It can’t be easy living life as a protagonist in a Coen brothers’ film. Their protagonists—often through great fault of their own—always seem to find themselves in positions ranging from terrible to worse. There’s something to be said about the melancholic and the misanthropic, and Joel and Ethan seem to take great joy in pushing their unlucky heroes into greater misfortune as their camera continues rolling.
Inside Llewyn Davis, then, is a Coen brothers film about life’s dichotomies and divisions. The bleak, wintery, New York setting makes way for a story about a man struggling to get his life together—in spite of his universe’s constant reminders that there is no hope forward. Llewyn Davis—played by newly-minted star Oscar Isaac—is a glum chap. He walks through the biting cold with a jacket held closely to his chest and a guitar close at hand. We’re introduced to him as he strums and sings a heartbreaking melody in a dimly lit bar in Greenwich Village. He’s a folk singer in 1961 America—a short time before the smooth sounds and nostalgic lyrics of folk music grabbed hold of the ears of American listeners and whispered aching truths into their psyches.
Llewyn seems to embody the starving artist in a way very few musicians truly appreciate. There’s something always on his mind, and his furrowed brow very rarely gives way to anything even resembling a smile. He’s sour, to say the least. He’s clearly in pain, but his world seems to hate him even more than he hates it. As his story unfurls, we see that he has no home—except for the couches and rooms that his wealthier, and luckier, friends can lend him. He teeters and totters from house to house, from apartment to apartment, failing to ever find secure footing. We must ask ourselves: what does Llewyn want in life? Thankfully for the plot, he fails to provide a meaningful answer.
Llewyn’s story isn’t supposed to allow him to find happiness. This is a hopeful film, but it’s not a film about overcoming adversity. When the final credits roll, Llewyn is no better off than when we first met him. In a sense, Joel and Ethan Coen have written a story about a man stuck in time. However, unlike other stories featuring developmentally arrested protagonists, the world does not move forward around Llewyn. Instead, the world has already settled—he’s the one who’s still clinging onto something beyond his reach.
His army of willing and infinitely patient friends are wealthy professors and budding musicians with record contracts and air-time. His two closest friends—though that’s not really saying much—are a pair of Village musicians who seem to put up with and despise Llewyn in equal measure. Even his family is well past the point of having written him off. To his sister and father, Llewyn is not a failed musician—he’s merely a hopeless man living an almost pointless existence.
Like I said, the Coen brothers seem to delight in putting Llewyn through abject misery. As a film about folk music, however, it’s sound that truly brings joy to the audience. The film’s stars—Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, and Carey Mulligan—lend their voices and musicality to injecting this melancholic story with some much-needed vitality. Not that their voices are happy; quite the contrary, the notes and chords they produce are shrouded in a constant veil of sadness. Early folk had that sound—a sadness deeply rooted in the collective American conscious—and Inside Llewyn Davis is more than happy to lead its audience through a journey filled with sadness. Aided in perpetuating the Coens’ bleak story is grey-brown cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel. Delbonnel’s drab colours and lights are constant, suffocating reminders of the nihilism central to Llewyn’s life. This is a film of few colours, and the story is better off because of Delbonnel’s insistence in utilizing a single palette that covers the screen in an overexposed shade of brown.
If I seem to have written off Inside Llewyn Davis as a bleak and dark journey, allow me to clear the air: this is a funny movie. A deeply funny movie, in fact, that made me smile because of its warmth—despite the setting’s freezing New York winter. The Coen brothers know how to write black comedies, and their script here is an indication that they remain skillful. Llewyn finds himself in humorous situations, just as often as his friends say humorous things. A brief stint trying to find a cat belonging to kind hosts leads to a multi-state plotline that resolves itself in the same way that all things resolve themselves: inevitably.
The film’s ultimate punchline, however, is the manner in which it deceives its audience into believing that they’re watching a one-sided bloodbath against a sad, loser of a man. Instead, the brothers Coen remind us that life is sometimes bleak and sometimes morose, but always hopeful. We lose things. We lose friends. We lose ourselves. But we will always find something to hold onto—even if that something is as fleeting as life itself.