Image Credit: Alison Rosa
Joel and Ethan Coen have never made a movie that didn’t have at least a few big bubbles of perversity percolating through it. That said, one of the ways that I divide their work in my mind is that there are the Coen brothers films in which the perversity stays, for the most part, just below the surface (Blood Simple, Fargo, A Serious Man), which tend to be the Coen brothers movies that I love best. And there are the ones in which perversity stands up and pokes you in the eye (Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?), which I, for one, have always found tiresome. Their new movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, which premiered tonight at Cannes, is set in the Greenwich Village folk-music scene of the early ’60s, and on the Coen perversity scale, I’d say that it’s right smack dab in the middle in a way that I found far from tiresome — the picture is lovingly crafted, eminently watchable, at times even inspired — yet ultimately frustrating. Inside Llewyn Davis comes just close enough to being an authentic, deep-dish portrait of a vital moment in pop-culture history that I felt a bit of an eye poke when it also turned out to be one of the Coens’ masochistic/misanthropic tall tales. READ FULL STORY »
