INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Coen Brothers paytribute to early 60s NYC folk scene.

*NOTE* Since I first wrote this review of the new masterpiece by the Coen Brothers, I have obsessively watched the movie over & over again. The review stands unexpurgated, My only revisions are the rating, bumped from **** to ***** & at the bottom of the piece I've added more Llewyn Davis paraphernalia.

Desperately hoping to hit it big, a broke, down-on-his-luck, couch-surfing Greenwich Village folk singer during the early 60s embarks upon a very strange and telling odyssey to Chicago. He also loses a cat.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) *****
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund, Adam Driver, Max Casella, F. Murray Abraham

Review By Greg Klymkiw

First of all, let's get the most important thing about Inside Llewyn Davis out of the way. It's so key to genuine film lovers the world over, that it seems ludicrous not to mention it right off the bat.

Albert "Al" Milgrom is the immortal nonagenarian gentleman scholar and godfather of cinema in the Coen Brothers' hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota and they've paid a lovely tribute to one of the most beloved and important champions of film as art in America by having Adam Driver play a folk singer with the surname of Milgrom, though the character has already chosen a far more goyische stage name Al Cody. My jaw dropped when this near-hidden tidbit is revealed. Anyone who knows or loves The Great Man of Minneapolis Movie Mania will, no doubt, be infused with a warmth for the Brothers remembering and honouring a guy whose inspired more cineastes per capita than anyone in the U.S. of A. Milgrom has long been a fixture on the international film festival circuits and in Toronto during TIFF, he can often be seen furiously riding between his preferred digs at the Downtown YMCA and various screening venues on a rented bicycle. Earlier this year, he nearly killed himself whilst taking a horrific tumble during the Berlinale and only this past summer was returned from Germany to his beloved Minneapolis to continue his recovery. Way to go, Al.

So, on to the matter at hand. This new film from Joel and Ethan Coen is one of the more genuinely entertaining movies of the year, in spite of a few oddities that somehow keep it from achieving a kind of greatness one wants it to have. Though the movie as a whole, never quite gets there, it certainly has individual moments of greatness and one extended sequence in the middle of the film that is as great as anything the Brothers have set to celluloid.

Shot in a gorgeous semi-monochrome by Bruno Delbonnel, vaguely inspired by the real-life late folk singer Dave Van Ronk and his posthumous biography "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" and replete with terrific musical numbers (mostly shot "live") created in collaboration with the great T-Bone Burnett, we're plunged into the world of Greenwich Village folksingers in that period just prior to Bob Dylan arriving on the scene and taking the world by storm.

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Davis) is a serious-minded folksinger (and ultimately nothing like the gruff Van Ronk) whose had to go solo since his partner in a performing duo took a dive off the (un-romantic, though oddly apt) George Washington Bridge and ended his already short life far too soon. Llewyn is broke and he hardly makes anything resembling a living as a folksinger. He hails from a working class background and is encouraged by his older sister to go back into the merchant navy. Llewyn will have none of this, though, and he continues to play whatever gigs he gets, surfs from couch to couch and borrows money left, right and centre.

He finds out his old girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan) is pregnant. Llewyn dallied with her behind the back of her current paramour Jim (Justin Timberlake) and now she wants an abortion since she's mortified that the baby growing in her belly might belong to the layabout itinerant she's come to despise.

Llewyn also loses a cat belonging to a middle-aged academic Jewish couple who kindly provide him with occasional meals and a couch. The search for this cat becomes easily as obsessive as his search for fame. In fact, Llewyn's tale becomes anchored when he hitches a ride with two musicians (John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund) to Chicago so he can audition with a famed folk impresario (F. Murray Abraham, who proves again what a great actor he is and how utterly misused he's been in so many films unworthy of his talents). It's this odyssey, involving a variety of bizarre conversations, strange goings-on and several sightings of the cat he's lost that, to date, is not only on a par with the very best work created by the Brothers, but serves as the true core of the film and as such, occasionally feels like a film unto itself.

The almost-everything-before-and-after to this sequence are, for me, the problematic aspects of Inside Llewyn Davis. The title character seems like a major league loser. He's an almost offensively self-absorbed asshole who treats women like shit, using them as receptacles for his imperfect spunk, a bitter, bullying dipsomaniac who hurls invectives at those who can't possibly defend themselves against the force of his bile, an egomaniacal asshole who fucks up every opportunity to actually make a living as a musician in pursuit of a fame he might not even deserve and as such, is continually broke and in debt because of his pathetic "I will not sell out, attitude".

Nothing goes right for this loser and it's all his own fault.

God knows, I'm the last person in the world to crap on a film's character for being an asshole. So much of the 70s cinema I love is bulging with such characters, but their stakes seem so much higher than Llewyn's, the darkness they're drawn to so much more flamboyantly seedy (think James Toback's central characters in Fingers and The Gambler), that I find it borderline intolerable that the Coen Boys are rubbing my nose in the shit of someone so dull, pretentious and inconsequential.

A loser folk singer? I'm supposed to not only give a shit, but derive something resembling entertainment value and food for both my heart and mind? Uh, I don't think so.

But here's the rub - I can't get Inside Llewyn Davis out of my head. The odyssey sequence I love would have no resonance without everything I detest about the film. The few moments of humanity in the film that stick out, almost like sore thumbs, wouldn't have the power they do. (A scene between Llewyn and his dementia-riddled father is not only worthy of the Coens' best work, but feels like a scene that could have been directed by John Ford if he'd been from their generation.)

Maybe, just maybe, this is a film that's really about the universal greatness inherent in those who've left their alternately rich and repressive hometowns, not unlike Bob Dylan, the Jew from Dinkytown in the land of Swedish milkmaids and stalwart car salesmen and Holiday Inn buffets, who appears briefly at the end of the movie, signalling the beginning of his fame and the eventual acceptance of folk music in the larger world. Maybe it's about having to know repression, real repression, to create great work that will resonate far beyond an insular community in a big city - one that Llewyn embraces more than he thinks he does. Maybe it's needing to understand - truly understand - what's both insular and heavenly in the same breath, hidden amongst those big open midwestern skies that look down upon the rolling prairies - a land that needed to be tilled by those without imagination, so that those with imagination could take what nurturing they needed before spilling out into the wider world.

Maybe, just maybe, Llewyn's illegitimate child who doesn't even know he exists will have the right stuff. The kid is, after all, being raised in the middle of BuckeyeFuck, Ohio.

Maybe, just maybe, Inside Llewyn Davis is the closest we'll come in this day and age to cinematically capturing the final words of Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio wherein he writes:

"The young man’s mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood."

I suspect this is a great film and for all my aforementioned kvetching I can hardly wait to see it again.

And again. And yet, again.

"Inside Llewyn Davis" is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media.

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Compelling Documentary details the mystery behind Rodriguez, the musical genius who in South Africa became the voice for anti-authoritarian youth and white liberals who opposed the evils of apartheid.

Searching For Sugar Man (2012)

dir. Malik Bendjelloul

****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

For over 50 years the virulently racist National Party policy of Apartheid in South Africa subjected its indigenous peoples to forced segregation. The resulting horrors must never be forgotten; nor should the struggle of the colonized nation's Black majority to free themselves from the brutal and degrading lifestyle imposed by the minority White rulers.

In the 70s and 80s, there existed an unlikely (and unwitting) hero of the anti-Apartheid movement - a man of almost insurmountable artistic gifts who came to represent a ray of hope and inspiration to the youth of South Africa's "ruling class" - those White Liberal Afrikaners who steadfastly opposed Apartheid and, in fact, rejected the entire atmosphere of fascism, repression and paranoia imposed upon ALL South Africans - white and black.

It is the backdrop of Apartheid that Malik Bendjelloul's glorious feature documentary Searching For Sugar Man uses to present a biographical portrait of the film's primary subject. Bendjelloul, a storyteller par excellence, structures the remarkable movie as a mystery and blends a variety of tools including animation, news reel footage and a multitude of gorgeously lit and composed interview segments to investigate one of the great show business head-scratchers.

'Twas the late 60s, in a land far, far away from South Africa, when a solitary figure became a fixture on the stages of waterfront taverns in working-class Detroit.


Night after night, late into the murky, smoky, boozy darkness permeating these ramshackle, beer-soaked dream palaces, this brilliant young American folk singer, born into a family of poor, hardworking immigrants from Mexico, captured the hearts and minds of those who came to recognize themselves, like mirror images within the evocative lyrics of the man known to them as Rodriguez. He wrote about himself, and in so doing, wrote about everyman. He was their poet laureate, their preacher, their prophet, their confessor. He shared himself with you and you alone, not the world.

A man so gifted, however, must be shared with the wider world and in due time he was discovered. Detroit was not only Motor City, but Motown and soon, he fell into the hands of some very talented Motor City music producers. This resulted in Rodriguez delivering two great albums for Sussex Records - Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971).

The world, alas, did not embrace them. Both albums were huge commercial disasters and Rodriguez was dropped from his label while in the middle of recording a third album (which, sadly, was never finished). Disappearing into the anonymity and obscurity of manual labour and a "normal" life, Rodriguez quickly became a has-been who never was. This young man, who had been touted as the next Bob Dylan quickly became "Rodriguez Who?".

Unbeknownst to Rodriguez, his work had been released into the repressive regime of South Africa, whereupon both albums shockingly went through the roof. In a land ruled by a succession of iron-fisted fascist maniacs like Botha, Rodriguez spoke to a new generation who wished to extricate themselves from the sins of their fathers.

In South Africa, Rodriguez did indeed become bigger than the Beatles, Bob Dylan and remarkably, Elvis Presley.

His songs often depicted the plight of the oppressed, the exploited, the working class and the poor. Rodriguez became synonymous with fighting for what was right and his songs were both anthemic and iconic amongst the Afrikaner youth of South Africa. Smothered by the "establishment" in the Totalitarian-like regime of South Africa, young Afrikaners with minds of their own embraced this fresh, passionate voice.

And yet, something didn't sit well with his multitude of South African fans. Who was he? Where did he come from? Where, on Earth, was he? The only thing they knew for sure, or at least assumed, is that he didn't come to perform in South Africa for the same reasons other artists didn't (and why other countries imposed cultural, industrial and financial boycotts):

The world was telling South Africa that Apartheid would not be tolerated.

An island unto itself, South Africa ignored worldwide demands to establish human rights for ALL its citizens, and within its hermetically sealed borders, thousands upon thousands of South African youth, in protest and solidarity bought the Rodriguez albums, listened to them on the radio and demanded his songs be performed by live cover bands. Sales continued to skyrocket - especially when sad news filtered beyond the government-controlled media that Rodriguez was dead.

Reports were conflicted. At first they heard that Rodriguez had been onstage performing for an unappreciative audience. He waited for their silence, played one last tune, then pulled out a gun and blew his brains out onstage. However, news surfaced that Rodriguez had indeed NOT shot himself.

On stage, he doused himself with gasoline and immolated himself in front of the shocked audience and in South Africa, martyrdom for Rodriguez was not far behind.

Years later, long after the fall of Apartheid, Rodriguez was still popular as ever and two of his biggest fans in South Africa embarked on an arduous journey to seek the truth. It is this journey, a fascinating blend of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and "All the President's Men", that drives Searching For Sugar Man right out of the park. This expertly written, edited and directed story of investigation and devotion, not only exposes truth, but presents a story that is as uplifting as it is sad, as thrilling as it is profoundly and deeply moving.

And then, there's the music of Rodriguez. Bendjelloul does not skimp here and this dazzling tale of determination, revelation and hope embraces us with filmmaking of the highest order.

The movie must be seen on a big screen. Sound, image and story demand a bigger than life viewing experience. And when you're done watching, you will, like I did - float out of the theatre, wander straight to the nearest purveyor of CDs and vinyl and snatch up as much Rodriguez as you can possibly find.

And then, like those Afrikaner youth who so long ago sought to extricate themselves from an evil they had no use for, you will play your Rodriguez again and again and again.

And you will feel elation of the highest and most spiritual order.

"Searching For Sugarman" is currently in platform release via Canada's Mongrel Media and Sony Pictures Classics in the USA. In Toronto, you will be able to see it at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. For tickets and info, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.