Inside Llewyn Davis (2014)

Llewyn Davis is a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1961. Gloriously, and in typical Coen Brother’s style, that’s it. That’s everything.

The film is a vignette of a man frozen in his own endurance against a set of circumstances which really aren’t rewarding his dedication to his art. It is a black comedy of errors that offers no respite to its central character in the way of plot development or hope. It sounds bleak, it is bleak, but it’s also sweet, funny and utterly absorbing.

Oscar Isaac gives a measured performance of give-up glances and hundred-mile stares that invites sympathetic sighs despite Llewyn clearly being the washed-up loser everybody is telling him he is. The supporting cast fill out the world around him with a mixture of dedicated artists (Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver), ageing music business types (F. Murray Abraham) and a very angry ex-lover (Carey Mulligan). All commit themselves to colouring the Coen’s barren world of frustration and sterile ambition.

Talking of colouring the Coen’s world, the film looks beautiful. French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel marinades every scene in the muted browns, greens and blues of old folk album covers enhancing the coldness and melancholy of the film immeasurably.

As Llewyn stumbles from mishap to mishap, he finds his path repeatedly crossed by a series of ginger tabby cats who may or may not be the same animal. Whether they are or not is a tease. As Joel Coen said himself “the film doesn’t really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that’s why we threw the cat in.”

If anything, the cat(s) are just a parallel to Llewyn, highlighting the randomness of fortune. Some incarnations of the cat are lucky; others (the final one) are very unlucky. Perhaps the key difference between Llewyn and the cat is demonstrated in one of the best sequences in the film where Llewyn journeys on the subway with the cat held carefully over his shoulder. Eyes glazed over, Llewyn stares at the floor. Suddenly we are given a POV of the cat who is looking out of the window at the stations as they whizz by. Excited by the sights, the cat makes a dash for it. Proactive and outward looking, the cat embodies the perfect contrast to Llewyn’s introversion and inertia.

The Coens’ direction is, as always, delicate and purposeful. Long single takes of music performances add a sense of truth and grit which mirror the themes of folk songs in general. There are no cutaways faking a complete performance through a compilation of separate takes – it all happens live (including sound, which was, for the most part, recorded live on set.) Llewyn himself is rarely framed in a shot with others. Even if he is having a conversation with someone sitting on the same park bench, still he is alone.

Apart from staying honest to a range of characters and the wit with which the ear-candy dialogue is constructed, perhaps the biggest achievement of the script is in not painting Llewyn as a consummate victim. We feel sorry for the hard time he is having but his laconic reaction to roadblocks and the sanctity with which he preaches about his art despite being so dependent on his friends lead us to suspect that perhaps Carey Mulligan’s character Jean is right when she says:

“You don’t wanna go anywhere. And that’s why all the same shit is gonna keep happening to you – because you want it to.”

Having us empathise with Llewyn’s melancholia despite his cyclical self-made woe is the key to why Inside Llewyn Davis is such an exquisite film. The look of the film, its period detail and precision direction just amplifies this engagement. A joy.

August: Osage County

 August: Osage County has a lot going for it. It has a lot of what a great film needs – rich characters, excellent performances and a well-constructed narrative. Despite this, it is a play, not a film.

Firstly, praise. Everyone on screen does a fantastic job, especially Meryl Streep whose turn as the family’s poisonous matriarch is definitely as Oscar-worthy as Cate Blanchett’s Blue Jasmine (one or the other should win it). The writing is solid. The dialogue rises from a cast of characters so well drawn that the story feels multi-protagonist despite it being clear that Julia Roberts’ Barbara has the most defined arch. As with the best stories, it isn’t forced. The drama, darkness and comedy all leak incidentally out of the narrative which comes simply because the family of characters bump, bounce and clash naturally.

The best scenes are those that jump out as being obviously written for stage. Simmering emotions in claustrophobic rooms make for dialogue that just fizzes. 2 hours went by with my engagement unbroken because the combination of great writing and great acting hold the thing together like gaffa tape.

However.

The things that are great about the film don’t belong on film. They don’t utilise in any way what film can do.

That great edict ‘show don’t tell’ applies just as much in the cinema as it does on the stage. But what changes from medium to medium is what can be shown. On the stage, dialogue is king. What is said and what is not said is what makes a great play. I’ve no doubt that August: Osage County is a great play because what I just saw at the cinema was a great play… but not a film.

When putting a play on film, certain things need changing to make it work in the new medium. What Osage County needed in its adaptation was to make room for a film director to bring something cinematic to proceedings. One simple thing a film can do, for example, is extreme close-ups; audiences can see large emotional shifts in small facial gestures, something that simply can’t travel 10 rows when watching a play in a theatre. In that case, why not replace some of the hefty dialogue with some carefully judged close-ups, or a smart cutaway, or a tracking shot or just something cinematic? Anything would do.

Plays do their ‘showing’ in dialogue, films do theirs in visuals.

The failure is not the direction; it is the adaptation. It feels as if nothing has been adapted. The director is given nothing to do. I can only assume that there’s something intrinsic about the play that Tracy Letts wanted to preserve and couldn’t bring himself to lose in the translation. It may well be that changing what is intrinsic about it for the cinema would ruin its essence. But in that case, why put it on film?

Probably money?

By virtue of the medium, cinema can reach a wide audience cheaply in no time at all – you travel miles to see a play in a specific theatre in a specific city whereas films pretty much come to you wherever you are. Maybe its producers thought that slapping August: Osage County onto the big screen as it is would stick like magic. Or maybe they thought it would just make a tonne of money.