The Coen Odyssey: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

In his memoir, Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote that “a folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.” What he meant was that you had to let the songs sing you rather than the other way around. When Dylan would perform a traditional tune about the slave market, like "No More Auction Block," he wanted to sing it from inside the experience of the black man being sold into bondage. "With a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it," he said in 1966. "[But] you may have to lean forward a little." Becoming a character in a song like "No More Auction Block" requires a fair bit of leaning, and maybe sometimes even donning a few nifty disguises, but that's how Bob Dylan transformed American topical music into a fervid national drama that the listener had a stake in.

In the opening scene of the latest Coen brothers' film, Inside Llewyn Davis, as the titular folk singer (Oscar Isaac) plays the traditional death ballad "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" with earnest dedication, what's clear is that Llewyn Davis has yet to meet even one of those thousand faces. He sits on a faintly lit stage in a Greenwich Village club with confident assurance and sings that he doesn't mind being hanged, but dreads the finality of the grave. Yet for all his fidelity to this dramatic dirge, Llewyn never truly gets possessed enough by its power to bring the Gaslight Cafe audience into that endless sleep with him. Over the course of the picture, however, we quickly grasp that Joel and Ethan Coen are most certainly fascinated by what's at stake in the song. With Inside Llewyn Davis, they take Llewyn on an elliptical and evocative sojourn through the American heartland of the early Sixties, in the dead of winter, and touch the despair and futility that's right at the heart of the song. In doing so, they've fashioned a funny, occasionally touching, and remarkably haunting ballad of their own. It's by far their best picture.

Cultural Offerings for the Holidays

Jonny Lee Miller, Jon Michael Hill and Lucy Liu CBS's Elementary.

It can be difficult to decide what to buy people for the holidays, what with so much stuff available out there. So here is my annual list of holiday suggestions, (hopefully) suitable presents for the film/book buff, music lover and TV aficionado in your circle.

FX's Fargo: Their Own Private Minnesota

Allison Tolman and Shawn Doyle in Fargo, now airing on FX

It's not a sequel. It's not a spinoff or a remake. Maybe it's more like a reboot? Right now I'm thinking of Fargo, FX's new limited-run television series, as falling into the "inspired by" category. My favourite theory is that its story is a riff on the same "true story" which playfully (and apocryphally) inspired Joel and Ethan Coen's feature. It shares a universe, an aesthetic of darkly comic, casual violence, and perhaps an area code with the Coen brothers classic 1996 film of the same name, but there is little other explicit overlap. (However, careful fans might observe a mysterious briefcase the show's opening scene.) Still, television viewers tuning in will be reminded of the film by the big skies, the unforgettable North Minnesotan dialect and exaggeratedly rounded vowels ("aw geez", "you betcha!"), and the signature pacing and tone. There are significant risks in toying with a beloved and critically acclaimed movie on the small screen, but so far, with nary a wood chipper in sight, FX's Fargo has already begun to stand on its own snow-booted feet.

Newgrass Bluegrass: Punch Brothers' Who's Feeling Young Now?

Who’s Feeling Young Now? (Nonesuch 2012) is the third album by the rising bluegrass band called Punch Brothers. It’s a valiant record full of stories of hard fought battles between the sexes and the insecurities of being a parent. It’s also an album of cloistered conceits and an expression of an uncertain future all under the peculiar sound of instruments best suited to mountain music and country-dances. The Punch Brothers formed in 2006 after a series of meetings that involved large quantities of wine and food and complaining about failed relationships. Led by Chris Thile (mandolin, lead vocals) and Gabe Witcher (fiddle), Punch Brothers is essentially a rock band with acoustic instruments. The group, which also features Noam Pikelny (banjo), Chris Eldridge (guitar) and Paul Kowert, (double bass), perform their own music with scarcely a traditional bluegrass song in site. It is for this reason that Punch Brothers deserves attention rather than dismissal. The result is contemporary songs performed with a bluegrass aesthetic.

Life During Wartime: More (Self) Loathing From Todd Solondz

Life During Wartime, the latest film from Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998))  is just more of the same, another putative drama full of caricatured human beings, who generally loath themselves and exist merely to reflect in turn the self loathing of the director. The deep humanity of a Mike Leigh (All or Nothing, Happy-Go-Lucky) is not for Solondz; he’d rather take facile shots at American society, kill off his own characters (as he did with Dollhouse’s Dawn Wiener at the outset of the wretched Palindromes (2004)), and offer up a facsimile of feeling and insightful commentary. Life During Wartime, though, is somewhat more competent than his norm, which considering the otherwise deep flaws of the movie, isn’t reason enough to go see this film.

More on the Broadway Musical Season: Dead Outlaw, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century is that too many of them recycle the plots of old movies. But ever since the advent of the sophisticated book musical with Show Boat in 1927, composers and librettists have looked to other media for source material, though during the golden age of American musicals they more often began as straight plays or novels. Did critics and aficionados bemoan the fact that My Fair Lady adapted Pygmalion, Guys and Dolls was derived from a pair of Damon Runyon stories and Kiss Me, Kate was based on The Taming of the Shrew? The proof, as always, is in the pudding. The recent history of the musical would be significantly poorer without Hairspray, The Band’s Visit and, God knows, The Light in the Piazza. Anyway, the evidence suggests that musicals are becoming more imaginative, not less so. This season’s crop included a Korean import about two robots in love, a nineteenth-century whaling tale that ended in shipwreck and cannibalism, and, weirdest of all, the new Dead Outlaw, a rock musical conceived by David Yazbek, who also penned the music and lyrics along with Erik Della Penna.  

Talking Out of Turn #41 (Podcast): Joel and Ethan Coen (1984)

A scene from Joel and Ethan Coen's Blood Simple (1984)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Folkie Flashback: The Music Scene On Screen And Off

Washington Square Park, New York City, 1960s

Mired in controversy worthy of a folk song that laments bruised feelings, raw memories and hard travelin’, Inside Llewyn Davis is intended to capture the spirit of the times 53 years ago in Greenwich Village. The titular protagonist (Oscar Isaac) is based on the late musician Dave Van Ronk and performs his signature songs.The screenplay is loosely adapted from his posthumous 2005 memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, by co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Although I have yet to catch up with the movie myself, I keep hearing that the character comes across as a talented but misanthropic loser.

Van Ronk’s first wife, Teri Thal, denounced the film in a recent Village Voice story. “I didn't expect it to be almost unrecognizable as the folk-music world of the early 1960s,” she wrote. “Llewyn Davis a not-very smart, somewhat selfish, confused young man for whom music is a way to make a living. It's not a calling, as it was for David and for some others.”

Terri Thal and Dave Van Ronk

Thal concludes: “The inept Llewyn Davis arranged some of those songs? Sang them as well as Oscar Isaacs does? I don't believe it. That schmuck couldn't make that music.”

Ouch!

Inside Llewyn Davis attempts to chronicle the days just before a guy newly-arrived from Minnesota changed the entire equation after cleverly tapping into the zeitgeist. Something was happening and you did know what it was, didn’t you, Mr. Dylan? Later, his lyrics for “Tangled Up in Blue” perfectly captured the Village life he found in early 1961: “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air...”

A Contrarian View: BlacKkKlansman, The Sisters Brothers, Shoplifters and Burning

Adam Driver and John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman.

The following contains a spoiler for the film Shoplifters.
 
It’s always illuminating to read film critics’ year end best-of lists in specialty magazines like Film Comment and Sight & Sound as well as mainstream mags and newspapers like Time and The New York Times. Overall, the critical community tends to hew to a predictable pattern, extolling art-house films, both foreign and English-language movies, much more than accessible (but quality) American or Hollywood fare. I’m not referring to Alfonso Cuarón’s superb Roma, his semi-autobiographical tale of his family maid in the '70s, which is a masterpiece and deserves all its accolades, but to other films whose rave reviews leave me cold. Here are four movies that don’t deserve the love they’re getting from critics.

Renaissance Man: Andrew Vaughn's Pilot of a Steam Powered Aereo-plain

It’s knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk/That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and tucked behind your couch/And it’s knowing I’m not shackled by forgotten words and bonds and the ink stains that have dried upon some line/That keeps you on the back roads by the rivers of my memory/That keeps you ever gentle on my mind.

- Glen Campbell, "Gentle on My Mind."

Sure, it was Glen Campbell who made the song famous. But it was John Hartford who wrote those words and the music that made them memorable. He was the tall, lean banjo player with the grin and the easy-going personality that backed Glen up on Campbell’s summer replacement show. Hartford had recorded his own version of the song which Campbell heard on the radio and decided to try his luck with a cover version. In 1967, they both won Grammy Awards, two each; Hartford for writing and for his own recording, Campbell for Best Country & Western Recording and Best Male C&W Vocal Performance. Hartford always said that “Gentle On My Mind” bought his freedom. He was more than a one hit wonder though, and not because he wrote dozens of hit songs. Hartford was a renaissance man in his own way; musician, songwriter, steamboat pilot, author, artist, disc jockey, dancer, folklorist, historian, and probably a handful of things we don’t know about. He had a comic side, although writing comic sketches for the Smothers Brothers wasn’t his forte, they kept him around for his razor sharp wit.

The Front Runner: Satire and Beyond

Hugh Jackman (centre) in The F.ront Runner.

Movie-wise, 2018 culminated in the lamest Christmas season in years; aside from Mary Poppins Returns, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, three of the six segments in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Peter Jackson’s extraordinary World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, I didn’t see a single film I could get behind. And the dim slate of Academy Award nominations for Best Picture confirm the widespread disgruntlement about the caliber of last year’s releases. Actually, it wasn’t quite as terrible a year for movies as the list of nominees indicates. It’s just that in 2018, even more radically than in most years, the majority of the interesting films were sidelined – they opened only briefly, and only in a few cities, and didn’t draw the attention they deserved. (Ironically, the other cadre of movies worth checking out resided at the other end of the spectrum: the franchise movies that saturated the cineplexes over the summer, most of which were immensely enjoyable.) This was the year of Blaze, Hearts Beat Loud, The Sisters Brothers, Paddington 2, Leave No Trace, Juliet, Naked, Christopher Robin, The Death of Stalin, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot and Journey’s End. And of The Front Runner, Jason Reitman’s movie about Gary Hart’s doomed bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 1988, which a friend helpfully steered me to a couple of weeks ago. It’s amazing that a movie as good as this one, by a respected director and with a major star (Hugh Jackman), released at the beginning of prestige-movie season (it came out Thanksgiving week), could have slipped by virtually unnoticed.

Order and Ambiguity: The Alex Colville Exhibit at the AGO

Seven Crows, by Alex Colville (1980)

In 1983 the Art Gallery of Ontario presented the first retrospective of Canadian artist Alex Colville. David Burnett who met the artist at his home in Nova Scotia curated the exhibit. In his book Colville [McClelland & Stewart, 1983] that accompanied that show, Burnett was particularly apprehensive of the job, saying that “to present the work of a living artist is a special responsibility that must rest upon a relationship of openness and trust between artist and curator.” I would be curious to know Burnett’s opinion of the new Alex Colville exhibit that opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario on August 23rd. For this exhibit, the artist, who died in 2013, was not part of that 'special relationship' of which Burnett puts much importance.

The Secrets of Subversion: Steely Dan's "Reelin' in the Years"

One night in the late Seventies, on their network television show, Donny and Marie Osmond decided to perform a nostalgic tribute to the glorious days of our youth. Decked out in spangles and bell-bottoms, the duo picked a contemporary pop standard they believed caught the mood of nostalgia. As they began, they traded lines of the song as if exchanging precious memories:

You're everlasting summer
You can see it fadin' fast
So you grab a piece of somethin'
That you think is gonna last
Well, you wouldn't know a diamond
If you held it in your hand
The things you think are precious
I can't understand.

Despite the bitter and acrimonious tone of the lyrics, the siblings' performance was upbeat and grossly energetic. They exchanged smiles, tossed individual lines to each other and reached out their hands as if eagerly anticipating their high school reunion. By the time they reached the chorus and were singing in harmony, their mood turned curiously exuberant:

Are you reelin' in the years
Stowin' away the time
Are you gatherin' up the tears
Have you had enough of mine?

Thumbs down!: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!

George Clooney in Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail Caesar!

Hail, Caesar!, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, may be their most lacklustre film to date. The story, set in 1951, revolves around the goings-on when movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped and harried studio executive Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has to retrieve him before the plug has to be pulled on the studio's expensive Biblical epic, Hail, Caesar!: The Story of the Christ, which stars Whitlock. Hail, Caesar! has a lot of potential as a screwball comedy, skewering as it does everything from self-centered actors to pretentious directors to the leftist politics of the time but the movie is pretty much dead on arrival. The actors are bored and mostly boring, the set pieces, made up fake movies of various genres, musicals, high comedies, Westerns etc., are flat and unimaginative, and the whole production barely makes a comedic ripple. Remember how disinterested and indifferent the Coens were when they won the Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men? Imagine a movie made with that same spirit of ennui and you have Hail, Caesar! in a nutshell.

Comedy at Its Highest Peak: The Big Bang Theory

The cast of The Big Bang Theory

Note: The following contains Spoilers

Two of the best American comedies on television, The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family, come from very different sitcom traditions. But they also cross over in interesting ways. The Big Bang Theory (CBS), which begins its sixth season on Thursday, Sept. 27, features an old fashioned laugh track, uses two cameras, and is a studio shot comedy in the vein of The Honeymooners, All in the Family and Frasier. Modern Family (ABC), which heads into its fourth season on Wednesday September 26, and which I’ll write about next week, eschews the laugh track, is filmed on real locations and is more in the naturalistic vein of M*A*S*H and Mad About You. Yet The Big Bang Theory still boasts the kind of sharp wit and subtle jokes that makes it quite contemporary in tone; and Modern Family has a decided penchant for slapstick, spit takes and pratfalls. Both shows are very funny and, in their own ways, unique comedies.

When The Big Bang Theory debuted in 2007, it did seem like a long shot for ratings success, even though it was the creation of Chuck Lorre, who had already scored big with Two and a Half Men (a crass comedy decidedly inferior to The Big Bang Theory in every way). After all, who but a bunch of science fiction obsessed nerds would want to watch a show about people like that? But Lorre was onto something. He realized that thirty years after Star Wars, SF, fantasy and gaming had so penetrated the popular culture that there would be quite a lot of interest in its goings-on from the outside world. Not to mention, the series offered one strong female character that functioned as the fulcrum for the guys and their shtick and provided  a ‘normal’ counterpart to the male oriented geek brigade (There are now three women on the show.) Five years on, The Big Bang Theory is an enormous hit (some 16 million American viewers, up 23% from the year before) and a smooth running ensemble, with not a weak link among the cast.

Getting It Right #2: Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit

My issue over the years with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen is that they hate people. Not in a misanthropic or curmudgeonly manner (I have always found misanthropes fascinating and curmudgeons amusing), but in a smug 'people are idiots' mindset. Look at pictures such as the reprehensible Fargo where every character, including the supposed heroine Marge (Frances McDormand), is treated with complete contempt because of their 'funny accent' or their 'stupid' actions (Marge doesn't even solve the crime, she stumbles across the solution by accident). The Coens are the worst sort of people-haters because, based on the evidence in several of their films, they think they're better than everybody else.

And yet, when they get it right, they have created, if not great pictures, ones where I've come away feeling amused/entertained/satisfied. Pictures like Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski and Miller's Crossing fall into this category for me. Most of the others are either 'god, I hate this movie' or 'yawn'. Even their Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is a bit pointless when you get right down to it. This brings me to their biggest hit in their careers: the remake of True Grit, now in theatres and this past weekend’s number one at the box office. I'd heard very good things about True Grit, so I was interested in seeing it. But people had also said wonderful things about Fargo, Barton Fink, and The Ladykillers. The picture seemed right up the 'aren't people stupid' alley that the Coens have mined over the years. It's a western, so lots of chances for: funny accents, ill-bred idiots, numb-nutted gunslingers and dumb-as-dirt cowpokes. So imagine my surprise when I came out of the theatre, well, moved (an emotion I'd never felt in any of the Coen brothers' movies).

Shaw Entertainments: The Ladykillers and Getting Married

Chick Reid and Damien Atkins in The Ladykillers at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. (Photo: David Cooper)

Performed by overlapping ensembles, The Ladykillers and Getting Married, comedies of very different stripes, are the most sheerly enjoyable shows I saw at the Shaw Festival this season. The Ladykillers is Graham Linehan’s 2011 stage version of the screenplay William Rose wrote for the beloved Ealing comedy from 1955, starring Alec Guinness – fitted out with hilarious fake incisors that made him look like a cadaverous shark – as the brains of a gang of robbers who work out of his rented room in an innocent silver-haired widow’s house fronting a railroad track. (The Coen Brothers remade it in 2004, with Tom Hanks in the Guinness part.) Getting Married is a George Bernard Shaw comedy of manners that’s little known, at least outside Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the festival has performed it on four previous occasions.

Deplorable: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

It felt pretty close to doing full penance just getting through all the grisly condescension and sanctimony of Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. That the picture has been garnering huge acclaim and numerous Best Film awards maybe shouldn't be too surprising given the current political climate. Dialogue in the Trump era has coarsened into Twitter feuds, talking heads on radio (who don't actually talk, but yell), and news anchors on television staking out positions rather than discussing issues, and a poisonous air of tabloid prurience perfumes the culture. People do little reflecting now and plenty more reacting. So Three Billboards keeps itself pretty busy staking out positions and reacting loudly in a cartoon atmosphere filled with ugly caricatures. Instead of reflecting on the current calamity, or even satirizing it cleverly, McDonagh chooses to distort the mood of the country and exploit it for pure effect. And the calculating unpleasantness of Three Billboards, with its queasy mixture of slapstick violence and sentimentality, would be bad enough were it not also trying to say something important. The film deliberately abandons any claim to dramatic realism, or even coherence, in order to manipulate and sway frustrated liberal sentiments and prejudices by crudely calling out "the deplorables" – the yahoos-in-a-basket whom Hillary Clinton identified as Trump's supporters in a misguided campaign speech. But the picture, with dialogue as broadly obvious as a billboard, ends up itself being deplorable by endorsing the same demagogic tactics that made Trump president in the first place.

What's Up, Doc?: Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), Thomas Pynchon's 2009 detective pastiche Inherent Vice is a hip and hefty comic riff (only with a melancholic bedrock) that builds on pop connections and associations already alive in the reader's mind. In Ragtime, a parable of American lore in which the author performed masterful tricks with the history we thought we knew, Doctorow captured the spirit of America in the era at the turn of the twentieth century and World War One. But rather than write a realistic account of the period, Doctorow created a crazy quilt, and a flip-book chronicle that was, in many ways, already a movie before it became one. Inherent Vice is equally opulent, but given that it invokes America in the early Seventies when the heady counter-culture of the Sixties is decimated by assassinations, drugs, and the election of Richard Nixon as President, it is perfumed in regret and loss. There's also a sense of dread implored, too, as the story opens in Los Angeles on the eve of the Manson trials (where Charles Manson, a diabolical psychopathic drifter, who looked like a hippie, had colonized the same California girls Brian Wilson once wrote lovingly about a few years earlier and together Manson and those women committed mass murder). Inherent Vice is about the door starting to close on the communal utopia the Sixties promised.

The Jesus Rolls: Blier Country

Bobby Cannavale, Audrey Tautou and John Turturro in The Jesus Rolls (2019).

It takes guts these days to remake Bertrand Blier’s freewheeling, anarchic 1974 screwball sex farce Going Places, and that’s what John Turturro has done in The Jesus Rolls (available on Prime). Blier ran afoul of feminist critics back in the seventies when he made Going Places and, four years later, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Both films star Gérard Depardieu and the late Patrick Dewaere as stumblebum buddies whose chronic misunderstanding of women is at the heart of both the comedy (in both pictures) and the sadness (in the final scenes of Get Out Your Handkerchiefs). In Going Places, they play Jean-Claude and Pierrot, scruffy, hedonistic auto mechanics in their mid-twenties whose desire for instant gratification is as unmediated as it is in little boys. They pursue sexual pleasure with exactly the same heedlessness and inability to imagine the consequences as they display when they steal a car. The emblem of the movie is a motif of images in which they run for their lives – from the gun-toting owner of a beauty salon whose beloved vehicle they borrowed just for a little drive, from a revenge murder they unwittingly get involved in, and so on. They’re hopeless schlubs whose epic miscalculations trigger one fiasco after another while the universe laughs uproariously at their antics. They’re constantly on the move, but in this context “going places” means “going nowhere”; the movie ends with them (and the woman they share, played by Miou-Miou) relaxing in relative peace and enjoyment of life, but they’re wanted by the law and we know there’s no place they can escape to. The French title of both the movie and Blier’s novel, on which it’s based, is Les Valseuses, which means “balls” and makes it explicit that their relentless bumbling is linked inextricably to their gender. But it’s impossible to envision an audience that would welcome the film now, since Blier takes the prerogative of an artist and makes these morons likable. God preserve the writer or director (Blier co-wrote the screenplay with Philippe Dumarçay) who doesn’t wag a cautionary finger at ill-behaved characters to make sure we know we're supposed to disapprove of them.