The Jaded Worldview of the Coen Brothers

While I will review all nine of this year's Best Picture Oscar nominees in the coming weeks, I want to share my thoughts on the Coen Brothers' latest film, "Inside Llewyn Davis," while it's still in theaters. This film only received Oscar nominations for cinematography and sound mixing despite having drawn a lot of attention from critics for the performance of its star, Oscar Isaac. It's well-acted, was created by a talented team of film-making professionals and covers an important historical moment, but it has one major problem: when a main character is this unlikeable and unable to learn or grow from his experiences, it's hard to care what happens to him. Yet the film has stuck with me because of the talent I saw in Oscar Isaac. Though I found the personality the Coens created for him to inhabit unpleasant, I admire him for the courage he showed in taking on such a role and playing it straight, not as a somehow likable loser whom we can care for despite careless behavior. Isaac allows Llewyn to be a jerk and stay a jerk. His dedication to naturalism gives me hope that his future performances will allow him to play someone I actually want to spend two hours with next time.

I promise you, I will get to the rest of the Best Picture nominees very soon, but for now, here are a few thoughts on "Inside Llewyn Davis" and the era in which the story takes place.

This film is about one of the prevailing countercultural forces in the early 1960s. The term "counterculture" is usually a form of shorthand used to describe the hippie movement of the 1960s. It conjures up images of blissed-out youths in miniskirts and bellbottoms grooving to psychedelic rock music in public parks, protesting the Vietnam War or haranguing their uptight parents. Some believe this was a brand-new challenge to a prevailing conservative military-industrial-complex-led America, that 1960s folk music was a movement that appeared out of nowhere and opened the eyes of the world's youth, but that's not so. The folksinging beatniks of the 1950s (and radical social protesters of decades long before that) made the advent of hippies possible. We generally underplay the importance of the folksinging tradition as a goad to social progress throughout the 20th century. When we consider how powerful a medium of political education and impetus to social change folksinging was from the 1910s through the 1960s, it's surprising that so few movies have examined the heyday of folksinging in the United States just before it was subsumed into the hippie culture and was overtaken by rock and roll.

With "Inside Llewyn Davis," the Coen Brothers have taken up the task of introducing the modern world to a moment just before folk music became one of the dominant influences on North American youth culture. Their story begins in the Greenwich Village folk music scene of 1961. Their antihero, Llewyn Davis, is a struggling, couch-surfing folksinger trying to snag a place to sleep each night, grab an occasional studio gig to make enough to scrape by on, and, eventually, secure a record contract that might help him earn enough to live on. The story takes place during that moment just before Bob Dylan became a household name and folk music exploded with politically relevant meaning and exhortations to wake up, get up and go change the world.

During the 1950s folk music had been growing in popularity but had been taken over by clean-cut, wholesome close-harmony groups like The Kingston Trio. These groups were often populated by talented musicians who were fun to listen to, but much of their music bleached the traditional soulful, bluesy influences out of folk music. The stories their songs told weren't so much about mining disasters or laborers ground down by corporate avarice, as many folksongs had been in the 1920s and 1930s (and long before), but were often lighthearted and humorous ditties, middle-class musical slipcovers over what had been a working-class art form. The Christopher Guest mockumentary "A Mighty Wind" is wonderful parody of the era of whitewashed, relentlessly upbeat folksongs. In the 1960s, the novelty folk songs started to be crowded out by grittier songs, compelling tunes and stories that encouraged an end to war, demanded equal rights and celebrated the innate equality of all. Folksingers encouraged outrage over social injustice and turned popular opinion on its head by singing simple tunes in earnest, nasal, sometimes piercing voices full of humorless sincerity. In dramatizing this important time, you might expect important directors to choose a highly political folksinger in the Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan or Joan Baez tradition. But of course the Coen Brothers are too cynical to make movies with political overtones, and their way of storytelling is too perverse and dark to for them to want to follow such an obvious or uplifting road.

Unlike Bob Dylan, Llewyn Davis has no interest in saving humanity, or in telling emotional stories that urge young people to take up causes, or in leading underdogs in nonviolent protest against their oppressors. He isn't worried about subverting the dominant paradigm or taking over the world; he just wants to make a living with his guitar. His more successful contemporaries aren't necessarily more talented—in fact, his scenes show that he has a more subtle and sophisticated innate musicianship—but the pale WASP competitors for singing spots in the Greenwich Village folk clubs are more immediately appealing and accessible, less complex, and easier to relax around. Llewyn is an uptight misanthrope without social graces who is surrounded by Peter, Paul and Mary wannabes and well-scrubbed Irish close-harmony quartets in matching Aran-knit sweaters. One of his best friends, played with an appealingly sweet-voiced earnestness by Justin Timberlake, gets him a gig playing guitar and singing backup on a terrible novelty song about flying into outer space, and you can tell right from the get-go that this cutesy dreck will have much more appeal in the marketplace than the intense, lonely blues-folk that Llewyn plays. His character was in part inspired by real-life folk singer Dave Van Ronk, an admired singer in his day who is little known now, having been completely overshadowed by Bob Dylan in his day.

Llewyn's way of singing is more in tune with the traditional folk songs of the earlier 20th century, the singers people like Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan listened to, the working men and itinerants and down-and-outers who inspired Steinbeck to write "The Grapes of Wrath." Oscar Isaac's style should appeal to those who enjoy the current folk music revival enjoyed by "nu-folk" and "indie-folk" bands like Mumford and Sons and Of Monsters and Men. (Indeed, Marcus Mumford appears in the movie.) But Llewyn has little empathy for causes or people (and notably little luck with animals, either). His lack of ability to connect with anyone else very successfully leads him on a series of frustrating misadventures which usually bring out the worst in him and don't do anyone else much good, either. But he has one thing going for him: he's a good musician. Not that most of the people in the film notice or care about that, but the Coen brothers must have thanked their lucky stars when they found singer/guitarist/actor Oscar Isaac to play the title role, since he has significant hangdog charisma despite his unpleasant behaviors. He has enough self-loathing to make the viewer able to care for him somewhat, despite his consistently bad behavior, but what empathy we can manage for this jerk is dissipated by one scene after another of him failing his friends, strangers and himself. Oscar Isaac has a natural affinity for folk singing, a beautiful way with an acoustic guitar and a naturalistic acting style—he's a real find. It's too bad that his break-out role is such a downer of a character.

There's a vein of meanspiritedness that runs through most of the Coen Brothers' films, even ostensible comedies like this one, which I find off-putting. Joel and Ethan Coen are clever fellows with a strong aesthetic sense; they choose excellent art directors and cinematographers to mold their vision, and their visual sense is powerful. Their film tableaux rival Sam Mendez's in their portrait-like stillness and attention to detail in each frame. However, their sense of humor runs dark, and despicable behavior is played for laughs. They have a nasty lack of empathy for their own characters; they revel in discomfort and like to watch people squirm. The sadistic element in most of their movies generally makes me feel like I'm spending time in the company of sociopaths. "Inside Llewyn Davis" isn't ruthlessly ugly like "Barton Fink," or gleefully grim like "Fargo," or psychopathic like "Burn After Reading" or "No Country for Old Men." Indeed, there's no glee in this film at all. Depression and angst run through Llewyn's story in an unstinting stream. His life is as relentlessly tatty as the dim folk clubs he plays in and the dingy old sofas on which he crashes each night. There's little peasure built into this film for the characters, not to mention the audience that pays to spend two hours watching this nasty young man roll through people's lives, making everyone he touches a little worse off for his influence.

Despite the Coens' usual blunted, blasé attitude toward man's inhumanity to man, there are times when dark humor shines in their work, and when a certain manic, outsized joy springs forth from characters that knocks us all sideways and delights us by its incongruity: George Clooney in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is the best example, though that cartoony mania appears in the characters of Paul Newman, Charles Durning and Tim Robbins in "The Hudsucker Proxy" as well. Of all their films, I find their version of "True Grit" their strongest film of all: it retains their jaded world-weariness and portrays a dark and nearly lawless society in vivid and ugly detail, but it is redeemed by the pure, earnest sincerity of Hailee Steinfeld's shining portrayal of Mattie Ross. She is out for vengeance, it's true, but her focus is tight and she has no desire to harm anyone along the way unless they block her path. Her respectful politeness and integrity combined with her ruthless purity of vision brings out the last vestiges of honor in the most jaded and self-serving of men. It gave me joy to see the Coens recognize and celebrate the finding of good in a seemingly dessicated heart after dragging their work down such a dirty path for so long, but they appear to have gone back to the comfort of their dank, dark, jaded ways since then.

Unlike biopics about true musical superstars like "Ray" or "Walk the Line" which feature one engaging, compelling performance after another, "Inside Llewyn Davis" recycles its few songs. We see Llewyn play them repeatedly, even using the same patter between tunes. Rather than fashion fresh performances and engage with his audience, he seems stuck in a loop of depressive self-absorption. He angrily turns down the opportunity to sing at a party after being well fed and taken care of by friends, and instead of finding joy in performance or fostering friendship between himself and those who are already disposed to like him, he seems to begrudge people their desires to enjoy and admire his talent. He doesn't want to be fresh or in the moment, and repeatedly turns down opportunities to connect with people. He wants to keep offering the same thing up instead of giving any thought to what others find appealing. He has more talent but less love of humanity than anyone around him except for the jaded folk impressario played by F. Murray Abraham and the abusive, drug-addled jazz musician played by the Coen brothers' regular John Goodman in an ugly, unpleasant performance. His character inspires even the usually sparkling Carey Mulligan to give a growly, foul-mouthed, mirthless performance.

Llewyn's misanthropy keeps him from caring enough to put effort into expanding his repertoire or pleasing his listeners, and we see his chances for happiness grow dimmer by the moment. He is thoughtless, disconnected and seemingly incapable of growth, characteristics which do not make for a particularly enjoyable two hours at the cinema. There is pleasure in the quality of the performances, and there are moments of wit and wry humor, as in every Coen brothers film, but the story itself is deflating and hopeless.