Inside Llewyn Davis
So I finally got around to watching the film, and I have to say that every single song sung by Oscar Isaac in this picture got me shaking my head in absolute awe of his raw, unplugged voice.
The words: Gaslight Cafe, 1961 appears on a black screen as the sound of a busy restaurant gets drowned out by the warm plucking of the guitar. There sat Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), who starts singing the song “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” (originally by Dave Van Ronk). The lyrics rang within the cafe as the customers listened intently.
Put the rope around my neck, and hung me up so high. Put the rope around my neck, they hung me up so high. Last words I heard them say, won’t be long now fore’ you die, poor boy. I’ve been all around this world.
Llewyn ends the song, saying, “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.”, drawing giggles from the crowd.
If there was any indication that this film was going to be one to keep your eyes on, well, it couldn’t be clearer.
Throughout the entire story, we witness the protagonist struggle to make ends meet, living on the couches of people who love and hate him. It is through the intimate moments with his friends and acquaintances that we soon discover how nearly impossible it was for Llewyn to develop any sort of emotional relationship or attachment to people.
Aside from the vintage cars and buildings, most of the songs in the film were recorded live, and they are as naked as it can get, with little to no computer additions.
When he finds out that he impregnated Jean Berkey (Carey Mulligan), the wife of his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake), he agreed to pay for the abortion because according to Jean, everything Llewyn touches “turns to shit!”, and had the child been Jim’s, she would keep it without hesitation.
His music career was not picking up, with no royalties coming in, and he was hit with another truckload of information that his ex-girlfriend had kept a baby from 2 years ago, which makes Llewyn the father of a 2 year old child.
After a fallout over Mike (Chris Eldridge), Llewyn’s other half of an old duo who killed himself jumping off the George Washington Bridge, he hops on a car to Chicago with a jazz singer, Roland Turner (John Goodman) and his driver Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund).
He finally arrives in the Windy City and heads straight for the Gate of Horn in the thick snow with barely a layer on to look for Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), a music producer. The song did not appeal to him however, who suggested that Llewyn join a 3-man band to which he said no, or get back with Mike.
Multiple rejections and depleting savings eventually forces Llewyn to go back to being a Merchant Marine. He paid $148 in dues to the union, finding out later that his sister had thrown out his Seaman’s license.
In one of the most heartwarming scenes of the film, Llewyn sits across his aging father and plays the song, “Shoals of Herring”, to which his father had “an accident” and had to be cleaned up, ripping the scene of an emotional moment that we thought finally the character had.
Llewyn goes back to Jean’s and surprisingly is not on the receiving end of her berating. Instead, she says that she persuaded Pappi (Max Casella) to let him play at the Gaslight Cafe, and that the Times were going to be there. It seems as if Llewyn had lost all drive to continue this dead end career as he scoffed and brushed it off.
A night before his appearance at the cafe, Llewyn caused a racket by heckling a folk singer on stage, eventually getting kicked out of the venue. It is revealed that in the opening scene, Llewyn performed more than one song, and ended his set with “Fare Thee Well”, a song he and Mike used to record.
The film closed with the familiar silhouette of a tall man teaching Llewyn a lesson for disrupting his wife’s performance the previous night. “What you do” he said, as he left in a speeding taxi.
Au revoir
