Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre’s screening of the melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) was shown as part of the cinema’s Film Club season. Introduced by Rachel Findley she told us that the film was about a week in the life of a singer who is active in New Yorks folk scene in 1961 just before Bob Dylan exploded on the scene and ‘folk’ music was changed forever.  The inspiration for this latest Joel and Ethan Coen written and directed vehicle is the music and memoir’s, (The Mayor of MacDougal Street), of Greenwich Village folk legend Dave van Ronk and the muted hues of the front cover of Bob Dylan’s second album released in 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It shows Dylan with Suze Rotolo at the corner of Jones Street and West Village New York City with critic Janet Maslin summing up the iconic impact of the cover as "a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging".

 

The Bob Dylan album.

Llewyn Davis (  When Davis hitches a ride to Chicago to audition for producer Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) he meets jazzman Roland Turner (John Goodman) who OD’s on the journey but recovers with the help of his valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund). The audition is not successful but Grossman does offer him a chance to form another duo but he turns it down deciding instead to go back into the merchant navy. Yet another plan that did not come to fruition!

Oscar Isaac), an unreadable character, is a self pitying loser who had made a name for him self as part of a singing duo until his partner throw himself off of the George Washington Bridge and he now spends his time looking for singing gigs around the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and bumming free board and lodging from friends and intellectuals that want to show him off to their friends as their ‘pet folk singer’. Other characters in his life are the married folk singing duo Jean and John Berkley (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake) Jean is pregnant and it could be Davis’s child, but as most of Greenwich Village fancies Jean so it could be anybody’s. All the same our wandering minstrel has to raise the $200 for an abortion!

 

The Peter, Paul and Mary type duo. 

Scraping together the abortion money!

Like the tracks on a lot of music albums from that period, the film itself is a little uneven at times, with high and low points. More like the rather disappointing A Serious Man (2009) than the brilliance of films like True Grit (2010), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), Fargo (1996) or my own personnel favourite The Big Lebowski (1998). But a Coen Brothers release is always appreciated and this one is very well constructed, the cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel is superb highlighting the period detail and as usual the acting is first rate but what worries me is the brothers reliance on a cute animal to under right this movie for no real reason which is not usually the case!  The music that forms a large part of the narrative is under the direction of T Bone Burnet with some input from Carey Mulligans husband Marcus Mumford and unusually the numbers in the film, which contextualise the era, are complete which has the tendency to slow the narrative down. It has been suggested that this film is not about the failure to make money but the failure to be connected to others, now theirs something I know about?

Fargo.

The wide open spaces of a Coen movie.

Wednesday night at the RBC Film Theatre was another in the Directors Focus series, this time following, True Grit on Monday, the Coen Brother were the subject of Darren Conner’s discussion. The evening started with a showing of the 1996 award winning Fargo.

The Coen character study.

Fargo is a dark comedy crime drama set in a very snowy North Dakota where Jerry Lundergaard a car salesman, who’s desperately in debt, arranges for two ex-cons to abduct his wife. The ransom is to be paid by Jerry’s rich, bullying father-in-law and split between Jerry and the two villains. But the “no rough stuff” deal does not work out as planned. This is due to two things the clumsy ineffectual crooks and the intervention of the seven-month pregnant local police chief Marge Gunderson.

Produced, directed and written by the brother’s Coen it stars the absolutely brilliant Frances McDormand as the very sharp local police officer, William H Macy as the anxious car dealer, the “funny lookin little fellow” Carl Showaller is played by Steve Buscemi and the psychopathic Gaear Grimsrud, a killer with a craving for pancakes, is portrayed by Peter Stormare. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, winning Best Original Screenplay for the Coen's and a very disserving Best Actress in a Leading Role for McDormand.

Coen humour.

Following the film Darren gave a very good talk with reference to what makes a Coen movie, something I have already rambled in my comments on True Grit (see link below) but suffice to say the Coen’s are unique, with an attention to detail, humour, strong characters and their tremendous writing ability. I think all of us who attended on Wednesday would agree that the whole evening was very enjoyable and I’m sure we would all like to thank Darren, who’s next for a focus then?

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True Grit 2010.

For the more discerning cinema lover the western still holds a special appeal proved by the fact that Ethan and Joel Coens master class in the genre is packing cinemas and Monday nights RBC Film Club showing was no exception.

Mattie Ross.

Based on the 1968 Charles Portis novel of the same name True Grit (2010) relates the story of 14 year-old Mattie Ross who sets out to avenge the shooting and killing of her father Frank Ross by his drunken low life employee who goes by the name of Tom Chaney, amongst other’s. The strong minded Mattie hires the one eyed fat whisky drinking US Marshall Reuben J “Rooster” Cogburn to track the outlaw who is now riding with the Ned Pepper gang across the Choctaw terrain. Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, who is pursuing Chaney for killing a State Senator, joins them on their manhunt.

Rooster Cogburn

Originally adapted as a film in 1969, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring the American icon that is John Wayne, a role that won him his only Academy Award for Best Actor, True Grit has now been resurrected by Joel and Ethan Coen. The “two headed director” wrote the screenplay, based more on the novel than the previous movie, edited under their normal alias of Roderick Jaynes and produced with a little help from a certain Mr Spielberg.  The Coen’s version narrates the story from the prospective of Mattie Ross who in 1928, as an older churchgoing spinster, recounts her adventures. Marshall Rooster Cogburn is portrayed as a complex character who was an unsuccessful family man, a member of William Quantrill’s guerrilla band during the American Civil War and its hinted, that he was once on the wrong side of the law?  The Texas Ranger LaBoeuf is a buckskin clad pipe smoking Texas Ranger who has been hunting Chaney for a cash reward for four months for killing the senator and his dog.

The Texas Ranger.

This western is pure entertainment from the start to the finish, it’s a film marked by its humour, its realism and its brutal social commentary. In my opinion its due to the brilliant cast and crew including long time cinematographer nine time Oscar nominated Roger Deakins, his eleventh film for the Coen’s. The soundtrack, based on 19^th-century church music, is the 15th scored by another long-time collaborator Carter Burwell. There is no doubt that we will certainly hearing a lot more of Hailee Steinfeld, chosen out of 15000 girls for the role of the resolute Mattie Ross. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress she even outshone Jeff Bridges who made the part of Rooster Cogburn his own just missing out to Colin Firth for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Bourne Trilogy star Matt Damon plays the Texas Ranger and Josh Brolin who was in the Coen’s award winning movie No Country for Old Men (2007) plays the psychopathic simpleton Tom Chaney. The directing style is undoubtedly  Coen brothers, with their attention to detail, the humour, the strong characters and their tremendous writing ability. It’s not before time that the brothers turned their clever genre skills to the best of all genres: the western.