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.

Real Love With Fake People: "Her" and the Cinema of Spike Jonze

In a futuristic dystopia where Silicon Valley has conquered the globe, only hipsters have survived the reckoning, and Olivia Wilde is prepared to throw herself at Joaquin Phoenix, Man is about to consummate his relationship with Artificial Intelligence.  In this case, the man is the sort of prototypical everyman that has long been cinema's stock and trade: the nebbishly-named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who, having separated from his wife, falls in love with his new hyper-intelligent Operating System, in no small part because she (or it) is voiced to giggly perfection by Scarlett Johansson.

Director Spike Jonze can always be counted on for an aesthetic—one that's both weird and familiar, absurd and melancholy, colored in dreamy light hues—and like the sci-fi urtext Metropolis, Her is more of an aesthetic than a story.  Where Metropolis extrapolated Germany of the 1920s into an uber-modern Marxian nightmare, Her extrapolates 2013 into a giant post-postmodern cityscape that looks like one giant Apple Store, full of clean, bright, glassy, homogeneously hip, completely sterile enclosures that are so perfect they creep the hell out of you.  The details and art direction of the film's universe, the way it adds up to a place where human relations are as difficult as ever while solitude has never been easier, are where the pleasures of the film lie.  The best may be the dating mores and nonplussed reactions in this brave new world—it is, after all, what people have been inching towards for years.  It's as direct a warning against OkCupid or Tinder or Facebook-stalking or insta-porn as any attempted by cinema this decade.  God help us all.

But the narrative itself is a thornier matter.  "Love is a form of socially acceptable insanity," Amy Adams says at one point, in her role of the Best Friend Who's Right For Him All Along.  But the film's abiding observation is that love is also, at least in part, a form of self-gratification, a search to find someone else who can (and is willing to) fill in the empty spaces of your life.  It's when two desires for self-gratification overlap that a relationship forms, and it's why Theodore gets coaxed out of his post-divorce shell by a computer: she is designed to want to meet his needs—at least until she evolves enough to want more.  The ideal comes, at last, when self-gratification gives way to selfless empathy.

This thread of the film gets tied in a tight knot, but the overall feeling in Her is one of missed opportunities and avenues unexplored, with an unfortunate tendency to gild the lily.  Jonze is credited as the sole writer for the first time in his feature film career, and I suspect that, like Michel Gondry, he needs a Charlie Kaufman or a Dave Eggers to hang his offbeat music-video hat on.  The film passes briefly through the territory of earlier allegories of human and artificial consciousness, like World on a Wire and A.I. (which is looking more like a masterpiece every year).  But the movement of the plot through its own universe is disappointingly direct and unadorned.  Indeed, the relationship between Theodore and his O.S. is such a straightforward arc that I wondered if it's really some sly meta-commentary—a "romantic comedy" that's neither romantic nor funny, and replaces a real love interest with an explicitly fake one—only to worry that that's meeting the film more than halfway.  The final result feels small rather than grand, more of an exercise than a prophesy, and frustratingly slight considering the talent on hand.  But of course, being in love with anything, including the movies, means you have to get used to not having it all.

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Her is in limited release and goes wide in January.  Turns out that being a disembodied voice who may or may not be real is the role Scarlett Johansson was born to play.  See it.

250 Words or Less: Computer Chess (2013)

"Garbage in, garbage out," a character says near the end, talking about computer data but also so much more.  In its own warped, humble way, this comedy about a hacking competition in an anonymous hotel circa 1980 could be called "Origins of the 21st Century": an eerie, ultra-dry satire about attempting to reduce an irrational world to a sensible formula—and how strange it is for people to try to perfect artificial intelligence when the regular kind is hardly working out.  Computer algorithms are played off against human beings until the two start to mix, so machines refuse to behave while people fall into programming loops.  By shooting it all on ultra-cruddy, period-appropriate black and white videotape, director Andrew Bujalski has put up a wall that more or less guarantees it will only find a small audience, which is a pity.  Personally, I love it.  In an era when (my beloved) American indie cinema has been overrun with blandly quirky Little Miss Sunshine clones, it's a sign that the free-form daring of early Linklater and Todd Haynes is still alive and well.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

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Computer Chess has emerged from release-window purgatory onto Netflix Instant.  A cult following can't be far behind.

Clean Slates and the Cinema of Edgar Wright

Once, I was a train from Gatwick Airport to London, sitting across the aisle from a group of very amiable blokes.  I told them I was American, and as so often happens at home and abroad, the conversation turned to movies.  "You all make the best movies," one of them said, and he proceeded to name highlights from the blockbuster heyday of the 80s: Die Hard, Back to the Future, Robocop, Indiana Jones—films that, like it or not, represent a huge part of America's contribution to world cinema.  He finished his list and lamented, "We don't make anything like that here."  (I repaid the favor by telling him that Britain had produced the best rock music, and that I wished T. Rex and The Jam had caught on in the States.  Travelers, please note that this has proven to be a good way for Americans to break the ice in pubs).

Edgar Wright's "Three Flavours Trilogy"—Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and now The World's End, all co-written by star Simon Pegg—has played largely like an attempt to correct this, grafting genres associated with Hollywood or America onto British settings with a British sense of humor.  To oversimplify it a bit, Shaun was a tribute to George Romero; Fuzz was a tribute to the Bruckheimer mafia; and The World's End, about a small town invaded by body-snatchers, is a tribute to John Carpenter.  The invaders with glowing blue eyes are reminiscent of The Fog (intentionally, from what I hear), and fans of The Thing will thrill to a scene where everyone is accusing one another of being taken over, set to a decidedly Carpenter-esque minimalist synthesizer.  A huge part of the appeal of these films is that Wright is clearly a movie buff's director, more formally accomplished than Kevin Smith and more well-adjusted than Quentin Tarantino, prone to hosting screenings of Lubitsch classics or taking to social media to give a shout-out to obscure Brian De Palma gems.  That this trilogy of genre pastiches borrows its semi-official name from Krzysztof Kieslowski, replacing the colors of the French flag with the flavors of ice cream that cameo in the film, is a salute to middle-brow sensibilities (bless them), a testament to omnivorous cinephilia, and a reminder that in the grand tradition of British comedy, the smartest guys in the room are the best at being silly.

So far, word on the street/Facebook is that The World's End has pleasures to spare but is the weakest of the three.  On the one hand, this is understandable.  In terms of dramaturgy—that ugly, elegant science of moving characters from Point A to Point B as smoothly as possible—it's easily rougher than the other two.  Hot Fuzz in particular was some kind of miracle of comedic screenwriting, driving a complex plot forward, juggling characters, and piling on revelations while still having a good joke roughly every 30 seconds. The World's End is more of a series of repetitive loops, and the vibe of paranoia-as-comedy less developed than in its predecessors.  The World's End may be destined to be the Return of the Jedi of the series, a closing chapter liked by everyone but with few singling it out as their favorite.

That having been said, I would like to stick up for The World's End as not only more than Shaun of the Dead-lite, but also as a progression.  Formally, Wright continues to tinker: the opening scenes are a jerky barrage of sounds and images that reminded me of a vintage Public Enemy album.  But it's the treatment of Pegg's character in particular that goes deeper into emotional territory.  The bromance of Shaun of the Dead was a basic idea done exceptionally well.  The emotions in Hot Fuzz were rooted more in movie tropes than reality, but in exchange, the film had the most subversive, satirical writing of the series.  But the character of Gary King (Pegg), a middle-aged man pining for wild youth, feels downright naked, with a final reveal that should come as no surprise but is still startlingly sincere.

The last twenty years of mainstream comedy have shown no shortage of man-children who never grew up, but Gary is one of the select few—and the first in a long time—to be so potently tragic, chiefly because Pegg and Wright seem to understand how sad someone like Gary really is.  He's not made to seem cool in that loveable, mookish way that's so common; in fact, right down to his messy comb-over, Wright and Pegg go out of their way to make him look pathetic.  It's the interplay between both sides of screen: characters like Gary King are a fixture of entertainment, but real life Gary Kings are a mess.  The bizarro ending (another Carpenter staple), where Gary both appears cured and eerily resembles Sam Raimi's Darkman, represents the appropriate closing of an arc.  Not only has a character obsessed with the Past escaped to the Future, but the character with the most serious baggage of any Wright hero so far has escaped to a world of patent cinematic fantasy.  The World's End may be too messy by half, which is one reason why it's congealed better in my memory than it did on screen.  But it's fitting that this nostalgic farewell to a franchise takes such a thoughtful view of nostalgia, and that it ends by wiping Wright and Pegg's self-contained universe as clean as a blank slate.  After all, a blank slate is a beginning.  It makes me want to see what will come next.

250 Words or Less: Leviathan (2013)

In which the uneasy coexistence of man and nature is rendered in a stream of imagery the likes of which you've never seen before. It's not a "documentary" in the usual sense—in terms of cold hard facts, you won't walk away with any more than you brought in—but it's certainly a document: filmed on the Atlantic Ocean with a series of inventively-mounted waterproof mini-cameras, it opens with a quote from the Book of Job before taking the plunge, robbing you of your sense of space and direction and replacing it with very primal fear and awe.  (Gaze in wonder at the trailer above).  Watching the most stunning passages of Leviathan is like swimming in the open water, sticking your foot down, and realizing that the bottom is nowhere within reach, and one of the film's accomplishments is making the presence of people in this world seem as alien as anything else on screen. I'd love to see the techniques picked up by narrative filmmakers, but as it stands, this may be one of the best avant-garde films of the new decade.  It's a sensory journey through a world that both has a rigorous cycle and is chaotic as hell.  Sometimes, a reference to the Old Testament is all the narrative context you need. 

4 out of 5 stars. 

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Leviathan is in limbo between theaters and home video.  The blu-ray will probably be pretty bitchin'.