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Inside Llewyn Davis R Released Dec 20, 2013 1h 44m Drama Comedy Music List 92% Tomatometer 292 Reviews 74% Audience Score 25,000+ Ratings In 1961 New York City, folk singer Llewyn...
Jan 26, 2016 · Well, the majority did, enough to have the film hold a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though safe to say J.Hoberman was not among them. And a small section of the moviegoing public was just as...
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- The Awards They Are a-Comin'
- Verdict
By Leigh Singer
Posted: May 21, 2013 9:53 am
No one succeeds at failure like the Coen Brothers. From exuberant comic dazzlers (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski) to muted character studies (The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Serious Man), their lead characters are expert underachievers, whose relentless, blackly humorous misfortunes are lovingly detailed by their unforgiving makers. The Coens, unlike their creations, get the job done.
Like Bob Dylan, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a Minnesotan Jew who headed to New York – just like the Coens themselves – striving to make it in the early 1960s folk music scene. He’s already cut a record as part of a duo (Marcus Mumford, minus Sons), whose partner killed himself and now he’s left peddling a solo effort, Inside Llewyn Davis, around Greenwich Village, scraping together coffee shop gigs, getting stiffed by his penny-pinching manager and, in an early scene, beaten up for seemingly no reason. If you’re meant to suffer for your art, then Llewyn Davis should be destined for all-time greatness.
That he isn’t of course, is the great cosmic joke the Coens play, though arguably with more overt heart and empathy than before. If Dylan is the self-confident joker flipping lyrics cards in the video to Subterranean Homesick Blues, Llewyn Davis would be skulking around in the alley behind him, like Allen Ginsberg, stranded in the shadows.It’s not that Davis has no talent: the atmospheric opening scene, all spotlight and cigarette smoke, with Isaac doing his own impressive singing, makes that clear; but he can’t seem to catch a break. Oh, and he’s a bit of a jerk – an abrasive, anti-social freeloader. “You don’t want to go anywhere, and that’s why all the same shit is going to keep happening to you,” rival folk singer Jean Berkey (Carey Mulligan) rants at him. “And also because you’re an asshole.”
Jean has a particular beef with Llewyn, as it may be him and not her sweetly naïve husband / musical partner Jim (Justin Timberlake), who made her pregnant. But there’s a wider malaise going on here. As Llewyn couch-surfs around town, even the small task of looking after a ginger tabby cat proves beyond him. The muted, wintry landscape, beautifully rendered by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (expertly subbing for the Coens Bond-bound resident visual genius Roger Deakins), spreads a paralysing chill.
At this stage, the Coens are working with a confidence and a maturity stripped of a need to razzle-dazzle. While their protagonists often find no direction home, they transport you again and again. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly minor key; just because Inside Llewyn Davis doesn’t have the genre trappings of a Fargo or No Country for Old Men, or t...
Parents need to know that Inside Llewyn Davis, by filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, is a startlingly affecting drama about 1960s Greenwich Village folk singer Llewyn Davis's struggle to be noticed and to survive. Expect a bleak (but memorable) retelling that includes some intense subject….
- CBS Films
- Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 92%, based on 286 reviews, with an average score of 8.5/10. The critical consensus states: "Smart, funny, and profoundly melancholy, Inside Llewyn Davis finds the Coen brothers in fine form." [34]
Dec 5, 2013 · NYT Critic’s Pick. Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Drama, Music. R. 1h 44m. By A.O. Scott. Dec. 5, 2013. “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song,” Llewyn Davis...
