Last weekend, a few friends and I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis. I don't think I'd been to the theater since seeing The Master back in February (after everyone else had seen it), so it was nice to revisit the big screen. And I must say, it was definitely a good choice for a first flick back. The Coen Brothers have brought out their A Serious Man side again, and it's arguably my favorite side of their repertoire. The dark and muted cinematography—beautifully rendered by French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel in a subtler turn from Amelie and A Very Long Engagement—takes us right back to 1960s Greenwich Village, a tricky but successful feat since the Coens like as much on-location photography as possible. Each character is dispatched so economically, so that every one of their appearances, no matter how many minutes of screen time they are given, evince a deeply believable relationship to the protagonist that is instantaneously recognizable, be it a longtime friend, a fellow traveler, or a tastemaker with the upper hand.
On the surface, the film features the titular folk singer down and out, couch-surfing his way up and down Manhattan, as he fails to jumpstart his career and insensitively steps on the toes of everyone else in his life in the process. Llewyn is lost without the other half of his musical duo: his solo effort hasn't sold any copies, and he is languishing at the darker end of the success gradient than the other musicians in his circle. During the film he strains the relationships he has with his married friends Jim and Jean, also musicians, by not respecting the former and possibly impregnating the latter. He also simultaneously takes advantage of and keeps at arms length the care of his surrogate parents in the film, the Gorfeins, an academic couple on the Upper West Side who treasure their hip "bohemian friend." He even manages to use and disappoint his sister, his only immediate relative in their right mind. In short, in a lot of ways, much his lack of success can be placed squarely on his own shoulders.
Plot-wise, the movie is framed by two stays at the Gorfein's house, two performances at the famous Gaslight Cafe, and one or two (depending on your interpretation of where this lies in the fabula of the film) alleyway beatings. At the beginning of the movie, Llewyn finds himself at the Gorfein's empty house the morning after a rough night, makes himself some breakfast, and takes off with his guitar and bag, accidentally letting the Gorfein's cat loose on his way out. At the end of the movie, he finds refuge back at the Gorfein's house after a bender and wakes up in a similarly empty house, but is sure to leave the cat indoors as he leaves. The film opens with Llewyn's performance at the Gaslight; his performance at the end of the film even features the same closing schtick. And again, Llewyn takes a pretty vicious alleyway* beating both at the beginning and the end of the film. One gets the feeling he has gone through all of this before. Indeed, even borrowing money and couch space is all too familiar to those around him for his behavior to be an occasional occurrence. He is homeless and he is a sponge trying the patience of those around him, and part of his fatigue stems from the fact that even he knows this cycle is not sustainable. After the movie, most of the friends I was with agreed that Llewyn's story was one of self-sabotage.
But I believe that this movie is bigger than just Llewyn. I don't think he's just an asshole stuck in a cycle of self-sabotage. To me, it was clear that the film was chock full of signs that Llewyn was not alone in the muck in which his wheels were spinning. While at fellow singer Al Cody's house, trying to stash his records, he finds a box of Al's own solo effort just as full as his own and sporting eerily similar cover art. Troy Nelson, the perky but perhaps tragically ironic soldier in from Fort Dix, is eager to make it big. His friends Jim and Jean are nominally more successful at drawing a crowd, but near the end of the movie Llewyn learns that Jean sleeps with the owner to earn a spot on the bill. Every wannabe knows where to play, but no one is breaking out of the scene. One of the lessons that stood out to me from these signs is that just because a scene is big or that an artistic revival is in the offing doesn't mean that it will be lucrative in its pure form.
In 1961, the year in which the film takes place, folk music was still, in the true sense of the word, trafficking in known standards and tied to the protest efforts of grassroots movements—from the true folk. To make a famous, 1960s TV-worthy career out of it, the genre would first have to evolve into something more mainstream, something Llewyn's character does not believe in. And it eventually did. But as the style of music evolved and gained popularity during the 1940s-1960s folk revival, the definition of folk music itself widened, from only encompassing traditional music and standards to connoting often original music that used similar instrumental and vocal arrangements and dealt with grassroots subject matter. Being based in 1961, Inside Llewyn Davis is not arbitrarily on the cusp of this push into popular dominance. Many of the big names of the revival (Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez) were big because they were committed to these movements, and while they may not have left the genre after its peak, their fame retreated to the background along with it during the rise of more mainstream work. This is a compromise Llewyn, and many in the pure scene, probably would not have made.
Two developments helped to change folk music into a lucrative art and take it to the next stage of its evolution, and both are present in the film. The first was the willingness of some members of the scene to lend their folk sensibilities to pop music. Jim, Justin Timberlake's character, writes and records the silly pop tune "Please Mr. Kennedy" that strikes all the right notes, name checking the president, outer space, and those rock 'n'roll stutters that are sure to make it a hit. Llewyn is enlisted to help record, but he can't help but scoff at the stupidity of it, and doesn't even bother to think ahead to what royalties he's sure to miss out on as he signs away his rights. While true folk fans might see songs like this as watered down or selling-out, real-life bands like the The Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas took off in the mainstream because of the pop-folk combination. The second development was a willingness to apply folk sensibilities to original music. Instead of sticking to the standards, as beautiful as they still are, artists like Bob Dylan sang their own poetry and simultaneously elevated and blew apart the whole genre.
Thus, it is important that the break to Llewyn's cycle of misery doesn't come from within, as it might in a typically protagonist-centered film, or to even Llewyn personally. As SM so aptly pointed out soon after we left the theater, Bob Dylan's (or more truthfully "Bob Dylan's") appearance at the Gaslight at the end of the film means that the cycle is broken for the whole folk music scene. Bob Dylan's rise to fame killed off the Greenwich folk scene, and whatever hopes the Llewyn Davises, Troy Nelsons, and Al Codys of the world had of making a career out of traditional American songs were effectively dashed. Songwriters and original music dominated the late 1960s and 1970s and the standards receded to cult status. I am not giving any commentary on folk music here; I am a big fan, and I think traditional music is both enjoyable and important. But my point is that I don't think Llewyn Davis was ever going to succeed, and the viewer is there as he finds the end of his rope.
One thing SM and I observed in a discussion about all of this is that the people most likely to make it big were the people less likely to be purists. This is true in the film as it was about the implosion of the folk scene. Llewyn may have put down Jim's ditty, but the audience knows that it might just be Jim and Jean's ticket out of the village and into the family life they want. I think part of what made Bob Dylan so successful was that he wasn't bound to a genre or a style, the music that came out of him went beyond that, reached past folk, and you could hear it. Folk was just a starting point, whereas for Llewyn and many others in the scene like him, it was the goal. There's a line in the film, after Llewyn plays for a club owner in Chicago: "I don't see any money in this." And he's right. The standards are beautiful, but, unfortunately for Llewyn, the scene was right about to come into its own.
No comments:
Post a Comment