A Circle in a Spiral
Inside Llewyn Davis (The Coen brothers, 2013) is a story told in a circle. It begins, moves forward, before looping back around into itself. Its beginning is its end and its end is its beginning. Even a road trip – that straightest of narratives – is circular: a round trip there and back; a circle within a circle. Inside Llewyn Davis is circular, like an album. Like a vinyl record on the turntable, it spins round and round, seemingly travelling somewhere yet going nowhere. It plays like an album because the film is full of songs: songs that – like those best tunes, on the best LPs – grow more profound with each play, that suffer not from repetition, that only add meaning with subsequent spins.
We meet the titular folk singer (played by Oscar Isaac) onstage, performing ‘Hang Me, Oh Hang Me’. It is – as a simple on-screen intertitle tells us – 1961 at the Gaslight Cafe, the tiny Greenwich Village coffee house that sits at the centre of New York City’s budding folk scene. His performance is tender, his voice husky around the edges, yet ringing clear. It’s not a virtuoso show stopper; instead, it’s more likely to scan as ‘competent’ to those in the fictional audience – and to those in the film’s contemporary crowd, sophisticated modern viewers who’re parsing Isaac’s performance for vérité, making sure this isn’t just another actor miming (gladly, he’s not: the performances, herein, being sung and played live for the camera).
But, ninety minutes later, when we loop back to the same performance, it comes after spending a week walking in Llewyn’s shoes – witnessing the trials, troubles and tribulations of a combative, career-averse, couch-surfing, smart-arse small-timer scraping to get by. Where someone singing a traditional tune can feel like a tourist, daytripping through the sufferings etched into songs passed down through generations, here we feel as if Llewyn has ‘earnt’ the emotion. His former partner in a folk duo, the much-mentioned but never-seen Mike Timlin, has previously suicided, jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Attempts to go it solo have stalled out. The constant hustle, the constant travel, the itinerant life of a wandering minstrel: it’s worn him
