INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

(Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)

Great filmmakers - great artists, in fact, be they novelists, playwrights, comedians, poets -  have the ability to capture how it feels to be alive. The Coen Brothers absolutely possess this ability. It gets forgotten, almost, lost in the rush to praise their brilliant screenplays, beautiful visual sense and their storytelling talent. What the mainstream brands as "quirky" is their incredible ability to combine comedy and drama so that certain scenes and passages in their best work play out. Half the audience will be laughing at the deadpan wit, the beautifully observed characters, the other half sit in silence, appreciating the human drama on display. Sometimes of course, they lean more in one direction than the other. There are the outright comedies, like Raising Arizona or Intolerable Cruelty. And the dramas: No Country for Old Men or Millers Crossing, say. But it is never simple. Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men is as funny as any creation in the Coens' filmography for all that he is a terrifying character in a mostly serious film. There is pathos in Raising Arizona, despite its Tex Avery comic invention.
What never changes are those moments of truth: what it is to be alive, captured in an instant, an image, a beat. Songwriters and singers do that too, which is one of the subjects of Inside Llewyn Davis. A character study of the titular figure, a struggling folk-singer in '60s Greenwich Village, played with world-weary cynicism and muted sadness by Oscar Isaac, it is a classic Coens mix of comedy and drama. Llewyn is on the downslope of a career that never really went anywhere, and he only truly realises that during the course of the story, appalled as he is by what passes for folk music around him.
His life is a ruin. He sleeps on the couches of friends, many of whom he doesn't even seem to like or respect, has no money to buy himself a coat despite the fact that it's winter, and doesn't plan for the future. His sister's suggestion that he give up music and return to life as a merchant seaman is met with the words "Just exist?"
His closest friends are Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan), a folk duo. Jean is pregnant, possibly by Llewyn, and her every word in his direction positively drips venom. It becomes apparent that he uses people, and though he is never warm or nice, his essential humanity, the loneliness of his situation and his effortless capacity for self-destruction, does make him sympathetic.
A long, surreal road trip to Canada alongside a loquacious hipster (John Goodman) and his laconic driver (Garrett Hedlund) is Llewyn's breaking point, and perhaps features the film's most beautiful and haunting sequences, as Bruno Delbonnel's exquisitely soft and dank cinematography captures several breathtaking scenes of nocturnal driving; snow drifting across highways, cities glimpsed off in the night.
The music is great, the cast perfect, the clockwork collapse of Llewyn's hopes and dreams hilarious and gruelling in equal measure.

IN TIME

(Andrew Niccol, 2011)

It may be an obvious, somewhat leaden metaphor for the inequalities of the capitalist economies currently dominating the Western World, but the high concept which is the basis for In Time is also a deft recurrent narrative mechanism. Niccol's film is set in a near future where people have been engineered to cease ageing at 25, at which point an internal clock starts. Time can be bought and sold, earned and stolen, and running out of time means the end of your life. The rich live in Time Zones of marble, steel and glass, requiring months and even years for access, while the poor live and die day by day in run-down, industrial ghettos.
The idea that all of the characters might be minutes from running out and need to find more time works like a little adrenaline jolt to the story, giving it a boost whenever the pace slackens.
But Niccol keeps it quite pacy, turning it into a slightly Hitchcockian man-on-the-run thriller, sketching in the details of his sci-fi World as the plot flies past. That world is a little reminiscent of the world from his superior Gattaca; utilising real, contemporary locations skilfully to suggest this near future. The lovely, pin sharp photography of Roger Deakins helps immeasurably with that process, and is especially impressive at capturing the art deco Noir world of the ghetto after dark, abandoned warehouses and desolate neighbourhoods awash in the yellow glow of streetlights.
Niccol finds a couple of strong set pieces in his material; a fine car chase and a fight for time - akin to an arm wrestle - between Justin Timberlake's hero and Alex Pettyfer's "Minutemen", a gangster who makes his living stealing time from others, and the story does roll along speedily throughout. But the love story between the principals is perhaps the chief component of the third act, and neither of them has much of a character to work with. Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried are empty, pretty wind-up toys here, given motivations but no depth, their actions driven purely by the story, and this is a near-fatal flaw.
There is much good here; from Cillian Murphy's haunted, layered performance as a Time-Keeper after the lovers, to the little ironies and details of Niccol's world - the way everybody runs in the ghetto, the use of the phrase "clean your clock" - to Craig Armstrong's atmospheric, pulsing score; but the void where its two protagonists should be prevents it from ever becoming really excellent.
It remains a well-paced, visually dazzling fun sci-fi thriller, most admirable for its attempt to make the current Ecomomic climate a subject for escapist entertainment.