Joel & Ethan Coen (USA, born 1954 & 1957)

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Inside Llewyn Davis starts as an entertaining portrait of a life lived bohemian. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Issac) is a folk singer in 1961 New York, and we follow him as he couch-surfs, gigs, gets into scrapes, loses- and chases- his friends’ cat, and participates in a goofy recording session. He has a tendency to rub people up the wrong way, and these abrasive interactions are often charming and funny in a decadent, downtrodden sort of way.

I liked it. I’ve always had a frustrated, ambivalent relationship with the Coen brothers, and failed to connect with their sensibilities, but this one felt slightly different. For one thing, the directors’ predilection for caricature was subdued here, and minimal.

Things changed a little around the middle of the picture, when Llewyn is travelling in a car with two new characters- Roland Turner, played by John Goodman, and Johnny Five, played by Garrett Hedlund. Both of them irritated me, Turner with his larger-than-life, oafish behaviour which felt like it might have been beamed in from a different movie (one perhaps more akin to The Big Lebowski), and Johnny with his affected, overly silent James Dean persona. It was around this time, maybe slightly earlier, that I had started to question just what the ‘point’ of this film was supposed to be. Was it just going to be about this guy, who spends his days hustling, and trying to find cash, and having arguments, and annoying most everyone he meets?

Anyway, I didn’t have to spend long with those two characters; they’re only in it for a few minutes. With them gone, the second half of the movie unfolded and the ‘point’ of it became clearer as the cavalier, often overtly comic tone of its first half descended into a whirlpool of disappointment and despair. Llewyn Davis is a man who lets himself down just as much as he lets others down, and there doesn’t really seem to be very much he can realistically do about it. He’s at a stage in his life- his early-to-mid-thirties- when bohemian behaviour starts to run extremely thin, and he is expected to have much more control over his general situation. His Plan A isn’t working, no matter how strongly he believes in its veracity and subscribes to its values. His Plan B- the Merchant Marine- is a last resort, a regression, a resignation. And there isn’t a Plan C.

Like the characters of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, tragedy hangs in Llewyn’s background, and no matter what he’s doing or where he’s going at a given time, it’s never far from his thoughts. Like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the film is another meditation on unfulfilled expectations, sadness and loss. Like The Return, the film doesn’t have what a mainstream moviegoer might call a ‘proper’ ending; it doesn’t have any answers for us as it fades to black, any more than Llewyn himself has any answers, and it simply lets its themes speak for themselves.

A Serious Man (2009) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Earlier, I opined that maybe there was a movie hidden somewhere inside Inherent Vice that I would have really enjoyed, featuring a strain of absurdist deadpan humour that was hitting some genuinely very funny notes. Well, that hypothetical movie might have looked a lot like A Serious Man. It’s the kind of ‘kooky’ film I often feel a distinct aversion to, something which has characterised all my previous viewing experiences with the Coen Brothers bar Inside Llewyn Davis and the OK-not-bad noir essay The Man Who Wasn’t There. The fact that there had never been a Coen Brothers film before I began this project that I would say I wholly, definitively liked, and now there have been two in a row to have achieved this feat comfortably, seems remarkable in itself, and perhaps even more notable when A Serious Man is perhaps considered to be one of their more minor works.

It’s nowhere near as obtuse or digressive a film as Inherent Vice. In fact, its storyline is about as simple and straightforward as you can get, and though its latter stages start to engage with the imagery and aesthetics of surreal fever-dreams, these narrative choices don’t feel particularly out of place, and could be said to reflect the unravelling of our protagonist’s accepted norms and general life direction. Two concurrent episodes, both heavily portentous, end the film on a dissonant note, but I received this much more positively than when The Master did a similar thing, or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, or, for that matter, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, which I will be dutifully but reluctantly watching again soon.

Is this hypocritical of me? No, I don’t think so. Unusual narrative choices are not the same as ones that are illogical or seem to exist just to baffle you. Another factor in my enjoyment of A Serious Man is that I liked Larry Gopnik, even as I found his wave of misfortune darkly funny. I liked Doc Sportello too, though, so such a thing can’t be used as any sort of failsafe barometer towards my overall appreciation of a movie. Still, it certainly doesn’t hurt, and Michael Stuhlbarg is terrific as the wide-eyed, mild-mannered everyman who just can’t catch a break. Also, if I can mention such a thing yet again, A Serious Man is 100 minutes long, a mere two-thirds of Inherent Vice’s luxurious runtime; The Master, meanwhile, clocks in at 137.

There are elements that might have bothered me in other films, and didn’t here. There are sub-plots that go nowhere and fizzle into nothing. There are shaggy-dog stories, there are mysteries that the movie establishes and never solves, and there is a neighbour character who is pretty superfluous, whose inclusion might only have been to inject a level of exoticism and fantasy into Larry’s pedestrian life, and to remind the viewer that beneath his submissive exterior, he has a sex drive that is just as active as the next man’s.

Any little question marks, though, that I might place over A Serious Man are trivial and trifling, and in any case feel like they might be a misunderstanding of its slippery, shapeshifting nature. It’s a film which is as gently and politely evasive as the numerous figures who provide useless counsel for Larry at intervals across the picture, who project a sage wisdom and helpfulness whilst actually providing neither. The final scenes remind us that this is not ultimately supposed to be a movie that you walk out of feeling refreshed and revitalised, despite the laughs that you may have had along the way; neither is it one that you were intended to take particularly lightly. Amongst other things, I guess this picture is a gesture of understanding toward life’s downtrodden whipping-boys, who may or may not be sleeping on their brother’s couch into their fifties, and gives them something of a voice. Inside Llewyn Davis covered similar ground, but less sweetly- Larry Gopnik is a nicer guy than Llewyn Davis, far less prone to outbursts of anger, and far more willing to compromise, often to the (undeserved) benefit of others.

No Country for Old Men (2007) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

There’s something sickening about No Country for Old Men. There’s something sickening about using a captive-bolt stunner to the head as a method to kill people, especially when you call them ‘sir’ and politely ask them to hold still while you do it.

By definition, then, there’s something sickening about the perpetrator of these deeds, Anton Chigurh, who feels nothing- nothing- when he snuffs out a person’s life. As a viewer, I guess it’s natural that this makes you uncomfortable, displaced and uncertain. How else should you feel, really, towards the act of killing, and the onscreen rendering thereof? Michael Haneke has stated that Salò is ‘the only film that has managed to show violence for what it is’, and though the onscreen content of No Country for Old Men is, of course, much more staid and far more socially acceptable than Salò’s, one feels that on at least some level, the points it makes belong in the same ideological ballpark.

There’s a question as to what the film is actually ‘about’. On the face of it, it’s a thriller with western elements and a palpable undercurrent of intellectualism. But it’s not a thriller, really- a couple of expertly filmed chase sequences aside, it’s not there to thrill, despite comments such as that from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who opines the movie is ‘entertaining as hell’. For me, the film is many things- it’s somewhat absorbing, from a certain cerebral angle, it’s unquestionably intelligent, but it’s not entertainment. It’s an essay. It’s a violent movie that comments negatively on its own content and forces you to really analyse the kinds of things that other films will so cheerfully depict. Could this be a direct criticism of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez? Possibly, especially when both filmmakers have made westerns with aesthetic elements that resemble this picture, but their films have got style, wit and verve, and violence is merely one facet of those filmmakers’ respective creative palettes. Instead, if we are indeed to assume that the movie is intended as a critique, then it might be more likely to be criticising steamy thrillers in the mould of Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct, which seem to present murder as part of the same exhilarating tapestry as sex, or killer-as-good-guy movies like Death Wish, Dirty Harry and Taken, which aren’t set in the cartoonish fun-cool worlds that Tarantino and Rodriguez tend to occupy but ones that are far closer to our own, and seriously seem to convey the message that violence, at least sometimes, with supposed circumstantial caveats, is something to be applauded.

As much as it is about anything else, then, I feel that the movie is about the actual act of killing, and the discrepancies therein- how one person can kill someone else, accidentally or otherwise, and it will be the most devastating thing that ever happens to them, leaving them a guilt-addled mess (the proverbial ‘most of us’), whereas others can take a human life with full malice aforethought and be thoroughly unperturbed- then, like Chigurh, continue to do it again and again on an indefinite basis.

Would he kill a child? It’s something the film doesn’t address- maybe it doesn’t feel like it needs to, as such a consideration may simply not be part of the film’s fabric. This is contrasted by, for example, Ben from Man Bites Dog, who absolutely can and absolutely does kill children- that movie, like this one, coincidentally also begins with our homicidal anti-hero garrotting somebody from behind. Similarly, Patrick Bateman, in the book of American Psycho, also kills children, for nothing, at least in his fantasies, something which the movie notably omits. Why? Too distasteful? It’s a questionable judgement call when one elects to adapt source material that is already so distasteful in the first place.

If this movie’s timeframe is an accurate representation of his killing habits, proportionately, then Anton Chigurh would probably be the most prolific serial killer of all time. I guess there have been real-life figures like him who have existed- Richard Kuklinski, say- but their numbers don’t match what Chigurh’s would be if adjusted for inflation, especially when we consider that he might kill someone every single time he needs to get past a hotel reception desk or is asked a potentially awkward conversational question by a gas station clerk. Chigurh struck me, therefore, as a symbolic representation of concepts rather than an actual human- the concept of fear, for example (the proverbial ‘all our fears’), or the kind of abstract ‘ill wind’ that I mentioned when covering Werckmeister Harmonies, or perhaps just death in general, echoing works such as the 17th century poem Death Be Not Proud, where John Donne addresses it directly as something of an anthropomorphic entity.

In the context of this movie, then, death can come at a time that is completely unexpected and inopportune, when you are just going about your regular business, as many of Chigurh’s civilian victims are when he lands upon them, or alternatively, as Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald do, you might get some level of advance warning- a terminal diagnosis- and spend a small amount of time staring death in the face and somewhat negotiating with it, desperately trying to find rhyme or reason. It gets some of us when we’re relatively young, like Macdonald, and some of us when we’re older. We might have a ‘brush with death’- a blood clot or stroke- that we manage to survive and leaves us deeply shaken, just like the gas station clerk played by Gene Jones.

Such conceptual theories go some way to ‘explain’ erroneous details of the film, such as why law enforcement seem to have absolutely no chance of catching and stopping Chigurh, or why Woody Harrelson goes quietly and willingly to the hotel room with him when he has nothing to lose from making the killer do his business in the more difficult, relatively public setting of the corridor. It goes some way to explain how Chigurh seems to have no trouble getting into an upper echelon of a private office block, shooting someone in the neck in front of a witness, taking time to stand over them and watch them gurgle and die with no hint of any need to make a quick getaway, and then apparently getting out of the place easily with no resistance or fuss; if Chigurh were real, he would probably be subject to one of the biggest manhunts of all time, not a search that was contained to a solitary, elderly Texan sheriff and a lone bounty hunter of questionable competence. These theories would also explain how, for example, he is able to get into Macdonald’s house in broad daylight without leaving any noticeable signs of a break-in or raising the attention of the neighbours. But they don’t explain a scene where Chigurh has a car crash- do Death, or Fear, ever have car crashes, even metaphorically? Or the scenes of Chigurh obtaining supplies and subsequently cleaning and bandaging his wounds- is that something that Death, or Fear, even in theory, ever do? Is all this supposed to make sense, or is No Country for Old Men trying to pull something of a Headless Woman on us (despite being the earlier film)?

You could maybe compare Chigurh to John Ryder in The Hitcher, another character whose apparent invincibility and bizarre fortuity suggest that he is not really supposed to represent a person, but something rather more abstract. An important difference, though- Ryder, like the aforementioned Patrick Bateman and Ben in Man Bites Dog, is seen to actively enjoy killing people and does it for nothing, whereas when Chigurh kills someone, there is always a supposed reason behind it, even if it is paltry in the extreme, and he is never overtly shown to get pleasure from his activities, as opposed to them merely being some morbid means to an end. I guess this makes him more unusual than them in the annals of popular culture, harder to pin down or properly define, and distinct also from the likes of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. 

In any case, earlier I described Synecdoche, New York as ‘absolutely saturated with death’ and I had a similar feeling here. We’re less than five minutes into the picture and not only has Chigurh already killed three people but Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Bell has also described the deaths of two others in his introductory voiceover. Then Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss, in the course of trying to kill a deer, comes across an entire fleet of cars filled with cadavers. Death, death, death and more death. Towards the film’s end, Sheriff Bell visits his uncle in a quiet, calm, weary scene. The uncle lives alone, squalidly. It is clear that these two men are approaching death. They might not die tomorrow, or the next day, but they are in the final stretches of their lives, something compounded by Bell’s retirement from work- ‘the beginning of the end’, as some might say. He mentions at the end of the picture that he has already outlived his father’s age by twenty years. He is on borrowed time. There is no mention of what he is going to do with what little he has left.

These are the sorts of themes that I’d neglected to grasp from previous viewings of No Country for Old Men, or to the extent that I did grasp them, I resented them. I was now seeing it for the third time, and in the lead-up to this latest viewing, did not look forward to it at all. It’s never been a film that I’ve liked- I had problems with the movie’s disrespect for narrative and its overarching tone, even if I couldn’t really fault the execution. While these issues haven’t completely gone away, it’s clear that the movie has all sorts of aspects going for it, even if these aspects are shrouded in a philosophical framework which is distinctly unappealing and, at times, downright ugly. One wonders, then, how justified I am in denigrating a film just because I don’t like the message it sends, especially as I have taken other critics to task for doing such a thing regarding Dogville. So I don’t know. I certainly appreciated the movie more on this third viewing, but ‘appreciated’ and ‘enjoyed’ are not the same thing- I am reminded of a whole subculture of ‘horrible’ and somewhat ‘sickening’ art that is clearly not supposed to be enjoyed by the likes of Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon and Zdzisław Beksiński. I am now aware that just because I don’t like something, it does not necessarily mean the artist is at fault, and in this case, the Coen brothers have crafted a work that it as brutally efficient as its antagonist, though I would still hesitate to follow in the footsteps of my critical contemporaries and call it any sort of masterpiece.