Few filmmakers convey the desolation of the physical landscape and its various reflections in the human heart as well as the Coen brothers. Their current film, Inside Llewyn Davis, takes this desolation to new (and cold!) heights in its portrayal of a marginalized, barely surviving folk singer wandering the unforgiving winter streets of Greenwich Village and Chicago in the early ’60s. Davis is homeless, which requires him to spend inordinate amounts of energy searching for a couch where he and his guitar can flop for a not-overly-imposing night or two while he awaits some kind of break or affirmation that his hope of making it in the music world isn’t completely misguided.
Among his many problems, though, is that even hope itself seems to have been beaten down in him by the time the film picks him up as a sad-eyed, occasionally mendacious soloist, pushing into his 30s with nary an asset nor credential to...
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