Joel & Ethan Coen’s ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

Maybe it was the 1960s setting, maybe it was the folk music, but as I watched Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis the words of a rugby song I last heard years ago as a student came into my mind: “Why was he born so beautiful, Why was he born at all? …” (which then descends into something else). Was it the Davis character? The film is a circular account of a few days in the life of a folk singer in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1962. Llewyn is a ne’er-do-well – “… everything you touch turns to shit, you're like king Midas's idiot brother”, he is told, understandably, at one point, by Jean (Carey Mulligan), who may be pregnant by him rather than by her partner and Llewyn's friend, Jim.  But the artistic world is full of people like Llewyn who want in, and the separation of an individual’s success and failure seems to be a matter of luck as much as talent.

Perhaps it was not the main character but the feeling that so much film-making skill had been directed at so slight a product. The 1960s New York settings were very convincing (the subway a real work of art) as was Llewyn’s road trip to Chicago and back. Similarly all the casting was excellent with heavyweight, if brief, contributions from John Goodman and F Murray Abraham, as well as Isaac’s flawless portrayal of a flawed young man, artfully contrasted with Stark Sands’ Troy, a soldier with a promising career as a singer. It could be that I just don’t like folk music that much (a soft spot for Joan Baez apart), but having said that, the Please Mr Kennedy session is a joy.

If you find this review shallow, then read Francine Prose’s for Prospect Magazine:

Llewyn’s passion for that music, and his inability to create, for himself, a career—or a life—remind us of a current that runs through many of the Coen brothers’ films: you can have talent, promise, a moderate amount of decency and luck, and things might still not work out. This may be the least American aspect of the Coen’s work, the least characteristic of a culture that (openly and privately) believes that hard work and good intentions will pay off, and of a country in which, to quote Julian Barnes, “emotional optimism is a constitutional duty.”

It will also take you to Please Mr Kennedy on YouTube.

Ben Affleck’s ‘Argo’

Actors who turn director or even direct themselves seem to yield good results – for example George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March. Ben Affleck’s Argo is no exception. It is the story of an operation carried out by the CIA with Canadian help to retrieve six American diplomats from Tehran in1980. They had gone into hiding in the Canadian embassy after the sack of the US embassy by Revolutionary Guards. Over 90 other personnel were held for 444 days but the six were exfiltrated with the help of Tony Mendez, a CIA expert (played by Affleck) whose plan revolved around passing off the fugitives as a Canadian film team scouting locations for a sci-fi movie, ‘Argo’ ,with a Middle Eastern setting.

Because we know that the mission was a success, Argo it isn’t so much a will-they-won’t-they as a how-will-they-get-out-of-that-one, but the action in Tehran is just as exciting nonetheless. As it unfolds, there are lesser cliff-hangers back in the US in the form of the machinations between the CIA, State Department and White House, familiar of course to fans of The West Wing and Homeland. While in Hollywood, the Argo crew’s leading lights, played by Alan Arkin and John Goodman, get some of the best lines in the film. The riots outside the US embassy and in the bazaar (actually filmed in California and Istanbul) are all too convincing.

Some people might not care for the ‘USA 7 Iran 0’ undertones of the film’s conclusion but its opening bande dessinée-style backgrounder on Iranian history pulls no punches on the US or UK. Less seriously, a post here earlier this year about The Artist pointed out the use of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, correct for its late 1920s setting. As Mendez flies into Hollywood we see the later HOLLYWOOD sign almost derelict. But in fact it had been restored to its current state in the late 70s before the hostage problem arose. So remember, Argo is a dramatization and a good one, not a documentary. Would all the secrets of a successful exfiltration ever be revealed? I doubt it. But Argo certainly deserves its current status as an emerging 2013 Oscar front-runner.

Stay for the credits which start with a sequence of contemporary photographs alongside equivalent stills from the film.


UPDATE 1 March 2013

Argo has now won various awards culminating with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' Best Picture Oscar this week. Its veracity has come under scrutiny as its profile has risen. For example, Glenn Greenwald from the Guardian has drawn attention to this post on the Wide Asleep in America blog.