Tired Film

Rating: 3/10 (30 December 2013)

The protagonist has his life sucked out of him due to failure from trying to make it in the music scene. And the only redeeming quality is the connection felt to this character since you will likely have the life sucked out of you after viewing.
Its about a man trying to make it in the folk music scene in new York city. Inside Llewyn Davis needed but lacked something smart to envelopment the audience into the folk scene. It needed to present us with whats going on in that scene. If they couldn't do it technically (since all that was done regarding the setting was showing cold, muted colors and bleak dark environs that do not transport you anywhere except to a place of gloominess) they should have at least tried to put in some dialogue about the scene, a bit of a historical perspective, something about folk music itself, anything to get the audience into the 1960s folk scene setting which was what the movie was about. Perhaps the movie wasn't really about the folk music scene but rather a metaphor for the man who fails in his vocation. The film was about portraying a face that is not able to make it and perhaps the difficulty of trying to be a folk singer during that time period. The music was portrayed and listening to it was a delight and the only redeeming quality unfortunately is was barely discussed.
The reason this film really fails is it exposes the worst of the worst film-making techniques and styles that the Coens are capable of. Quirky and boring caricature like characters that are trying to be amusing or maybe funny but you absolutely don't care about. Characters who are arbitrarily literally dropped out of the story which is OK because you don't care about them. There is really no character study of Lllewyn Davis he is sad, a little frustrated without very minimal backdrop to why he does what he does.
The second major film-making problem was that it seemed put together in a very amateurish way since it has a disjointed feel, lacks flow, contains scenes of random nothingness infiltrated with characters of such banality. This was the worst Coen Film since the random characters which are sometimes amusing in their film were carelessly put in, had nothing of interest to say and completely failed to amuse. The random scenes in their films that usually don't fit in can sometimes have this quirky suspense about them but there was no suspense in this movie. The movie seemed lazily put together, the main character was tired and it may ultimately leave the audience tired.
The only pleasantness derived from this is the actually folk music we get to hear. A complete song was played which is the only enjoyment I can foresee an audience deriving from this poorly put together depiction of bland misery. Devoting significant movie time to playing complete songs is also a problem. So the only good thing about this movie even added to the problems since by having a lot of time devoted to playing the complete song; the character development, the story and the substance were all forfeited.