Inside Llewyn Davis

Just FYI, this review contains spoilers.

"Wouldn't mind the hanging, but the laying in the grave so long;  Been all around this world, poor boy, been all around this world."

This is not a biopic.  Llewyn Davis is not a real person.  Real people like Llewyn Davis almost certainly existed, sure, but they're not the kind of people that get biographies of any kind.  Llewyn never gets his big break.  He doesn't spiral into drug-addled self destruction and find himself isolated at the top.  The implication, at the end of the film, is that this will never happen to Llewyn Davis.

And all that is okay, because this is a Coen Brothers film.  If we were talking Martin Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson, you could reasonably expect a more sprawling epic, about a tortured artist reaching the pinnacle of worldly success and throwing it all away, then maybe dying or redeeming himself at the end, or whatever.  But the Coens have never really been about that.  Their films are small stories that find their sense of grandiosity in a wide existential backdrop.  On the surface of their stories, they are more attuned to farce, failure and anticlimax, and they have a real talent for finding the poetry therein.

The story of Llewyn Davis is one of many non-events.  He plays gigs at a small-time club for minimal profit, scavenges for royalty money from his agent, sings back-up vocals on a pile of shit called "Please Mr. Kennedy", and watches his career die before it ever even started.

Does this make someone like Llewyn Davis less significant than, say, Bob Dylan?  On a cultural level, sure.  But all the musicians of the 60s, both successes and failures, were human beings and artists.  Some of them made it big.  Most of them did not.  Compare this film to last year's "Not Fade Away", the feature debut of "Sopranos" creator David Chase.  Both films tackled these unsuccessful rock musicians.  But while "Not Fade Away" found its protagonist Douglas essentially outgrowing the music scene and going to film school, Llewyn Davis remains completely and thoroughly trapped when we part ways with him.  On one level, yet another brutal farce left him without any kind of job opportunity outside the music scene.  But on another level, we get the sense that music is all Llewyn Davis is really suited to, even if he will fail at it commercially.  After a closing number back at the Gaslight, his usual small-time venue, Llewyn announces "That's what I got."  And audiences are touched by his music, even if that doesn't mean success - as the camera pans in on producer Bud Grossman, listening to Llewyn's rendition of "The Death of Queen Jane", he sees something in the musician.  But nothing that will make him money, which, at the end of the day, is the ruling concern.

Llewyn Davis has nothing to his name but that music, but when he plays it we feel it.  He's the kind of character that other musicians would sing about, recalling the time when they were like him, with no big breaks on the horizon, and maybe recalling that without a stroke of luck, they might still be there.  Llewyn has no real expectations of success - after Bud Grossman's rejection his reaction is mostly resigned.  Llewyn's more concerned with where his next meal is coming from.

And though he has no mass audience in-universe to validate him, that doesn't really matter, because he has us, the people sitting in his movie theater, watching his story play out.  And it feels significant.  Llewyn's story gains a fable-like quality from the framing device of a cat belonging to one of Llewyn's hosts, the Gorfeins, as Llewyn accidentally lets it out, has to carry it around New York, loses it, finds it, realizes the new cat is a different one, and discovers later that the original cat found its way home on its own.  Even if he'll never find success, Llewyn still has a soul, and day-to-day things like that cat give his life meaning.  His partner, Mike, committed suicide before the events of the film - one can imagine that maybe he was too preoccupied with the big picture, lost sight of what it really means to exist in this world from moment to moment, and threw it all away.  But Llewyn keeps carrying that cat.

Midway through the film, everything comes to a halt as Llewyn hitches a ride to Chicago with two other musicians, burnout jazz player Rowland Turner and taciturn young beat poet Johnny Five.  We spend what feels like an eternity in the car with these two, though the journey amounts to about a day.  John Goodman is at his best in years playing Rowland Turner, a character who is equal parts absurdly comical and morbidly pitiful.  I lost track of how many times the film would cut from one shot in that car to another, hours later, interspersed with the almost hypnotic, trudging rhythm of the car passing over bumps in the highway.  This part of the film is where the Coens really indulged in what they do best, concocting a profoundly surreal sequence in which their character catches a glimpse of that existential backdrop looming over all his worldly affairs, and the story becomes almost mystical.  Llewyn goes on this surreal journey essentially alone, on a very different wavelength than either of his fellow journeymen.  And with what does this journey culminate?  Llewyn sitting in a club, playing a song for a music industry big-shot, and getting rejected.  That rejection, which felt almost inevitable, is really more of an afternote to the car ride with Rowland and Johnny.  As they say, it's more about the journey itself than the destination.  And in a film about someone like Llewyn Davis, that makes sense.

We all think we can see destinations in our future.  Some of us are musicians who keep playing gigs, hopping from band to band, waiting for the day when we make it big and become a household name.  Some of us are writers who keep making spec screenplays and reviewing movies on Blogspot, waiting for the day we make it big and become the showrunner for an award-winning drama series.  Some of us are careerists, looking towards the day when we meet the right partner, settle down, and start a family.  But ultimately, every perceived destination is an illusion.  That horizon stretches past your happy ending, and the only real conclusion in life is death.  The life of Llewyn Davis is this concept in its most distilled form.  Llewyn doesn't plan ahead, and doesn't count on any future goal to validate or satisfy him.  His whole life is one long journey.  At the end of the film, in which Llewyn is beaten up in an alley, just like he was at the beginning, with a budding Bob Dylan playing a song inside, we should be depressed by just how unfair Llewyn's life appears to be.  But he'll be alright.