#Inside llewyn davis movie#

He's kind of hard to like, given his surly defensiveness.īut this movie doesn't give the impression that he's someone his creators like to push around. Yes, Llewyn is an incorrigible screw-up, having, among other things, impregnated a friend who also happens to be the wife of another friend, two halves of the very palatable-to-the-mainstream female/male singing duo Jean and Jim ( Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake). This movie-which can reasonably be described as feeling like a '70s Wim Wenders picture scripted by Billy Wilder and/or Preston Sturges from a story by Terry Southern-is different.

How Llewyn inadvertently inherits, loses, then re-finds, and kind of adopts, the aforementioned cat is one of the more involved traps of the movie's plot, which may make the wary viewer, or the all-around anti-Coenite, suspect that this is some kind of exercise in auteurial sadism, a charge the brothers themselves laid themselves open to when they admitted that in concocting 2009's great ' A Serious Man' they thoroughly enjoyed torturing their lead character. 'Inside Llewyn Davis' is the most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet. And there's just the most adorable orange cat staring him in the face. Outside Llewyn finds no friend, but instead a suited, fedora-sporting stranger who exchanges a few words with the singer before calmly kicking and punching the daylights out of him.Īnd then Llewyn wakes up.

For another, after he finishes his song, the place's glib, slick, runty owner Pappi, directs Llewyn outside to see a 'friend' who's been asking for him. Why? For one thing, he's the protagonist of a Coen brothers movie. Llewyn, as talented as he is, does not look to be one of that revival's future success stories.