Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis

 Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) was a particularly influential figure in the New York folk music scene during the early 1960s, to the point he was nicknamed "The Mayor of MacDougal Street." Among other clubs for music and poetry on MacDougal Street was the Gaslight Cafe, and Van Ronk's fourth album went by the title "Inside Dave Van Ronk." After reading Elijah Wald's The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Joel and Ethan Coen decided to make their follow-up to True Grit a true-ish story about the folk music scene in the very early 60s.

Inside Llewyn Davis opens and closes in 1961 at the Gaslight Cafe, where Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is performing, possibly for the last time. Increasingly frustrated by musicians around him finding success with insipid lyrics and trite gimmicks, Davis has been abandoned by his agent and told he isn't commercial enough by the most influential folk club in Chicago. His previous musical life as a duo ended abruptly, but everyone wants to talk about his old partner. He has nowhere to live, doesn't have enough money, and is stuck with a cat he doesn't want. Oh, and some guy just beat him up in the alleyway behind the club.

  Joel and Ethan Coen's latest film may be their most depressing effort to date, and this is from the brothers who brought us Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men. And yet, it resonated deeply with me. Yes, it's a relentlessly downbeat movie, whose laughs come tinged with a sardonic bite, mostly tied to Llewyn's disgust for other musicians. He asks his friend Jim (Justin Timberlake) is the "singing soldier" Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) if he "serves a higher purpose," because he can't believe people take him seriously. Jim's girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan) despises Llewyn, and at her kindest regards him with contempt. It's all the more complicated because Jean is pregnant, and she's not sure if it's Jim's or Llewyn's, so Davis has to pony up the money to terminate it. He doesn't have it, and can't ask Jim without Jean finding out. Llewyn's life is a series of bad, impulsive decisions - at least for the week we spend with him.

 Instead of a story of "has been's," Inside Llewyn Davis is a story of a "never was," punctuated with the presence of a legend in the making, but more on that in a little bit. Llewyn moans and groans about how horrible many of the other songs are, but he doesn't write his own material (like Jim), he just performs songs "you might have heard before." After all, they "were never new and they never get old, and it's folk music." As ridiculous as many of the songs in the film seem to Llewyn (and, by proxy, the audience), at least one of them, "500 Miles" was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary. A novelty song that Davis records with Jim and Al Cody (Adam Driver) about Kennedy and the space program could net him royalties, but afraid to tell Mel (Jerry Grayson), his agent, that he took a "for hire" gig, he takes a quick payout and signs away any future earnings. But at least his sister Joy (Jeanine Seralles) thinks he's a famous musician.

 Audiences have been lukewarm to Inside Llewyn Davis, perhaps because the titular character is so unlikeable, so pessimistic. To be fair, most of the characters in the film are hard to warm to, either because they're horrible people or because Llewyn hates them for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Troy Nelson seems to be a nice guy, but Davis regards him with nothing but disdain. When Llewyn takes a job riding to Chicago with washed up jazz musician Roland Turner (John Goodman), he's continually insulted for not playing "real" music and finds no help in the monosyllabic Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund), Turner's driver. Even the cat wants to get away - Davis is initially stuck with him when he escapes the apartment of Mitch and Lillian Gorfein (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett), but Llewyn is insistent of keeping the cat around, even when he realizes he brought the wrong one back to the Gorfeins.

 It is true that Inside Llewyn Davis is a tricky movie to like, even by the Coen brothers standards, but after I finished it (and enjoyed it), days later I found it stuck with me. I kept thinking about the film, and I needed to watch it again. Like Barton Fink, it makes an immediate impression, but also grows on you. There's a sadness in the hopelessness of Llewyn's story, but beneath that I sense a desire to make something, to do something with your life, even if things clearly aren't working out. Llewyn's  stubbornness to do it on his terms up until nearly the end of the film that counterbalances the jaded and cynical characters. But don't expect even a sliver of hope as Inside Llewyn Davis comes to a close: you won't find it. Strange for a movie based on someone considered by most to be jovial and beloved.

 Which brings us back to the first paragraph: Inside Llewyn Davis is "based on" (or even "inspired by") Dave Van Ronk in the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou is "based on" The Odyssey: it's more of a springboard to tell their own story than an account of the influential and beloved Mayor of MacDougal Street. There are a few actual connections: most of the songs Oscar Isaac performs are ones you'll find on Dave Van Ronk albums; Jim and Jean were an actual duo, and they aren't the only actual people to make it into this fictionalized version of the folk scene. Inside Llewyn Davis closes with perhaps the most potent juxtaposition between our "never was" protagonist and arguably the most famous figure to emerge from the New York folk scene. Blink and you'll miss the silhouette of the singer who follows Llewyn, but once they start playing, you'll know exactly who it is. The song, playing over a scene we were presented without context at the opening of the film, is a potent coda for Inside Llewyn Davis.

 What helps, I think, to ease the bleakness of the story is T-Bone Burnett's choices in music, performed almost entirely by the actor on camera singing. Isaac sings all of Llewyn's songs, and while we only see his partner Mike Timlin on a record sleeve, he's joined by Marcus Mumford for "Dink's Song (Fare Thee Well)" an upbeat tune that eases the on-screen frustration of our protagonist. Fans of folk music are going to find plenty of lesser known songs to recognize (even "Please Mr. Kennedy" is an actual song) while audiences who don't know the scene so well might simply assumed they were invented for the film. The music serves a similar effect as in O Brother to move the narrative along and to punctuate important moments.

 I don't know if Inside Llewyn Davis is going to stick with the rest of you the way it did with me. It is true that I am a fan of the Coen brothers, and it won't take too much digging on this site to find a series of essays on their films. Where does this fit into their body of work? Into their (increasingly downplayed or outright denied) auteur canon? Well, there is a continued theme of "true" art being crushed by commerce, or feeling de-legitimized and surrounded by mediocrity that's evident in Barton Fink. John Goodman returns for the first time since O Brother, Where Art Thou, and it has a similarly begotten upon protagonist as A Serious Man. There's even a shot of windshield wipers in rain that immediately brought Blood Simple to mind, as strange as that might sound.

 This is not the affable Coen brothers that audiences tend to embrace, and there's little of the quirky charm found in Fargo, but if you liked The Man Who Wasn't There or A Serious Man or Barton Fink, I think you'll enjoy Inside Llewyn Davis. A darker Coen brothers movie is still something working paying attention to, but be prepared to work a little bit. They won't make it easy on you, and in this film in particular, nothing comes easy. But the soundtrack helps. And the cat acting - I know they hated working with cats, but how they got some of those shots is mighty impressive. Cat acting... that seems like a good place to leave this review on. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to listen to "Dink's Song" again...

Blogorium Review: Argo

 I was listening to the radio the other day, and a sports commentator decided it was a fair point to compare a team he wasn't fond of to Ben Affleck.

 "Sure," he said "they're having a great season right now, but you can't ask me to forget about what they were doing a few years ago. It's like Ben Affleck - yeah, The Town was great, Argo was great, but you can't just make me forget about Gigli, Reindeer Games, Jersey Girl, Pearl Harbor and Daredevil*."

 The general point (and I know this because sports radio is mostly about repeating the same point over and over again for three hours) was that just because things are good now doesn't mean that we have carte blanche to forget about when they (being it Ben Affleck or the Atlanta Falcons) were terrible. Or, I suppose, maybe it's that we shouldn't forget that they WERE terrible, therefore their recent success needs to be tainted by that.

 It seemed funny to me, because for one thing I don't really see the point in that, but more importantly it seems to reinforce a theory that there are no second acts in show business** (let alone sports, which is a ridiculous notion considering how frequently the makeup of teams change over time). As someone who followed Ben Affleck from small parts in Dazed and Confused to a high school / college student that saw every Kevin Smith movie to a guy who watched his friend lose his grip on reality during Gigli***, I was as skeptical as anyone when Gone Baby Gone came out. I bought into the "Ben Affleck is snarky asshole who makes terrible decisions in film roles" conception of the actor, willfully forgetting that I had seen him in movies I really enjoyed.

 So when Gone Baby Gone, Affleck's directorial debut, was pretty good, I was taken aback a little bit. The concept that a quiet, reflective Ben Affleck had been hiding there all along, that the possibility that Affleck and Damon were more than what anyone expected of them after Good Will Hunting (and certainly after Dogma) was a little revelatory. Matt Damon spent most of the 2000s becoming the action star that Affleck failed to be with Michael Bay and John Frankenheimer, and Affleck sat out leading roles after Surviving Christmas, not because he had "given up" but because he needed time to prove he had more to offer****.

 My polite skepticism continued through The Town, although I will admit I was more interested in seeing The Town than Gone Baby Gone. It was one thing to see Affleck direct a film, it was another entirely for him to direct and star in his sophomore effort, but I'll be damned if that wasn't also a really good movie. Neither are my favorite films of their respective years, but I own both of them and have seen them again since. For whatever choices he made as an actor in the late nineties and early 2000s, Ben Affleck has a fine eye for direction, for choosing compelling stories, and in casting the right actors for the roles. What he may have lacked in front of the camera he certainly made up for behind it.

 Which brings us to Argo, the reason for our unnamed sports pundit's rant. Ben Affleck is (deservedly) getting a lot of positive buzz for his third film, and it may well carry over into awards season, and maybe that rubs people the wrong way. "How dare this Ben Affleck, who I said was a fraud for Good Will Hunting and who was in all those bad movies be the talk of the town now? How dare he???" Well, sports and movie critics, I have to say it's because Argo delivers the goods. And more importantly, Ben Affleck went the extra mile and proved that he isn't just a very good director - he can still carry a movie too.

 Instead of rehashing what Argo is about, or how politically appropriate the story turned out to be our current global climate, I thought I'd focus on something I wasn't expecting from a movie about the Iranian Hostage Crisis: how funny the move is.

 There are large stretches of Argo - mostly while Tony Mendez (Affleck) is setting up the titular fictional film that gets him into Iran - where you'll find yourself laughing quite a bit. Mendez recruits Hollywood makeup effects man John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) to help him buy the script for Argo from writer Max Klein (a great cameo by Richard Kind) and drum up enough publicity to convince the Iranian government that he really is part of a Canadian film crew scouting locations in Tehran, and not just a specialist for the CIA that rescues hostages like the ones hiding in the Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber)'s basement. Most of the midsection of the movie, while Mendez is creating the ruse, is a prolonged jab at Hollywood and movie-making in general, and it lightens the tension of the beginning of the film (which recreates the raid on the American Embassy) and the end of the film (after Mendez touches down in Tehran).

 What I was so impressed by is that it doesn't dilute the tension in the second half of the film, despite the fact that information about Mendez's success or failure is readily available in the public record (or, at least, it is now). Even if you've accidentally heard how the story ends, Argo succeeds in keeping you on the edge of your seat as our protagonist(s) head towards their plane out, even if part of what really happened was "augmented" for cinematic purposes. Affleck maintains the fine balance between self-deprecation and serious business as Argo needs it, and the film is by my estimation more successful than Gone Baby Gone or The Town as a result. They feel like very good dry runs, and Argo is the culmination of what Affleck knew he could do as director and actor. He succeeded, as far as I'm concerned, and I look forward to whatever he chooses to do next.

 If Argo becomes the second "welcoming" by Hollywood to its prodigal son, I have to say I'd be okay with that. If it was a chocolate Easter Bunny movie - all good flavor, but no substance, then maybe I'd be a little more hesitant, but Argo is both entertaining and substantive. You don't just move on to the next digestible piece of cinema after you're finished, and I look forward to seeing Argo again. If I had my druthers, I think The Master is more ambitious, but it's also more difficult to enjoy, if more interesting to experience. It's easily my favorite Ben Affleck film and is a strong contender to be one of my favorite films of 2012.

 Since I brought up Arkin and Goodman, and so as to not make this entire review about Ben Affleck, I'd like to also point out the fantastic cast of Argo, in large and small roles. Richard Kind (who most of you would remember recently from A Serious Man) has a one scene cameo, and you probably noticed Bryan Cranston (Red Tails - that's what you know him from, right?) and Titus Welliver (The Town, Dinosaur Island) in the trailer, but let's take a look at the many other familiar faces of Argo.

 There's Zeljko Ivanek (In Bruges, Heroes, everything), Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog, Creepshow), Tom Lenk (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Michael Parks (Kill Bill), Chris Messina (The Newsroom, Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and lest I forget the hostages themselves. Affleck intentionally went with actors that looked like the actually hostages and weren't very "well known," which is odd because I immediately recognized Rory Cochrane (Dazed and Confused), Clea DuVall (The Faculty), Tate Donovan (Love Potion Number 9), and was later able to pick out Christopher Denham (Shutter Island, Sound of My Voice) although I initially mistook him for someone in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. My mistake.

 Well folks, if there's a lesson to be learned other than "never listen to sports radio," it's probably that even if we all assumed that Ben Affleck was the problem (and not Michael Bay or Kevin Smith), and even if he maybe was for a while there (*coughBennifercough*), it is possible to break free of your negative stigma and to be successful doing what you really want to do. And if you're successful at that, you end up in a Terrence Malick film that people are already raving about. And not be the guy who made Red State or Transformers 3.

 Non-Directly-Affleck related post-script: Even though this experience has taught me to be less cautious at the mere presence of a name associated with dumb tabloid stories or crappy movies, I continue to be hesitant every single time I see a trailer for a Tom Cruise movie, even when I really enjoy it (Mission: Impossible: III / Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol). Jack Reacher, not even the Affleck Theory is changing my mind about you...

 Non-Directly-Affleck related post-post-script: At some point, I should also explain how this theory applies to Brad Pitt, who is continually viewed through the "hunky leading man" image cultivated during Legends of the Fall even though he frequently chooses to work with fascinating writers, directors, and in films you wouldn't expect "that" Brad Pitt to be in. Maybe when I see Killing Them Softly...


 * He also mentioned 200 Cigarettes, although I strongly suspect he never saw the movie because that's not exactly a Ben Affleck vehicle...
** Because, y'know, nobody ever heard of that Robert Downey Jr. guy again after he relapsed during Ally McBeal.
*** Seriously. He went temporarily insane and put a 12 pack container on his head, declaring himself the Sprite Pope. He then marched around my room issuing decrees, because Gigli snapped his brain.
**** For the record, I'd like to say I really enjoyed him in Hollywoodland, Smokin' Aces, and Extract, all of which happened between Surviving Christmas and Argo.