Llewyn all but accuses Jean of aiming for the suburbs, but Jean doesn’t see anywhere else to go. Llewyn’s kind of beat commitment to his art is almost incomprehensible to her. It’s certainly not very practical. He doesn’t even have an apartment and endlessly circulates among friends and acquaintances, sleeping on couches and floors. It’s not a sustainable lifestyle but his dream is to support himself from his singing. Day jobs like working in a record shop or teaching music don’t seem to appeal, even bar tending or waiting on tables – the staples of struggling artists – don’t enter the picture, although realistically they should. Llewyn gets occasional gigs and has an album out on Folkways but they’re not paying his way. The story follows him over the course of a week or so, hustling and singing, trying to get a break.
Were things tougher back then? Things are always tough when you’re trying to make it, even small time. What exactly is the point of setting the story in 1961? Does Llewyn’s music carry some special reflection of that time? I suppose if I knew enough about the history of folk music I might discern some nuances. But generally, folk music by its nature does not change much and it’s hard to see anything pivotal to it in 1961 or Llewyn Davis’s take. He didn’t seem that peculiar or inaccessible, as a folkie. He is just never going to be mainstream or really popular. This is pretty much what Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) a folk club owner in Chicago (presumably based on impresario Albert Grossman), tells Llewyn upon completing an impromptu audition there. “I don’t see much money here”. And Llewyn accepts that. Grossman offers to include him in a Peter Paul and Mary-type act he is putting together, if he will cut his hair and trim his beard, but Llewyn realises the compromises are not for him. He is happy to pick up session work in New York through Jim, where he foregoes royalties for cash, working on popular (Kingston Trio-ish) material but again this doesn’t really amount to a living. The choice seems to be stark – either go commercial all the way or remain an amateur. But this is to ignore the options of a minor day job, as noted, a longer term strategy, a more modest ambition. By the end of the movie Llewyn attempts to re-enlist in the merchant marine, in order to retreat from the Village scene and build up some savings. Even this is thwarted by regulations but one senses it would be a temporary measure in any case.
The false dilemma struck me as typically Hollywood – what alternative can there be to the big time? Who would want to be small time, a part-time folkie, stuck in a circuit of little bars and clubs, with no more than a cult following? For the Coens, Bud Grossman is either going to make money out of you or not – end of story. Why bother if you don’t get the nod from the big guy? It’s better to just move on, right? Get on with the rest of your life, become a sailor or something. Does this seem even remotely likely? Llewyn is not some naïve teenage novice. Why would Grossman even bother with running a folk club if he was only interested in cross-over acts? For all the respect given the performances throughout the movie – almost all live – you realise that for the Coens it all comes down to how much money you can make out of it – not the beauty, the feeling, the excellence or originality – just the bucks. The whole dedication to music produced on a humble acoustic instrument is just another angle, a thing or gimmick. This is so square it just embarrasses itself. But then this is Hollywood, the home of compromise and the pseudo hip and the Coens can dress it up with all the details of Llewyn’s private life and kooky episodes when he hitchhikes to Chicago in desperate company but they don’t come anywhere near getting inside the one thing he lives for - his music.
We learn he was in a successful folk duo, but his partner committed suicide, crushing him personally and professionally. He has trouble returning to their material. We learn a former girlfriend planned to have an abortion, for which he paid, but changed her mind and left for Akron without telling him. He has a father in a retired seaman’s home suffering from dementia, scarcely capable of communication anymore and he has a sister, Joy (Jeanine Serralles) a housewife in Queens, sympathetic but without much in common. He has fans, such as the wealthy Upper East Side couple, the Gorfeins where he regularly crashes and he has brief affairs, including one with Jean, for which she blames him for her pregnancy and insists he source and fund an abortion. He naturally complies. But that seems unconvincing as well – Jean’s character either not well written or acted. Her indignation with her pregnancy plays as just a little too arch. Later we learn the owner of The Gaslight folk club, Pappi Corsicatto (Max Casella) has also had her, and the implication is this may be how she wins gigs there, even for Llewyn. Ah the old casting-couch bit, just in case you thought otherwise, just in case you thought money was the extent of the Coens’ piercing insight.
The whole tedious business with the Gorfein’s escaped cat, Ulysses, which Llewyn lugs around for much of the story, is supposed to tie the thing together according to the writers and directors, but this only underlines their feeble grasp of structure, their distraction with trivia at the cost of substance. The cat sums up the Coens in other words.
