Of Empathy and Gargoyles: "Inside Llewyn Davis" and the Cinema of the Coen Brothers

"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art." —George Bernard Shaw 

What do the Coen brothers believe in?  It's an interesting question, particularly since a tour through their body of work provides more negatives than positives.  They don't believe in the meritocracy of institutions, public or private.  They sure as hell don't believe in human nature.  They don't believe in the redemptive power of Love, or Sacrifice, or Brotherhood.  They don't believe in a grand universal plan, or the romantic notion that the joys and sadness of life are beautiful.  As witnessed in The Big Lebowski, they don't even believe in nihilism, which is just another belief system ripe for hypocrisy.  But in their own devoutly middlebrow, pop-culture-obsessed way, the Coens believe in art.  They may not believe in artists—hypocrisy again—but a night at the movies or a song on the radio is the best that the world, or rather their world, has to offer.

You can see this implicitly throughout their work, the way their rigorous, referential, highly "cinematic" cinema has rewired Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, and Dashiell Hammett with the expertise of two moviehounds who, in building an entire movie around anecdotes of 30s Hollywood (Barton Fink), would be sure to include a period-appropriate reference to Ruggles of Red Gap.  (A secret handshake for cinephiles if there ever was one).  It's elevated to something resembling an explicit "philosophy" in A Serious Man, where the best advice that anyone can offer is hiding in plain sight as a Jefferson Airplane song.  The brothers didn't steal the title for O Brother Where Art Thou? from Sullivan's Travels just to be clever.

All of which goes to explain why, in their new film Inside Llewyn Davis, music is a much more foregrounded, likeable main character than any of the humans on display.  Most critics have been sure to mention that our titular folk singer (Oscar Isaac), who wanders Greenwich Village in 1961 looking for a gig or at least respect, is a fuck-up and an asshole.  And so he is: arrogant and irresponsible, soulful only by himself or on stage.  But the music stands apart—you'll meet his music before you meet him—and it has an arc of its own.  "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" sounds lovely at the beginning, but has picked up context by the time it's reprised at the end.  A folk standard called "Dink's Song" is a recurring centerpiece, and one of the most telling tragedies of Llewyn's life is that it will never sound as good when he sings it alone as it did when he recorded it with his former (and now deceased) partner.

Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Llewyn has become the latest battleground in the critical dust-up over the Coen brothers.  The duo are darlings of cinema to many, mainstays on the festival circuit abroad, and at home are among the few "auteurs" to gain traction, respect, and prestige with an audience who wouldn't call themselves cinephiles.  But there is a faction of critics and cinephiles who find their work insufferable.  In short, the charge goes, the brothers make smug, mechanical, misanthropic comedies, populating their films with grotesque gargoyles, delighting in pain and cheap derisive humor, and targeting meaningless satire at everyone but themselves.

This charge has dogged the Coens for years, and not exactly without cause.  A film like A Serious Man, which elevates suffering to comedy (or vice-versa), splashes around joyfully in a relentlessly cynical microcosm.  Burn After Reading sinks into it.  One reason The Big Lebowski is the Coens' best film, and not just their most quoted, is that it's the one that most effectively dodges this charge, combining their morose goofiness with a genuine celebration of underachievers who want nothing more out of life than a group of friends to go bowling with. As for the rest, I've seen serious critics, not to mention serious men, write off the Coens entirely.

I've never sided with the criticism, which strikes me as a reductive reading of films that are generally a good deal more nuanced.  But when the Coens take to the stage at Cannes and the Oscars to accept awards, it's not hard to see why they catch backlash.  At a time when serious cinephiles are on the lookout for anyone who can measure up to the old masters in terms of formal innovation and emotional engagement with the outside world, the Coens are two intelligent, prolific smartasses who rarely make it a point to attempt either.  It's not so much that they refuse to explain the deeper meaning of a cryptic film like Barton Fink, it's that they laugh off the idea of deeper meaning altogether.  And this, just like Tarantino and his pastiche buffets, has made the brothers a curious case study for their oh-so-disaffected time and place.  The "death of the author" is in full swing; the Coens just know the best place to hide the body.

 

So where does that leave Llewyn?  In a way, it's become a victim of auteur theory, where a lot of negative criticism seems less like a review of Inside Llewyn Davis and more like a review of "a Coen brothers movie".  This is a mistake, I think, as the film is borne on a tone not normally found or sustained in their work: namely, a very melancholy sense of loss.  It doesn't aim to be riotous like A Serious Man, its closest antecedent in setting and structure.  In fact, it finds the Coens at peak empathy.  Llewyn is an asshole, yes, but not outside the normal boundaries of artists and young men.  And if it is indeed a movie about an asshole, it's also about the condition of being an asshole: of going through life thinking that the problem is everyone else, only to realize—and to a certain extent, I would argue that Llewyn does—that the problem is you.

Of course, in the end, it all comes back to music, and the way that songs can be more pure than their creators.  After all, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, to pick two of Llewyn's more famous, less fictional contemporaries, could be huge assholes themselves.  But does that make the idealism and beauty of their work any less potent?  Or is being a person more important than being an artist?  And so Llewyn will pass up opportunities for help, and the gargoyles around him will take on added dimensions.  He'll butt heads with a condescending, vitriolic jazzman (John Goodman) without realizing that the way Goodman treats him is a funhouse version of the way he treats others.  (On the pecking order of artists and squares, jazz is apparently higher than folk).  He'll brush off a baby-faced guitarist named Troy (Stark Sands) without realizing that Troy's unconditional warmth and friendliness, initially played for laughs, make him a better person.  But most of all, he'll be too proud to compromise, and not lucky or brilliant or strong enough to make it on his own.  So he'll sing his heart out and close his show by saying "That's what I got", knowing that offering it up is the best anyone can do.  Then he'll get the shit kicked out of him while Dylan strikes it big in the other room.  And throughout it all, Oscar Isaac's weary face gives this "comedy" a very serious tone.  I felt for him—maybe there's an asshole in all of us.  Or perhaps we have an uncommon sighting of the Coens' emotional engagement.  Inside Llewyn Davis is an elegy for the also-rans who were good, but not quite good enough.  This is America; there are a lot of them.

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Inside Llewyn Davis is now in enough theaters that you have a chance of seeing it before they start showing Her instead.