Inside Llewyn Davis
A bona fide musical and a Bob Dylan fictional biography at the same time. Top that, future Timotheé Chalamet biopic, I bet it’s going to be worse than this.
Just like most Coen films, the protagonist has a plot thrust into him, he rolls around in that vortex, gasping for air, then comes out at the end, and not a single lesson was learned. This is even more so, the plot is basically circular, the first and last scenes are extremely similar (but still different).
Pretty much all plot beats are misunderstandings, the protagonist fucks up everything for absolutely pointless reasons, as it turns out. It seems his life is a week-long Groundhog Day stable loop, with minute variations.
Just a sample of shit that happens: his married friend is pissed since she is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is. He needs to raise funds for an abortion, so he goes to the same doctor he went to two years ago when this last happened, and discovered he has a two years old son, somewhere.
He is trying to break it into show-business for years, playing on shitty bars for no money, but that abortion thing comes up and he needs money, ASAP. He gets a gig as session musician, but instead of going through his agent and getting royalties, he gets a flat fee instead. Would you know it, that’s the song that breaks into the mainstream, and it mentions Kennedy in 61, some months before the Zapruder tape!
He didn’t even need the money in the first place, the doctor owed him from the last time! And when he got the money, he spent most of it paying the backlogged union dues to be able to ship out in some merchant marine job he can’t even take, because her sister threw out the box of old stuff he told her to!
On a lark, he travels to Chicago with some acquaintance of an acquaintance, driving in shifts, but their bigshot producer passenger is a jazz guy that hates poofter singers. The driver talks back to a cop and gets arrested on the spot, stranding the passenger and our protagonist in the middle of the road. Our protagonist just abandons all that and hitchhikes the rest of the way.
He goes to Chicago to meet some club owner he heard about, and after that gruelling trip, he gives him a record and plays for him, but his answer is a dry “I don’t see much money in that”. Yet another pointless trip. In the very same day, he hitchhikes back to New York.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.