If The Sun Also Rises were Set in the Sixties...

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2014)

...Then this would be it. Ernest Hemingway takes his book title from the verse in Ecclesiastes that states "Also, the sun rises and the sun sets; And hastening to its place it rises there again. Blowing toward the south, Then turning toward the north, The wind continues swirling along; And on its circular courses the wind returns." Like The Sun Also Rises, Inside Llewyn Davis doesn't have much of a plot. Its characters, particularly the titular Llewyn, drift from place to place, never really going anywhere. And like Jake Barnes, from the Hemingway novel, Llewyn has a piece of himself missing--his former singing partner, Mike. Llewyn loses himself in this lost part of himself, and thus falls into the wind's swirling, circular course. But his obstinacy and pretension keep Llewyn from escaping, and so, as the movie's beginning and ending scenes suggest, Llewyn is stuck in a rut from which he'll never escape until he can learn to compromise.
And since I've already compared the film to one literary work, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to bring in a few others. Llewyn's cyclical life evokes Sisyphus, although if Albert Camus imagined Sisyphus happy, the Cohen brothers imagined him broken, weary from pushing his meaningless rock day after day.
And then, of course, there was the cat, that elusive creature that kept slipping through Llewyn's fingers, much like his dream of being a renowned musician. I can't help but think of T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock" here, with the "yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes."
But anyways, I thought the film was excellent. The writing was superb, the direction was great, and Oscar Isaac really shined, even if only as a diamond in the rough. (And mad props to Adam Driver for being one heck of a scene-stealer.)