Inside Llewyn Davis

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS                 B      
USA  France  (105 mi)  2012  d:  Joel and Ethan Coen             Official site

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. 

Country Strong

COUNTRY STRONG                                                D+                  

USA  (117 mi)  2010  d:  Shana Feste

I can't believe I fell for this shit twice!            —J.J.(Jeremy Childs)

Well if you ever want to shoot yourself, this is the movie to watch, as you just might find a reason to do it.  This is one down, down, downer of a film, and one that is patheticically short in having anything substantial to offer.  Instead it’s a continual stream of country music cliché’s that typifies a made-for-TV movie, feeling more like a Gossip Girl episode, a film that hasn’t an ounce of emotional authenticity to it, yet it’s filled with close ups on faces with perfect hair and make up that have precious little to express.  The director has once again written and directed a film that dwells on wretched misery, apparently an obsessional subject that keeps her occupied, but she’s simply the wrong messenger, as that’s not a subject to treat lightly, and what’s missing is the needed depth to make any of this matter.  Instead, without a moment’s worth of silence or reflection, it sounds like someone left the radio running with a wall to wall country music soundtrack, feeling more like a Disney movie that’s meant to commercialize the songs and sell movie merchandise.  Gwyneth Paltrow is the down and out country music star who is pulled too early from drug and alcohol rehab to quickly resurrect her fledgling career and is filmed and costumed like a perfume commercial, where it could just as easily be Jennifer Lopez or Tyra Banks, each modeling whatever merchandise they have to sell.  What this film may unintentionally be expressing is how superficial and shallow the music business really is, and how stupid fans really are to continue to sink their hard earned cash dollars into a business that operates through such callous manipulation, all the while pretending to be down home and real.  The singers are marketed as being unpretentious and honest, as if the sincerity comes from the heart, yet they’re doled out to the public like the latest line of automobiles, where sleeping with the right person apparently gets your name on the bill, filled with all the superlative hype and product credibility.  Still this seems like an unintended side effect of sitting through a pitifully bad movie, perhaps reading something into it that was never there. 

Instead the script is told in dual layers, showing the light going out on a faded country music star while another one rises for the next generation’s up and coming crop of wannabe’s.  It’s also told in terms of relationships, as Paltrow has the hots for one of the young rehab attendants (Garrett Hedlund, filmed so often in close up it’s as if he was portraying Zac Efron) who also writes and sings country music on the side, while her old guard husband (Tim McGraw) is overzealously trying to prematurely push her back into the limelight, managing her career while showing little concern for her well being.  Also at the same time, a Texas beauty queen turned country singer (Leighton Meester, actually from Gossip Girl, filmed as Vanessa Hudgens) is attempting to get her foot in the door, wanting in the worst way to become a star.  Somehow they’re all drawn together in a macabre musical chairs of bedding the wrong sex partners, where if they keep changing, maybe eventually they’ll get it right.  Paltrow herself is seen as a pampered diva, a woman of privilege, an incredibally narcissistic individual who hasn’t had a clear head in ages, where drugs have changed her perception of herself.  Gone are the days when she was fearless and headstrong and couldn’t wait to get onstage, whereas now she’s plagued by fears and self doubts and has very little connection to anyone anymore, which includes her audience, as she’s been avoiding anything resembling the truth about herself for as long as she can remember.  In the same manner, her husband speaks as her over controlling manager but never as her husband anymore, as both are avoiding the obvious.  So without any real truth at the center of the picture, the overall message is surprisingly empty, where all that’s left are side effects and leftovers.  The film takes an offensive turn with Gywneth’s character, one that really sends a wrong message not only to viewers, but one that diminishes any credibility in the overall story.  In what is most likely a dishonest and failed attempt at getting real, the film sends a horrible and irresponsible message that won’t soon be forgotten.  This is such a stinker that it’s likely to leave a stain on Paltrow’s career, as this is a tainted role, not only anti-heroic, but one that too easily throws under a bus any sense of humanity.       

TRON: Legacy in 3D at IMAX

 

TRON:  LEGACY - 3D at IMAX               C+                                                                            USA  (127 mi)  2010  d: Joseph Kosinski

You're messing with my Zen thing, man!        —Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges)

It’s always something of a disappointment when a disclaimer plays at the opening of a 3D movie indicating much of the film was shot in 2D, so viewers please do not be alarmed.  Well of course that’s a disappointment, and remains one throughout, as it only draws attention to what becomes one of the film’s biggest drawbacks and limitations.  The whole purpose of seeing a film like this is to immerse oneself in a visual 3D feast of eye-popping artistry where an escapist futuristic video game world comes to life, where if it’s not 3D enhanced, then what’s the point?  Actually, only the opening and closing sequences are shot entirely in 2D, bookkending a thrill ride down a rabbit hole into a virtual world.  As this is a follow up to a 1982 film just called TRON, it is expected to hold the key to a new parallel universe onscreen.  It’s an interesting mix of old and new, as computers and electronic possibilities were just getting started in 1982, the same year BLADE RUNNER was released, where the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” is playing on the jukebox in the background, and for that time period, this would probably look dazzling.  But judged by today’s standards and seen thirty years later, the visual scheme looks pretty similar to what we’ve already seen, where too much is left unexplained and the near incomprehensible storyline never comes together in any intelligible whole, but the idea of creating a virtual computer world that takes on a life of its own is intriguing, where all imperfections, such as the presence of humans, like a computer virus, need to be cleansed from the system in order for operations to run as smoothly as possible.  Instead this has the feel of fragmented set pieces, which even if visually and architecturally impressive, remain disconnected from one another, with characters that never build up enough interest to carry the film.  It’s a mishmash of ideas where a young first-time director, an architect by training, simply hasn’t the sense of purpose to make this matter as anything more than at times provocative eye candy. 

Jeff Bridges was Kevin Flynn in the original, the CEO and chief video game designer for a computer software company, Encom, and was on the verge of designing something brilliant, a dazzling landscape of a computer designed, architecturally complex city called “The Grid,” the representation of a Utopian virtual ideal, something he intended to show to his son, but instead he disappeared, leaving his headstrong son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) to flail on his own, though he grows up rebellious and equally computer savvy.  By the time Sam is 27, with the ownership of his father’s company in legal chaos, a friend of his father’s receives a message from a number that’s been disconnected for over 20 years from Flynn’s long shut down Video Arcade.  When Sam goes to investigate, he soon finds himself face to face with “the Grid” as he immediately enters a strange new world inside the computer where he’s ushered into the public spectacle as a Thunderdome gladiator of some kind, where he quickly has to discover how to fight using a dangerous flying Frisbee that can take his head off.  But when he bleeds real blood, a rarity in these parts, he is immediately taken to the highest commander known as Clu (a computer generated version of Bridges twenty years earlier), who looks like his father, but isn’t.  Instead he’s thrown into another impossible competition, this time with a wand that turns into a race car, where competing contestants attempt to run the other competitors off the road, usually resulting in death.   

In the middle of this contest, Sam is whisked away in a car driven by a gorgeous young woman, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a computer designed cybernetic lifeform called an “iso” (an isometric algorithm) who leads him away from the city into a protected and hidden landscape where his real father is living, having been overthrown by Clu and now having aged twenty years, where the formal dinner sequence is reminiscent of Kubrick’s White Room at the end of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968).  According to his father, once entered, the portal to this universe remains open only for a short duration, at which point it closes until someone from outside opens it up again, which is why he’s been stuck there for twenty years.  But since his father didn’t send the mysterious message for him, it’s apparent Clu most likely did in an attempt to spread his power and influence into the world outside, where he could conceivably enslave and take over the world.  This likelihood is why his father has remained inside, now offering his son the same advice, but Sam is more of a hothead who would risk the world for his own personal freedom.  What follows is a series of daring escapes and travails as they attempt to reach the portal, which of course is guarded by Clu and his minions, all matched by a stunning musical soundtrack written by Daft Punk that matches the tone of severity fraught with danger.  It’s easy to get lost in some of the intricately designed futuristic landscapes, but what’s missing is an original thought or the idea of seeing something we’ve never seen before.