Released in 2013, Inside Llewyn Davis remains the Coen brothers’ last truly great cinematic output as a filmmaking duo. Two other projects have since followed: the six-part Netflix anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) and Joel Coen’s solo work The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021). Both have something to offer in their own way, particularly the latter, an expressionistic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. But neither feel like a proper Coen brothers feature film (since one is basically a collection of short films and the other lacks a required sibling).
There’s a good chance Inside Llewyn Davis endures as the Coen’s final theatrical release, their swan song. It wouldn’t be so bad ending a legendary run with this mournful masterwork. Set in a loving rendering of Greenwich Village’s early-‘60s hipster folk scene, Inside Llewyn Davis is a tragicomic interrogation of commercial ambition and artistic integrity. Both meet mutual destruction here. We open during the final gasp of those halcyon days, right before Bob Dylan explodes a specific Bohemian milieu out of existence.
The Coens offer Inside Llewyn Davis as an idealized simulacrum of a time that preceded their lived memories, a gimlet-eyed elegy to a world long since eradicated. At the center of this comic-drama is Llewyn Davis himself (played by the then-unknown Oscar Isaac, who would eventually become a Disney star warrior), the down-and-out folk musician (modeled after Dave Van Ronk, the so-called “Mayor of MacDougal Street”) unmoored and adrift within a cultural sea that’s about to abruptly change. Llewyn – still coming to terms with the suicide of his close friend and musical partner Mike – is at once a respected performer, embraced by Upper West Side elites, and a couch-surfer barely tolerated by his downtown peers.
The latter cohort is personified by Jean (Carey Mulligan, hilarious here), a fount of precise and superb derision. During a tense exchange in a café, she asks Llewyn, “Do you ever think about the future at all?” He offers a jokey rejoinder and Jean follows with the killing blow, one that gets to the heart of this picture: “You know, you don’t want to go anywhere. And that’s why all the same shit is gonna keep happening to you, because you want it to.” She ain’t wrong.
Inside Llewyn Davis is a hymn of circularity, of personal foibles played on repeat, of a man unable to shake himself free from grief. Llewyn willingly succumbs to an unending loop of indignity and shame (he could write apologetic, morning-after notes to his benefactors while half-asleep), and not because he’s inspired by some higher artistic calling. The business of folk music he’s part of is just that – a mere day job, another gig, a means to a paycheck that will cover, say, the cost of an abortion. Llewyn drifts through life, one plucked guitar-note after another.
Those notes, to be clear, are unabashedly gorgeous. Inside Llewyn Davis is, after all, a splendid musical, one that features the Coen’s most indelible soundtrack (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, another great presentation of T Bone Burnett-produced songs, is a close runner-up). Early into the film, our protagonist travels southbound in a subway car with an orange cat in tow, a wayward feline named Ulysses that will become something of a proxy for Llewyn himself, a spirit animal of sorts. The rousing “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” plays in the background as an express train speeds by stations and barrels down the island toward the various thrills and disappointments of a bygone, Lower Manhattan terminus.
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