where the Coen’s parody
of the boring verse repetition in “500 Miles” Peter
Paul and Mary, 500 Miles YouTube (2:53) with a hootenanny audience
obediently singing along suggests it would simply not be tolerated by today’s
more restlessly uptempo youth.
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