There are two kinds of Coen brothers films: the good ones and the bad ones. As with Woody Allen or Robert Altman or Federico Fellini, very rarely do they fall between two stools. The reasons for the artistic success or failure of a Coen brothers film can usually be determined according to a simple rule. The good ones combine an expertly evoked mood with a tight and convoluted plot hinging on genre conventions (even if those conventions become twisted or subverted). The bad ones don’t have much in the way of plot, so that no matter how diligently the mood is sustained, or which genre the script appears to have sprung from, the impression is superficial, affected, soul-less.
Their new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, shares with the likes of Barton Fink and A Serious Man this malady. It is confident and self-congratulatory in its ability to evoke unease or melancholia or claustrophobia in a single cut or composition or camera angle. The world of the (fictional) struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), trying to make his way in early 1960s New York, is one of long, narrow corridors, oppressively rumbling subway trains, grotesque faces shot from unflattering angles. Shoes squelch, winds whip, a car harrumphs noisily over the potholes in a road, a man hitchhikes in the fog. We feel comfortingly uncomfortable.
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