Recently I re-watched the Coen Brothers' great 2013 movie Inside Llewyn Davis. Oh, how I love this flick!
My original post was an examination of why this is a great NYC movie. (It still is, by the way.) But what I didn't fully appreciate at the time was and is how radical, how subversive, how daring this movie is; how it completely shatters all conventions and norms of storytelling -- it does all the things you're not supposed to do in a movie, it thumbs its nose at "the rules" of a conventional plot and character development, but it does it so seamlessly, so straightforwardly, that you don't notice.
In short, Inside Llewyn Davis is about a folk singer whose career is going nowhere fast. In fact, this is a story about failure. That's it. It's not a tragedy -- Llewyn doesn't die, doesn't go to jail, doesn't lose everything (because he has almost nothing to begin with), doesn't gain the world only to lose his soul, etc. etc., cliche, cliche. No. It's just about a guy who tries and fails, who attempts to succeed and doesn't. He's an honest failure but a failure nonetheless. He doesn't go anywhere, his future is empty. The end.
Why? Because he's a bad guy? Not really. He's not a great guy (he bangs other guy's wives and has a temper problem) but, when he does wrong, he tries to make it right. So he's flawed but not irredeemable. Is he untalented? Not at all, in fact, he's a beautiful singer -- but he's not GREAT. His fate is sealed not because he does anything wrong but because, as he's told by a music producer at one point, there's just not "a lot of money here."
This is one of the only movies, only stories, I've seen that's about how and why people fail. About how random and how unpredictable failure and success is -- and how failure happens just because you fall a little short. We see this in elections all the time -- a few votes short here and there, and dreams of a political career, of public service, are dashed (often permanently so). Score just a little bit below the "mean" or whatever it is on a standardized test, and forget about getting into college or grad school, with all the career implications that implies. This movie shows how careers and lives are forever altered -- often shattered -- just because the powers that be, the umpires of life, the "means", the beancounters, the scorekeepers, the gatekeepers to the future, find you wanting and ... slam the gate.
This doesn't happen because you're a bad person or a good person. It happens just because something, like money or a few votes or a few points or something, "isn't here."
I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. And where are our movies? Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the precious few.
And does Llewyn learn anything from his failure? Does he grow as a person? Does he, as the storytelling Gods tell us he's supposed to, "arc." No! Why would he? It's not his character flaws that lead to his failure. His failure happens ... just because ...
You should read this article from a few years ago that brillantly sums up this movie and its message -- or lack thereof -- about failure.
At the very end of the movie, Llewyn plays his final set at a nightclub and then walks off and the next act is a guy named Bob Dylan. Llewyn goes into an alley and gets beaten up. And this is the point -- one will go onto make music history and win the Nobel Prize while the other ... well, we don't know what happens to him in the long run. We check out on Llewyn at this point. After all, he's a failure, he has no future, he's destined to be forgotten, so we take our leave.
This is what failure, ultimately, is -- nothing. A void. A blank page. An empty space. A non-memory. Nada zilch zero.
And that's why this is probably the best movie about failure ever made.
In short, Inside Llewyn Davis is about a folk singer whose career is going nowhere fast. In fact, this is a story about failure. That's it. It's not a tragedy -- Llewyn doesn't die, doesn't go to jail, doesn't lose everything (because he has almost nothing to begin with), doesn't gain the world only to lose his soul, etc. etc., cliche, cliche. No. It's just about a guy who tries and fails, who attempts to succeed and doesn't. He's an honest failure but a failure nonetheless. He doesn't go anywhere, his future is empty. The end.
Why? Because he's a bad guy? Not really. He's not a great guy (he bangs other guy's wives and has a temper problem) but, when he does wrong, he tries to make it right. So he's flawed but not irredeemable. Is he untalented? Not at all, in fact, he's a beautiful singer -- but he's not GREAT. His fate is sealed not because he does anything wrong but because, as he's told by a music producer at one point, there's just not "a lot of money here."
This is one of the only movies, only stories, I've seen that's about how and why people fail. About how random and how unpredictable failure and success is -- and how failure happens just because you fall a little short. We see this in elections all the time -- a few votes short here and there, and dreams of a political career, of public service, are dashed (often permanently so). Score just a little bit below the "mean" or whatever it is on a standardized test, and forget about getting into college or grad school, with all the career implications that implies. This movie shows how careers and lives are forever altered -- often shattered -- just because the powers that be, the umpires of life, the "means", the beancounters, the scorekeepers, the gatekeepers to the future, find you wanting and ... slam the gate.
This doesn't happen because you're a bad person or a good person. It happens just because something, like money or a few votes or a few points or something, "isn't here."
I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. And where are our movies? Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the precious few.
And does Llewyn learn anything from his failure? Does he grow as a person? Does he, as the storytelling Gods tell us he's supposed to, "arc." No! Why would he? It's not his character flaws that lead to his failure. His failure happens ... just because ...
You should read this article from a few years ago that brillantly sums up this movie and its message -- or lack thereof -- about failure.
At the very end of the movie, Llewyn plays his final set at a nightclub and then walks off and the next act is a guy named Bob Dylan. Llewyn goes into an alley and gets beaten up. And this is the point -- one will go onto make music history and win the Nobel Prize while the other ... well, we don't know what happens to him in the long run. We check out on Llewyn at this point. After all, he's a failure, he has no future, he's destined to be forgotten, so we take our leave.
This is what failure, ultimately, is -- nothing. A void. A blank page. An empty space. A non-memory. Nada zilch zero.
And that's why this is probably the best movie about failure ever made.
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