Inside Llewen Davis

Ostensibly about the Greenwich Village folk music scene in 1961, the Coen brothers film, "Inside Llewen Davis," is about something more fundamental, mysterious, and enigmatic. The movie explores two closely interrelated and baffling questions: How is it that some people are destined to bad luck? and, conversely, why does fortune inexplicably favor one man and not another? Claude Levi-Strauss famously said that some subjects are "good to think with". The Coen brothers portrait of Llewen Davis, a bad man with a sweet voice, is "good to think with" -- watching it,we are forced to consider a great and awful subject, the workings of providence in human affairs. Davis is a folk singer, talented enough but unable to make a living. When we first meet him, we have the sense that something inexplicable and terrible has happened to him. A ghostly figure assails him in the alley behind the coffee shop where he has been performing and knocks him down -- the attacker is shrouded in the darkest shadow: he looks a bit like Baron Samedhi, the voodoo loa, trickster, an emissary of death and the dark powers. We don't know exactly why Davis is assaulted, but the way that the scene is staged suggests that he richly deserves the injury inflicted upon him. Later, we learn that Davis is one-half of a folk singing duo that has released an unsuccessful record and that his partner has killed himself. The film's purpose is to raise questions, not answer them -- it remains ambiguous throughout the movie as to whether Davis' rage and dysfunctional egotism is a traumatic reaction to his partner's death, whether the man's suicide simply functions as an excuse for Davis' misconduct, or whether, in fact, the anti-hero's feckless and irresponsible behavior has induced his partner to hurl himself from the George Washington Bridge. We can't decide and the film's ambiguity on this and other points is part of its uncanny richness. Certainly, Davis is a wretched fellow and deserves to be punished: he is the kind of man who will try to cadge money for a girl friend's abortion from the woman's husband. But the film's stark progression of calamities befalling Davis doesn't appear to proceed necessarily from anything that the hero does or fails to do -- rather, Davis is cursed simply because of who he is. And the Coen brothers relentless (one might say Talmudic) study of this theme, the curse that has befallen Davis, engenders the film's phantasmagoric and allegorical features. Critics misunderstand this movie if they assess "Inside Llewen Davis" according to the canons of ordinary realistic narrative film making. In fact, the film demands to be understood in light of ancient classical archetypes refracted through the sensibility of Franz Kafka. Some writers have denounced the film on the basis that nothing significant happens in it. This is to misunderstand the film's genre -- the picture is an allegory of a kind of stagnant damnation in which literally nothing can occur. Davis is trapped in a time-loop; the movie ends exactly where it begins with a reprise of the scene with the mysterious assailant in the alleyway. Davis' bad luck is that he is a seaman who can't ever get to the sea; a merchant sailor without a boat; a man who can't escape the bad luck that has trapped him without resources and made him homeless. Everything in the picture is designed to make the Kafkaesque point that Davis is imprisoned by his bad luck and his entire milieu is a form of solitary confinement -- we see this expressed in the ramshackle squalor of the office of Davis' agent, a kind of Jewish purgatory with yellow caricature pictures of the old, miserly man on the wall and giant heaps of moldering paper on the desk. The apartments in the Village are comically tiny and their hallways converge to nightmarish points where doors on opposing walls that face one another like the set decorations in an expressionistic film like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." A trip to Chicago lands Davis in a club called "The Gate of Horn", a real Chicago folk venue and, also, a reference to the source of true dreams derived from the Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid. (The Coen's delight in references to their previous musical, "O Brother Where Art Thou," a film that was claimed to be a free adaptation of "Homer's Odyssey" -- "Inside Llewen Davis" features a cat called "Ulysses" and John Goodman reprising his role as the malevolent Tiresias figure, a prophet who pronounces his malediction on the doomed Davis. Unlike Homer's Odysseus who couldn't get home from his voyages on the wine-dark sea, poor Davis can't even escape the city -- he's an Odysseus who never even reaches the harbor.) Indeed, the concept of "old music" ("musica antica")-- deployed for a laugh during a nightmarish dinner party -- is symbolically central to the film: folk music is an inauthentic form of nostalgia for a past that never existed. Davis' failure to escape his environment, his peculiar doom is reflected in the music that he plays -- songs that are neither old nor new, songs that can't progress, music that is trapped, somehow, in a rut. There is something subtly wrong about the folk songs in the film -- they are somehow trapped and willfully, even, perversely, antiquarian, further, evidence of the peculiar paralysis that afflicts Davis. Even the film's astounding color design reflects the tone of paralysis and stagnation established by the film's non-narrative narrative: the entire movie is designed in monochrome, wintry greys, snow white, cold brown -- it's like an entire movie defined by the color scheme in the picture on the cover of Bob Dylan's second, and most famous, album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" -- a image that the film duplicates with scary accuracy in several shots. Contrapuntal to Davis' misfortune, the Coen brothers stage a curious subplot -- "Felix" (the fortunate) cat. This aspect of the film is cited extensively in trailers promoting the movie, creating anxiety in me that the otherwise acerbic Coens' had succumbed to cat-video kitsch. Fortunately, my worst fears on this point are not realized by the film. The cat (or cats) are filmed in a way that emphasizes feline agility and indifference -- there are several close-ups of the animal glaring at the camera in an unnerving way. Like Little Blackie in "True Grit," the cat seems strangely autonomous and occult. In a film about bad luck, about being "snake-bitten," the episodes involving the cat are staged in a way to suggest that the animal is a messenger from the gods, a creature with nine-lives that will always finds its way home -- a contrast to Davis' dismal situation: he seems to have barely one life, he is lost with no direction home and, indeed, unlike the cat, ultimately homeless. (The scene in which Davis confronts a film poster for Disney's "The Incredible Journey" triggers powerful and emotional recollections in a person my age -- an allusion that I would suspect that younger viewers don't recognize and can't decipher. This sort of hermeticism is integral to the Coen brother mise-en-scene: another example is a reference to Al Milgram, the doyenne of the University of Minnesota Film Society when I attended college in the early and mid-seventies: Adam Driver plays a cowboy folk-singer with the stage-name Al Cooper. Cooper is revealed to be Arthur Milgram, although like Bob Dylan he plans on permanently changing his name -- hence, we have "Al" (Cooper) Milgram," a secret and self-indulgent allusion that delights me but that means nothing to just about everyone else attending the film.) The cat that finds its way home and Bob Dylan, who makes an appearance in the film's penultimate sequence, implicate the film's second, and equally, troubling question: why are some fortune? Why do some people have good luck? Bob Dylan's singing completely lacks the suave finesse of the other folk singers shown in the film. So why is it that he will become famous and wealthy and beloved beyond all measure while others equally talented, perhaps, will labor forever in the vineyards without any recompense at all? The Coen brothers answer is no answer at all -- we don't know why some succeed and others fail. It has everything to do with luck and luck is inscrutable. Llewen Davis' misfortune is so thoroughgoing and complete as to seem majestic. It's like the miseries inflicted on Job. With respect to this theme, "Inside Llewen Davis" (the title, by the way is a complete misnomer -- we never get inside him at all) bookends the Coen brothers' other film on the subject of theodicy, "A Serious Man." The protagonist of "A Serious Man," the beleagured physicist, also involved with cats -- he lectures on Schoedinger's cat in his quantum mechanics class -- is a mysteriously good, humble and virtuous man. But he's as unlucky as Llewen Davis and everything goes wrong for him -- he is beset by woes that seem to emanate from the indecipherable will of God and that have nothing to do with his ethics. "Inside Llewen Davis" reverses this formula -- it shows a bad and immoral man, surrounded by (some) mysteriously kind and virtuous people, afflicted with all sorts of misfortunes. (One of the pleasures of the Coen brothers' mature films is their willingness to portray simple virtue -- the scene in which the benevolent and kindly Gorfeins' welcome Davis into their home, feed him and offer him a place to sleep, after he has lost their cat, deceived them, and caused a horrific scene at an earlier dinner party, is surprisingly very moving: this aspect of the film has Biblical feeling, complete with imagery of a menorah prominently displayed in the background of many of the shots.) Taken together, "A Serious Man" and "Inside Llewen Davis" constitute a meditation on the role of luck in human affairs, a sort of modernist study of the Book of Job. Neither your virtue nor your sin will avail you against bad fortune: the curse that John Goodman's junkie, chauffered through the snowy wastelands by the wholly enigmatic Johnny Five, pronounces upon Llewen Davis is both prospective and retroactive: it takes away his future and his past happiness. The film proceeds in a greyish fog of ambiguity: in one sequence, Llewen Davis visits his elderly father who seems to be wholly demented and uncommunicative. Davis strums his guitar and sings for the old man and, momentarily, the glazed and indifferent look in the demented patient's eyes relaxes -- for a second, the man seems to come alive, an extraordinarily subtle and powerful effect achieved entirely through an indescribable, slight change in the way that the actor moves his head and focuses his gaze. We seem to see the Orphic effect of music: art brings the dead to life. But, then, Davis becomes agitated, rushes from the room, and tells the attendants that the old man "needs cleaning up." Is the momentary change in the old sailor a sign that he is hearing the music or just the effect of a messy bowel movement? The film's lacerating ambiguity requires that we consider both possibilities.