“A struggling folksinger in 1960s Manhattan, Llewyn spends his days playing whatever gig he can get and his nights crashing on friends’ couches. Still recovering from the suicide of his ex-partner, he’s someone who’s been beaten down by life and isn’t sure yet if he wants to stand back up.” — Robert Gifford
There’s almost no color in Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s not black and white, just gray, like a winter day without snow. The off-white walls of its Greenwich Village walk-up apartments are bare and unwelcoming, its folk-singer nightclubs underlit and hazy with smoke. Even the faces in the film seem opaque and distant, as if the humanity of the characters has been hidden behind a veil.
But, every so often, a ray of beatific light pierces the frame. Sunshine washing in through an open window, a spotlight on a singer as he hits a grace note, the nighttime glow of a city reflected on low-hanging storm clouds — this is the way the world looks to Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac, Won’t Back Down). Life is a dreary, colorless thing only redeemed by moments of intense illumination.
“He’s a stranger in a strange land, someone just passing through, marveling and horrified at existence in equal measure,” Isaac said of his character.
A struggling folksinger in 1960s Manhattan, Llewyn spends his days playing whatever gig he can get and his nights crashing on friends’ couches. Still recovering from the suicide of his ex-partner, he’s someone who’s been beaten down by life and isn’t sure yet if he wants to stand back up. His weary frown carved from granite, he’s unfriendly but rarely mean, talented but maybe not quite talented enough.
The movie is short on plot and long on character and atmosphere. Llewyn loses — but later finds — a cat. He plays a few jobs and loses a few others. He gets his best friend’s girlfriend pregnant and pays for the abortion. He hitchhikes to Chicago then hitchhikes back. It’s a film about stasis, not movement.
Actually, that’s only half true. The feeling of getting stuck in the mud and being unsure whether to flail or sink defines much of the film, but it’s punctuated by transcendent musical interludes. Like its protagonist, the film often feels inert — which, in this case, is no complaint — but whenever some sad soul puts calloused fingers to nylon guitar strings, it soars.
Composed mostly of the favorite standards of folk singers such as Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan and arranged by legendary producer T-Bone Burnett — whose work on Inside Llewyn Davis filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen’s (True Grit) O Brother, Where Art Thou? inspired a brief resurgence in bluegrass — the soundtrack is as simple as it is stirring. Music is a joyous expression of the soul, as one character puts it, and the expression is all the more joyous for being thrown into relief by such despair.
As with the recent adaptation of Les Misérables, all of the music was recorded live by the actors to preserve the emotional authenticity of their performances. (In fact, Burnett went a step further and insisted all recording be done on analog equipment to ensure sound quality.) The extra work pays off brilliantly; Isaac’s masterful, career-making performance is just as notable for its musical achievements as its dramatic ones.
“It was absolutely critical and crucial that it be live because he’s an isolated guy. He’s cut off from the world, he doesn’t connect,” Isaac said. “He never has a cathartic moment or a moment of just expressing what he’s feeling, because that’s not who he is. This was the only bridge, the only window into who he is, into his soul. If that moment comes and you can tell I’m not really playing, that I’m just lip-syncing it, the magic would just dissolve.”
A good film is like watching someone else’s dream. You get to not only see what they see, but, more importantly, the way they see it, the way the people and things they encounter in the world reflect their insecurities and unspoken desires. Sometimes, that power — so unique to the medium — is used for pure escapism. Toss in the right DVD and you get to be Superman for an afternoon. Isn’t that fun?
There’s nothing wrong with that. But film can be so much more. It’s a chance to live someone else’s experience, to see and feel the world as they see and feel it and in that way come to recognize what makes you alike and unalike both.
Inside Llewyn Davis is one of those films. Like a dream, it ends more or less where it began, its stopping point not its destination but merely a resting place before the journey is resumed at dawn. But, somewhere along the way, you come to see something inside Llewyn Davis, to understand him as well as anyone can understand anyone and to see the inner light trying to escape from beneath of all that gray.
