Another "Not-Easy-to-Watch" but altogether Impressive Coen Bros movie

Rating: 7/10 (11 December 2013)

I saw Inside Llewyn Davis in a sold out matinée in Union Square, NYC last weekend. The city was cold and dreary, much like the 1960s Manhattan depicted in this film. I sat with my friend after the movie and basically railed against the film for the first ten minutes before slowly admitting that my criticisms were obviously the intended result and that the Coen Brothers have once again made a great movie that is simply not easy to digest and certainly not fun to digest.
I'll lead with the greatness. The underlying takeaway of this film is that the actual creation of music - the sound, the beauty and the lyrical story - can embody some of the best attributes about humanity and yet, the creator of such music can nonetheless lack all such attributes and essentially be as ugly a person as his music is beautiful. That is the takeaway, and the Coen Bros intentionally force this upon the viewer. The folk songs song by Lleywn serve as calming beautiful interludes and as stark contrasts to the plot driven by a character who is simply put, a terrible human being stuck in an extremely frustrating, self-made vacuum of an existence.
I assume that most people, like me, gravitate toward wanting to root for the struggling artist. There is a nobility in pursuing your dreams when such dreams consist of the pursuit of an art form. Here, folk music is put on a pedestal and LLewyn's pursuit of it is from the outset, something the audience implicitly will support. In the course of 90 minutes, the Coen Bros force you to question this support, hate the lead character and eventually cheer when he gets punched in the face.
The problem is simple. I did not want any more of LLewyn Davis after 90 minutes. I did not want to hear his music anymore because the lyrics he sung were fraudulent, the beauty of his playing, a guise. And due to his self-made failings throughout the film, I no longer cared where his story went. The Coen Bros could have taken the plot line in any number of ways to give the viewer some foothold to hope that Llewyn may end up on the right track one day. They do not give you that foothold, and for that reason, I was pretty ready for this movie to end when it did. This is admittedly a criticism, but more an observation. I certainly do not need films to end with rainbows and hearts, but this script really forces you to watch a man stuck in a static world where his own actions cause him to go nowhere, and that is a frustrating world to inhabit for 90 minutes.
The best parts of the film are not the Manhattan scenes, but the drive LLewyn takes to Chicago. The Coen Bros have used the theme of "driving at night" time and time again to make some great scenes, usually emotionally charged personal voyages. This is no different. Their cinematography and over all character driven story telling shines when their lead characters hit the road. The bit characters are fun and unusual in the Coen Bro's way, but do little to ease the 90 minutes of crass, immature, self-defeating, out-of-touch and eventually just pathetic life movements from Lleywn's character
For Coen Brother fans, its worth the journey; for general movie fans, be warned, as this is an interesting film, but arguably not an enjoyable one.