A shaggy odyssey for the under-recognized

Songs of farewell and songs of perdition, songs of rambling and songs of surrender. Joel & Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis is set in New York in the winter of 1961, the peak of the folk revival that bloomed in the basket houses of Greenwich Village, and the songs that river through this movie are by and large songs drawn from collective memory, songs remembered and revived for their haunting individual images yet most often credited to no one in particular. “If it was never new and never gets old then it’s a folk song,” our titular protagonist (Oscar Isaac) flatly declares after singing ‘Hang Me, Oh Hang Me’ to a small but transfixed audience at the Gaslight. From the title on down, ‘Hang Me’ is a song would sound like resignation were it not for the simple fact of its being sung—in this case with spectral grace.

‘Hang Me’ is, in a sense, the movie in miniature: talented but no genius, a bold interpreter but not a songwriter, Llewyn struggles to make a name for himself but is beset by obstacles throughout this tale marked by loneliness, strange twists of fate, acid absurdist wit, and a pitch-perfect sense of time and place. Llewyn possesses genuine artistic integrity, but he does not ingratiate himself. He’s not remarkably handsome or charismatic. Actually he’s kind of an asshole, or in any case tends to say the wrong thing. He also has a knack for impregnating women he probably shouldn’t have slept with to begin with. He carries a deep psychic wound—stemming from the loss of his musical partner—but won’t give others the benefit of discussing it, much less exploit it for the sake of honing a then-marketable lonesome traveller persona. (The dissonance between Llewyn the performer and Llewyn the ordinary ornery fuck-up is one of this story’s most compelling elements.) In short, he makes no effort to let his friends, colleagues or listeners “inside.” He doesn’t “connect” with audiences the way that the seemingly wholesome duo Jim & Judy (Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan) or the exceedingly earnest Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) do. What Llewyn gains in authenticity he loses in accessibility.

So this is decidedly not a chronicle of musical success; Llewyn is barley successful at scoring a couch to crash on, a ride, or a meal. He can’t even take care of a benefactors’ cat—and let me add that Inside Llewyn Davis features what must be the most impressive cat performance(s) in the history of cinema. Llewyn falls into a gig playing backup on a potentially lucrative novelty tune (featuring vocals by a brilliantly ridiculous Adam Driver) but signs himself out of royalties. At one point Llewyn joins in on an ill-fated road-trip to the Midwest—maybe things will be better in Chicago—accompanied by a Santería-practicing junky jazzman (John Goodman, with excellent haircut) and a taciturn valet named Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund, hilariously revising and reversing his garrulous Dean Moriarty from On The Road). Later he’ll consider abandoning music and returning to the merchant marine, but even giving up art for commerce proves problematic.

Initially inspired by the life of the late folkie Dave Van Ronk, Inside Llewyn Davis follows one of these figures for whom fame and fortune will always remain elusive—which is a whole other kind of mystique: the romance of the under-recognized. Riddled with dead ends and fraught affairs, impromptu travels and roads not taken, unsupportive agents and the world’s narrowest hallways, Llewyn’s shaggy odyssey is closer to the stuff of folk songs than those of other singers famous for singing folk songs. If I haven’t made this clear yet, the movie is beautifully acted, photographed and edited; it’s poetic, funny, sad and fascinating; it’s a mature, surprisingly soulful work from these forever fraternal filmmakers, lifelong collaborators who can surely relate to the idea of not knowing how to go on as an artist without your creative partner by your side.  

                                            

Rise of the nerd economy: The Social Network

If the internet sometimes feels like the crowning achievement of American rear-view myopia—a disdain for any history that isn’t myth; the quest for forms of communication that annihilate reflection via equally instantaneous responses to events banal and of the utmost gravity—then it’s that much more exhilarating to discover this very American movie that interrogates recent history—the creation of what is arguably the most colossal internet phenomenon of our century’s first decade—in a manner that’s at once deeply reflective and gloriously impatient, and through a story that forsakes virtual communities for actual ones.

Based on Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction bestseller The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network opens with a riveting break-up scene rife with humiliation and rapid-fire banter—Todd Solondz by way of Howard Hawks—and closes with the smuggest half of this broken couple refreshing the other’s stubbornly oblivious Facebook page like a caffeinated laboratory mouse tapping his lever in vein hope of some paltry reward. Director David Fincher has described The Social Network as “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies,” and he’s not far from the mark. That young woman who left him at the bar with unflinching assurances of his asshole status will remain Mark Zuckerberg’s elusive Rosebud, the one who got away and stayed away, understandably so since only minutes after being dumped the future Facebook creator blogged about what a bitch she was before drunkenly creating a flamboyantly misogynist hotness rating site using photos of every girl on campus as the coup de gras. Unlike Orson Welles’ media giant and failed politician, Zuckerberg’s odyssey ends before he even hits 25, having already become the world’s youngest billionaire yet nonetheless still wearing plastic sandals with tube socks to his emotionally-heated legal proceedings. Kids: they grow up fast these days.

Zuckerberg is portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, whose facility with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly bracing dialogue is almost supernatural. Eisenberg is even less ingratiating here than he was in The Squid and the Whale, far too in control of his performance to concern himself with audience sympathy. He’s beautifully matched by Andrew Garfield’s diabolically shafted Facebook CFO—Zuckerberg’s former best friend, and probably the most sympathetic character in the movie—Justin Timberlake’s absurdly confident Napster creator—it was Timberlake killed the music industry!—and most especially by Armie Hammer’s dual role as the Winklevosses, the handsome and wealthy Harvard twins and human rowing machines who recruited Zuckerberg to do the nerd labour for their proposed Harvard student dating site and watched helplessly as Zuckerberg took their fragment of an idea and turned in into the biggest virtual place in the ether. I love the fact that Sorkin gives many of the best of his smart-ass lines to these guys, the characters who could be seen as the story’s biggest schmucks: “I’m 6.5, 220, and there’s two of me.”

The completely convincing doubling of Hammer for these bits is not only the result of skillful acting but also fluid special effects, something Fincher knows his way around (even if the movie’s CGI breath during some ostensibly chilly outdoor scenes looks distracting and ridiculous). Yet one of the things that makes The Social Network so satisfying is the sense that Fincher has almost completely shaken off the technical show-offery that plagued some of his earlier work, most notably Panic Room. Delivering on the promise of his career make-over Zodiac, he emerges here as a nimble, eloquent and precise storyteller, never hitting the themes harder than necessary, locking his focus on faces of characters whose lives are going too fast for them to fathom, and gleefully compacting extremely wordy scenes into taut matches of wit and desperation. These scenes indeed allude to contemporary issues of dissolving privacy, fractured interaction and fast money, yet they so often resonate most potently as a study of masculine psychology barely past he gates of awkward adolescence.