Struggle

Rating: 9/10 (29 July 2016)

If I had to describe this film in just one word it would be the word struggle. That's what we go through when we go inside Llewyn Davis. The struggle artists have to go through to get out there.
If you're a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a poet, a painter, an animator or anything else in the creative industry then I highly recommend this film to you, to give you a possible vision of your future. Life is tough, and that's what Llewyn Davis shows us. We go through unfortunate and very relatable events with our protagonist in this story. We all had moments in our life where we screwed up. We all made mistakes and we all have said things we didn't mean to people we love.
Aside from this film being very relatable, it's a really well directed piece of art.
A thing you will notice if you're a fan of the Coen's, like myself is that this film didn't have Roger Deakins as the DP, who at the time probably was working on Prisoners. This time we get Bruno Delbonnel behind the camera's and he does a fantastic job. The lighting is very impressive, especially in the opening scene. The shot-reverse shot can also been seen a lot in this film, which makes it feel very familiar to the Coen's previous works.
The music, acting and overall direction is great. After I watched this, Oscar Isaac instantly became one of my favorite actors working today. John Goodman once again teams up with the Coen's and delivers a solid performance. Other actors and actresses do a good job as well, Carey Mulligan is a great singer and she is a really diverse actress. I hope she appears in more movies from the Coen's.
My only complaint is that the second act in this film had bad pacing. It felt like it didn't fit in with the rest of the film and it didn't do the characters a lot of justice. The third act makes up for it though.
Overall, I feel like this is a very overlooked film with beautiful music, great screenplay and good performances. How this has a 7.4 on IMDb is quite surprising to me, then again I can understand if some people think this movie drags, because there doesn't happen a lot aside from character interactions.