StrangeScaffold
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Inside Llewyn Davis (2013 film) = Finished
🕑 Added 2018-12-28 10:37:43 +0000 UTCThe more I think about this movie, the more I love it.
The work of the Coens often balances arch or mythic qualities (which can be distancing) with approachable humor and straight up weirdness. Barton Fink is a good example of this unique ability, making a pretentious screenwriter's absurd tale heartbreaking and personal through a couple strange characters and some extremely well-chosen turns of the screw. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs became their favorite movie of mine recently with this approach. Irony and horror, essential folklore and grounded humanity, all swirling together into a basin of Weird West strangeness to produce an anthology unlike almost anything out there.
Coming to Inside Llewyn Davis, I can see the clear progression that allowed them to make Scruggs. It truly started here.
They're using all of the tools of the biopic to tell the story of someone who shouldn't be given a biopic.
Someone who turns out painfully ordinary.
Llewyn Davis is a folk musician who would be part of a duo, if his partner hadn't killed himself. Our main character is charismatic, but not a particularly nice guy all of the time. He's also made a number of decisions that make you question your previous opinions about him when they're revealed. Taken together, he's a screw up that could make it with one good break...and the rest of the movie is a sinking realization that he'll never get it.
There's a constant host of cascading decisions that keep coming back to bite him, elaborately designed to land when they'll hurt most. He rejects his one recent chance at solvency by cashing out the earnings of a recording session early so he can pay for the abortion of his best friend's girlfriend who he slept with, but it turns out he can get the abortion done for free since the last woman he paid for decided to keep it without telling him and moved to Ohio--also the song is going to be a big hit and he won't get royalties because he already cashed out.
That's a LOT of stuff, right?
In practice though, it makes perfect sense.
You follow the train of shit and go, "Yup, Llewyn was here."
He doesn't get the record deal, or make the impulsive choice to turn off the highway into Ohio, or go back off to sea like his dad, or so on and so forth. The sum total of all of his sacrifice, pain, and (sometimes) idiocy, is stasis. Perfect equilibrium. He's trapped in the same basement, playing to the same crowd, for as long as that lasts. It's a virtual purgatory of his own making. By the end of the movie, you can see he's basically accepted it, too.
Maybe he'll kill himself.
As much as the movie is about living on the knife edge between success and failure (with a preference towards the latter), it's also just a beautiful monument to the weirdness of life when you depend upon others. Taking rides with truly strange strangers, because you don't own a car. Sleeping in odd places because you have to bounce from couch to couch.
It's a mythic treatment of a person who didn't become mythic at all. As a result, it's got this sacredness to it. A fragility. The tinge of a holy blessing on a doomed journey.
Welcome to Llewyn Davis.
Enjoy the ride--because it might not last long.
