You can size up the Coen brothers’ blacker-than-black, early 1960s time capsule ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ from all sorts of angles. Is it a sideways look at a music scene? A reverential portrait of a unique time and place in recent-ish pop-cultural history? A melancholic but also extremely funny riff on what it was like to be a struggling folk singer in Manhattan in 1961 who didn’t go the way of the scene’s big noise, Bob Dylan? Is it a love letter to the absurdities of being an artist? You could even, at a stretch, call it a slippery, askew glance at Dylan himself – similar in its total swerving of the traditional music biopic to Todd Haynes’s ‘I’m Not There’. Dylan’s definitely here in spirit, and if you look hard enough, maybe even in person. ... ... The Coens poke a bit of fun at the folk scene and at Davis along the way (whose ego can do with pricking). But the mood is generally tender and warm, with a brilliant dash of the surreal (witness the too-narrow corridor with diagonal doorways in the building where some of Davis’s friends live). The film’s on the right side of nostalgic, too, and nowhere near the warped, exaggerated visions of musical revolutions that cinema often opts for. At its core is a character, Davis, played with a lot of sympathy, although not without an unpalatable edge and totally selfish streak, by Isaac. When we see him getting beaten up in an alleyway at the beginning and end of the film – the same event repeated – we’re sorry, but we also know he kind of deserves it. The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It’s a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 16:28:55 +0000
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