Inside Llewyn Davis

“I’m not the one you want, babe

I’m not the one you need

You say you’re lookin’ for someone

Never weak but always strong

To protect you an’ defend you

Whether you are right or wrong

But it ain’t me, babe

No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe

It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe”

-   “It Ain’t Me, Babe” by Bob Dylan

Every time I watch Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), I’m reminded of the Bob Dylan song, “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and how the lyrics pertain to the film’s titular character. Set in 1961, it is the Coen brothers’ bittersweet love letter to folk music. Even though the film takes place before Dylan’s career took off, his shadow looms large because we know, in hindsight, how much he will influence the New York City Greenwich Village scene and beyond. Instead of focusing on that, the Coens decide to chronicle a week’s worth of misadventures from Llewyn’s life and how he manages to self-sabotage every potential shot at success. Partly inspired by folk singer Dave Von Ronk, Llewyn is brilliantly portrayed by Oscar Isaac who depicts his character as equal parts gifted musician and misanthrope.

The film opens with Llewyn’s moving cover of “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” in a small nightclub in the Village. Isaac is actually playing and singing live, delivering a soulful rendition of this song. It sets a definite tone and mood, complete with the stylized cinematography that resembles a slightly faded photograph. Llewyn’s life is a mess. His musical partner committed suicide and he’s attempting a solo career with little success. His debut record isn’t selling very well and his manager (Jerry Grayson) has no idea how to promote it or him, for that matter. Personally, he lives a transient lifestyle, crashing on the couches of various friends and ex-girlfriends, chief among them is Jean Berkey (Carey Mulligan).

It’s not that Llewyn doesn’t know what makes a hit record. He recognizes what songs people like as evident in the one that fellow folk singer Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) performs with Jean and her husband Jim (Justin Timberlake) that the audience spontaneously sings a-long to. Llewyn stubbornly picks songs to play that are powerful but not very catchy. When he does get a shot on cashing in on a potential hit record, he forgoes royalties for money up front because he is in desperate need of it. The scene depicting the recording of said song is hilarious as Isaac and Justin Timberlake work out the arrangement while Adam Driver, in a memorable cameo, warms up in the background with all sorts of odd sounds. Then, they record the song and you can tell that it is going to be a hit. Arriving in Chicago partway through the film, Llewyn seeks out legendary nightclub owner Bud Grossman (F.Murray Abraham) and plays him a song full of feeling and emotion but it’s not much of a toe-tapper or, as Bud tells him afterwards, “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

Along the way Llewyn acquires a traveling companion – a cat that he accidentally let out at a place he was staying. The musician loses the feline a couple of times but they always seem to find each other. Inside Llewyn Davis segues into a proper road movie when Llewyn shares a car ride to Chicago with an obnoxious jazz musician (Coen regular John Goodman) and nearly mute beat poet (Garrett Hedlund). We feel Llewyn’s pain as he spends hours enduring the jazzman’s insults and the driver’s monosyllabic responses (rivaling Peter Storemare’s equally silent type in Fargo). Their journey feels like an eternity until the poet tells a cryptic story and then recites one of his poems.

Oscar Isaac is a revelation in this film, digging deep to find a way to make an unlikeable character like Llewyn watchable. The actor uncovers Llewyn’s feelings in a heartfelt scene when he visits his father who is sick. He plays a song for him that he used to like. Early on, his sister (Jeanine Serralles) hints at a contentious relationship between father and son and through song the latter tries to reconnect with the former. The stern-faced patriarch says nothing but he seems to find some kind of peace from Llewyn’s performance. It is a touching moment until the Coens punctuate it with a bit of a cruel poop joke.

Llewyn’s music comes out of a great pain that is conveyed through the emotion in his singing and playing. Clearly, he has not gotten over his partner’s death and it colors his entire worldview. As a result, he doesn’t let anyone get too close lest he loses them, too. Isaac refuses to shy away from Llewyn’s less sympathetic aspects. When he’s on stage, however, he’s capable of such warmth and emotion as evident in the absolutely moving final musical number, a powerful rendition of “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song).”

Cast against type, Carey Mulligan portrays Jean as an acerbic woman that clearly resents Llewyn over the failure of their past relationship. She often spews venom at his direction, still bitter over how things went between them. Jean knows that she can’t depend on him and even though he still has feelings for her knows, deep down, that it will never work out between them because he’s emotionally unavailable. Mulligan does an excellent job playing Llewyn’s angry foil while also hinting at possible unresolved feelings towards him.

Around 2005 or 2006, Joel Coen thought of a possible scenario for a film: what if a folk singer was beaten up outside a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1961? It stayed with him for years and with his brother Ethan they decided to come up with a film that would explain this incident. The Coens liked the early 1960s era of folk music and were drawn to Dave Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street because it was a “document of its time,” and really gave “a sense of what it was like to be a working musician at that time,” said Ethan in an interview. They decided to option the book with the notion of using aspects of the musician’s life in their film. Van Ronk moved to Greenwich Village as a teenager and spent the next five decades there recording several albums that mixed blues, jazz and sea chanteys. He championed Bob Dylan early on as well as aspiring songwriters like Joni Mitchell.

Similarities to Van Ronk included having Llewyn sing three Van Ronk-associated songs, the faux cover of Llewyn’s solo album is a direct nod to Van Ronk’s 1963 LP Inside Dave Van Ronk. Both Llewyn and Van Ronk spent time in the merchant marines, went to Chicago to audition for the famous Gate of Horn club only to be rejected, and decided not to join a Peter, Paul and Mary-type folk group. That being said, those close to Van Ronk were quick to point out that, personality-wise, Llewyn doesn’t resemble him at all – people slept on his couch not the other way around and he was more philanthropic whereas Llewyn is misanthropic.

The Coens researched the time period by watching various documentaries, variety shows from the era, and read Dylan’s memoir where he talks about the New York music scene when he arrived. Early on, while writing the screenplay, the Coens wanted to reveal at the end that most of the film had been a flashback leading up to the beginning again and then they had to figure out what happened in-between. They also involved legendary music producer T. Bone Burnett, bouncing ideas off of him.

He not only assembled a powerhouse group of musicians to record the soundtrack (that included the likes of Marcus Mumford and the Punch Brothers) but also worked with the cast in recreating the music of the period. The Coens auditioned several famous musicians who were able to nail performing a song, “then we’d ask them to do a scene, and then you’d go, ‘Um, yeah, this isn’t going to work.’ You can get almost anybody who’s got a modicum of talent through a scene, or two, or three, but you can’t do that for an entire movie,” said Joel.

Casting director Ellen Chenoweth suggested Oscar Isaac because he was an actor who could play and sing. She showed the Coens an audition tape and they were impressed enough that they passed it on to Burnett who told them to cast the actor as Llewyn. Burnett was impressed with Isaac’s skills: “I haven’t worked with an actor who could play and sing this style of music this well. You can’t do it with bluster, you have to do it with the rawest honesty you can.” All the songs were done live, from start to finish, sometimes 30 takes of one song. Isaac didn’t mind as he loved the music and had been playing the songs 100 times a day in preparation.

In terms of the film’s look, the Coens used the album cover for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan as a reference point. They told cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel they wanted “a slushy New York,” he remembered, “We had to feel the winter and that dirty feeling when the snow starts to melt.” He and the Coens decided to shot on film stock because it “seemed appropriate for the period because of the grain structure of the film stock.” Principal photography took place in various locations in and around New York City over six weeks.

Much like the Coens’ A Serious Man (2009), Inside Llewyn Davis is about a protagonist at the mercy of an uncaring world but he’s also in control of certain aspects of his life, always making the wrong decision as if he is out punish himself by taking a harder route. An argument could be made that Llewyn doesn’t want to sell-out and he even accuses Jean of being a careerist at one point, but I think he’s simply punishing himself for being unable to prevent his partner from committing suicide.

“Go lightly from the ledge, babe

Go lightly on the ground

I’m not the one you want, babe

I will only let you down

You say you’re lookin’ for someone

Who will promise never to part

Someone to close his eyes for you

Someone to close his heart

Someone who will die for you an’ more

But it ain’t me, babe”

Despite all the poor decisions and setbacks, Llewyn soldiers on with a determination that is admirable or foolhardy. At the rate he’s going he will always be a struggling musician and mainstream success will elude him. As if to reinforce the point, the film ends with Llewyn leaving a nightclub he frequents just as a young Bob Dylan takes the stage and begins to play. He has grown tired of the daily grind of a struggling musician and the Coens refuse to romanticize it. Instead, they opt for their usual objective viewpoint that presents a world and the characters that inhabit it without judgment. As a result, they are sometimes mistakenly accused of not caring about their characters, which is not true. A lot of work went into constructing the world of Inside Llewyn Davis and the creation of a complex character as Llewyn. They are helped considerably by Davis’ wonderful performance. For every Bob Dylan that makes it big there are all kinds of Llewyn Davises that do not for various reasons. Their stories are just as interesting and worth telling as Llewyn’s.

SOURCES

B, Benjamin. “Folk Implosion.” American Cinematographer. January 2014.

Browne, David. “Meet the Folks Singer Who Inspired Inside Llewyn Davis.” Rolling Stone. December 2, 2013.

Cieply, Michael. “MacDougal Street Homesick Blues.” The New York Times. January 27, 2013.

Hiatt, Brian. “The Coen Brothers’ Classic Folk Tale: Behind Inside Llewyn Davis.” Rolling Stone. November 21, 2013.

Inside Llewyn Davis Production Notes. 2013.

Nicholson, Amy. “Interview: Oscar Isaac of Inside Llewyn Davis.” Village Voice. December 4, 2013.

Rohter, Larry. “For a Village Troubadour, a Late Encore.” The New York Times. December 5, 2013.

Ryzik, Melena. “30 Takes of One Song? No Sweat for Llewyn’s Star.” The New York Times. December 6, 2013.

Southland Tales

The common trap independent filmmakers fall into comes after their low-budget debut garners them a certain amount of buzz from the media and does well enough financially to attract the attention of the studios. They try to parlay this newfound clout to get a significantly bigger budget in order to realize an ambitious passion project. Sometimes, they pull it off and the result is even more critical and commercial acclaim (see Pulp Fiction). Sometimes, they crash and burn spectacularly (see Mallrats). Richard Kelly’s second film, Southland Tales (2006), falls into the latter category. It’s an epic, sprawling mess of a film – an unholy union between the paranoid science fiction of Philip K. Dick and the paranoid noir that is Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Kelly said of his film, “It felt like this window of time in my life where I could do something big and bold and political and get it out of my system before it was too late, before I lost my nerve, or the window of opportunity had disappeared.”

A rough cut of Southland Tales was entered into the 2006 Cannes Film Festival where it received one of the worst receptions in the prestigious festival’s history. Most critics hated it and the film was barely given a theatrical release before it limped out onto home video by an indifferent studio. Most people either didn’t get it or simply didn’t care for Richard Kelly’s playful socio-political satire that took place in a near-future alternate history version of Earth. I’ve always felt that Southland Tales is a flawed masterpiece, ballsy epic that immerses you in its strange futureworld and expects you to be an active participant in the sense that you have to think about what you’re watching. Most people don’t want to work in order to understand a film, but for those that do, Kelly’s film can be a rewarding experience.

World War III begins to 2005 and three years later a German company known as Treer introduces an alternate fuel source called Fluid Karma – a hydroelectric energy field that is basically a wireless network of electric power running machines remotely. Of course, the United States government strikes a deal with the company. Most of this information is conveyed via voiceover narration by Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), a battle-scarred Iraqi War veteran who sets things up for us and introduces the main characters.

There’s Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), an actor that suffers from amnesia. He has written a screenplay about the end of the world with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star turned political activist. She’s trying to go legit with a “topical discussion chat reality show,” and plans to diversify with a pop album, jewelry, clothing and perfume lines as well as an energy drink. Boxer is actually married and his mother-in-law is Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson), deputy director of the NSA. She is looking for him because of what he knows. However, she’s at odds with Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), the ruthless head of Treer.

Digits for Democracy, a neo-Marxist fringe group that operates off the grid, are in conflict with the government. They are hoping to make the government look foolish during an election year. Officer Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) is a very confused pawn of Digits for Democracy. He has been tasked to impersonate his twin brother Ronald (also a police officer) for their own terroristic ends. Over the course of the film, these various characters, and a whole slew of supporting ones, interact with each other in major and minor ways to form a complex tapestry of life in Los Angeles.

The first hint that Kelly is going for a satirical vibe is the casting of several Saturday Night Live alumni in significant roles – Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, and Amy Poehler – and other comedic actors like Will Sasso and Seann William Scott. This probably didn’t help people take the film seriously. In a risky casting against type that pays off, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Dwayne Johnson, and Seann William Scott are particular stand-outs. It’s not just because they get a lot of screen-time, but that they also make the most of it. Freed from the shackles of pre-conceived notions about them – Gellar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Johnson as a professional wrestler and action star, and Scott as a comedian – they are given a chance to play radically different characters.

Gellar looks like she’s having a lot of fun playing a not-too smart reformed porn star with aspirations to respectability. Her talk show is a funny jab at programs like The View, but only if it was hosted on the beach with ditzy porn stars. Johnson has always struck me as a smart guy that was more talented then a lot of his film roles would suggest and in Southland Tales he not only gets to showcase his capacity for comedy, but also his willingness to try something different. Sadly, the commercial failure of this film has either scared him off taking more chances like this or discouraged other filmmakers from casting him against type. Known mostly for doing raunchy comedies like the American Pie movies, Scott gets a rare chance to play it straight as he portrays a confused man who provides a pivotal role in the drama that unfolds over the course of the film.

Southland Tales isn’t exactly a character-driven film and so it is easy to dismiss a lot of the performances as stunt casting. Most of the cast hardly has any time to make an impact with what screen-time they have. Let’s fact it, these actors are there to service the story that Kelly is trying to tell. And it is a helluva story – clearly inspired by the events of 9/11 as he comments on things like PATRIOT Act, the war in Iraq, Homeland Security, and domestic terrorism. Cinematically, Kelly’s film seems indebted to Kathryn Bigelow’s New Millennium cyberpunk thriller Strange Days (1995). Like with Bigelow’s film, the climax of Southland Tales is kickstarted by a video-recording of a racially-motivated murder, which throws downtown L.A. into chaos, but where Strange Days opted for a safe, stereotypical ending, Kelly goes gleefully over-the-top with a full-on armed riot in the streets and a dimensional rift in the space-time continuum that visually quotes a great L.A.-based social satire, Repo Man (1984) all orchestrated to a dance number involving Gellar, Johnson and Mandy Moore. And yet, for all of its cinematic influences, Southland Tales is steeped in literary references with Kelly citing the work of Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as influences. The film quotes the work of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost while also referencing Karl Marx and The New Testament.

Southland Tales is chock full of deliciously satirical imagery, like the SUV television ad that features two vehicles having rather explicit sex, but it’s okay because that version will only air in Europe. There’s Krista Now’s Britney Spears-esque music video for her hit single, “Teenage Horniness Is Not A Crime.” As he demonstrated on several occasions in Donnie Darko (2001), Kelly has a real knack for marrying just the right piece of music with a scene and Southland Tales is no different as he has Boxer escape a double murder scene through a fog-enshrouded suburb to the strains of “Wave of Mutilation” by the Pixies. The showstopper of the film has to be Pilot Abilene’s song and dance routine in an arcade to “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers with “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” being a key lyric that comments on the character. It is easily the best sequence in the film, really bringing it to life. It not only hints at the greatness that just eludes Kelly’s grasp, but also suggests that he is destined to make a musical.

There’s a lot to absorb in the first 20 minutes as Kelly works hard to set up this world and the characters that inhabit it. Perhaps the problem is that tonally Southland Tales is all over the map, shifting from satire to a serious meditation on the end of the world without warning. Kelly fell into the sophomore trap of making too ambitious a film and not having the filmmaking chops to match, but you have to give him an “A” for effort as there are all kinds of fascinating ideas and themes that he explores. However, because he is trying to tell such a complex narrative involving so many characters, he spends too much time explaining how things work and who everyone is instead of finding some way to show us. The theatrical version of Blade Runner (1982) ran into this problem and it is an issue with a lot of futuristic science fiction films. Filmmakers are afraid of confusing their audience thereby losing them and then relying too much on expositional dialogue or voiceover narration.

So, what is Kelly really trying to say with Southland Tales? He is obviously commenting on the dangers of too much governmental control and extremist fringe groups, but also on the proliferation of technology in our lives. He has created an instant cult film with mainstream actors. It was never going to be something palatable for mainstream consumption because it was just too weird. Southland Tales is a confused Sui generis film that ultimately collapses under its own lofty ambitions, but god bless Kelly for giving it the ol’ college try. It throws so many ideas and images against the wall to see what sticks and that is part of its charm. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, Kelly has created, “A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

SOURCES

Lim, Dennis. “Booed at Cannes, but Now the Real Test.” The New York Times. October 28, 2007.

Parson, Spencer. “The End of the World As He Knows It.” Austin Chronicle. November 16, 2007.

Further Reading:

An excellent Salon.com article that breaks down the plot of the film in detail.

An excellent retrospective article on the film.

An in-depth interview with Richard Kelly where he answers several questions about the film.

The Social Network

A film about the creation of website – really?! Have we finally run out of ideas for stories to tell? There must’ve been something deeper, more intriguing enough to attract the likes of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher as their involvement in The Social Network (2010) gives the film a lot of credibility. Based on the “non-fiction thriller,” The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, the film chronicles the origins of the immensely popular social networking website Facebook and turns out to be a familiar story about greed, jealousy and power – a study in class warfare: old money vs. New Economy dot com millionaires. What started as an idea shared among a small group of Harvard University students eventually became the domain of one person: Mark Zuckerberg. However, after Facebook became a legitimate global phenomenon and he became a billionaire, the others wanted in on the action (and the money) and lawsuits and court battles ensued. Because the notion of authorship is in question, Sorkin and Fincher apply the structure of Citizen Kane (1941), by telling the story via flashbacks from multiple points-of-view, while viewing it all through a detached journalistic viewpoint reminiscent of All the President’s Men (1976). The end result is an engrossing, intelligent look at young, ambitious men who made something that altered the popular culture landscape forever.


Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is super smart but socially inept, saying all the wrong things and this is readily evident in the film’s prologue when his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) dumps him, and seals the deal by telling him that he’s an asshole. Motivated by being dumped in public, he vents his frustration on his blog with a vicious diatribe. To get his mind off it, Zuckerberg creates a website called “Face Mash” comparing all the girls at school with each other. He does this by hacking his way into other websites on campus. With the help of his friend and fellow classmate, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Face Mash becomes a hit – so much so that it crashes the school’s computer network. Fincher quickly establishes Zuckerberg as a computer programming genius and, along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsating electronic soundtrack, actually makes the sequence where the proto-Facebook website is created look cool. Reznor and Ross’ dark, brooding score perfectly complements Fincher’s often gloomy, atmospheric imagery. The director juxtaposes this sequence with a party at the school’s most exclusive club, the Phoenix S-K Final Club, in order to show how they both end up objectifying women, reducing them to sex objects for horny, young men.

Zuckerberg is busted for invasion of privacy and is approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) who have created a crude prototype of Facebook and they ask him to merge his ideas with their own. In return, they’ll introduce him to the higher social strata of Harvard. However, Zuckerberg’s gateway to the big time occurs when he meets Sean Parker (Justine Timberlake), the co-creator of the Napster, an infamous and very popular music file sharing website. Parker is a persuasive speaker and his slick ways impresses Zuckerberg as he sells him on the potential of Facebook on a global scale. Parker introduces Zuckerberg to nightclubs and, more importantly, appeals to his antisocial tendencies. Justin Timberlake does a fantastic job of playing Parker as a smooth-talking salesman cum New Millennium con man who is smart enough to recognize the Next Big Thing, latch onto it and ride it out to fame and fortune. He delivers a playful performance and there’s more than a whiff of a master manipulator as Parker comes across as someone who had an ethics bypass at birth. There is a delicious irony seeing a slick performer like Timberlake playing a slick entrepreneur like Parker. It’s like Parker is the Silicon Valley Tyler Durden from Fight Club (1999) to Zuckerberg’s socially awkward hacker. Parker is Zuckerberg’s unchecked id as he surreptitiously drives a wedge between the young programmer and his best friend Saverin.

Jesse Eisenberg is a revelation as he’s cast against type in The Social Network. Known for playing stuttering, loveable neurotic characters in films like The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Adventureland (2009), he shifts gears to play an aggressively ambitious nerd. His take on Zuckerberg is that of an extremely logical person with loads of talent to burn and who is motivated by rejection. He comes across as an insensitive prick that doesn’t have the time for people who can’t keep up with him and his fast mind. The film posits that the main motivational factor for him doing what he did was to climb the social ladder, to make money and to be the head of an exclusive club where he has the power to accept or reject people instead of being the one on the outside looking in. However, when it gets down to it being spurned by Erica was the prime motivator for Zuckerberg creating Facebook.

After making the popular tear-jerker The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Fincher returns to the moody, journalistic approach he took with Zodiac (2007), but where the latter was a slow burn over almost three hours, The Social Network moves along at a very brisk two hours as the talented young cast delivers Sorkin’s wordy screenplay in his trademark rat-a-tat-tat style. This film is absolutely dense with dialogue, even topping Zodiac with all of its scenes of theorizing about the identity of a serial killer. Sorkin had just come off the high profile flop of his short-lived television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and this film sees him back on familiar turf with fast-talking cocky characters antagonizing each other. His dialogue his smart and funny as it gets to the heart of the matter – providing Zuckerberg’s motivation and doing a great job chronicling just how Facebook came to be in an engaging way. Fincher and Sorkin have pulled off quite an accomplishment with The Social Network by making an entertaining and engrossing film about the creation of a website. The irony is that Zuckerberg created Facebook as a way for people to acquire friends and connect with each other while he is a deeply antisocial person who doesn’t really care about having friends. Of course, he’s now a billionaire, which I’m sure cushions the blow but the film leaves the lingering impression that he still wants to be with Erica and that this is something that no amount of money will make go away.