Subtle and surreptitiously
soulful,
Joel
and Ethan Coen’s latest has a light, tender touch and a surfeit of sincere,
deep feeling, two things the Coen brothers generally lack. A lot of the emotion
comes from the music itself, supervised by
T. Bone Burnett, a man who really knows
his way around a ballad. The film is as melancholy as the somber, smoky, sweet
songs filled with steely, blue notes, providing a startlingly straight-faced
departure for the directing/writing/producing/editing
duo behind
Fargo,
No Country for Old Men,
The
Big Lebowski,
Burn After Reading, and
Raising Arizona. Marvelous and mordantly
funny,
Inside Llewyn Davis is deeply
personal, boldly original, and highly emotional.
The sounds
of the early sixties folk music revival float in the air like a strange,
intoxicating perfume, reflecting the lonesomeness and romance of the traveling
life, particularly the meandering, fraught journey of a guitar-strumming balladeer
trying to reconcile his life and his art.
Oscar Isaac, who
portrays the title character with sincere conviction and a haunting humanism, can
definitely sing, in a fine, clear tenor voice that palpitates with the poignant
pain of loss, longing, and loneliness. All of the songs speak to this pain and to
the rootlessness and regret of his existence: “
Fare Thee Well,” “
Five Hundred Miles (Away From
Home),” and especially “
Hang
Me, Oh Hang Me,” which opens the film: “wouldn’t mind the hangin’ except
for layin’ in the grave so long, poor boy... I been all around this world.” The
words and chords don’t just enrich the movie, they complete it, tapping into reservoirs
of otherwise inaccessible feelings.
Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut takes its title from the English derivation of Janus,
the two-faced Roman god who stands at the cusp of the new year, simultaneously
musing backward at recent lessons and experiences, and peering forward to the
murky and elusive future ahead, a guardian at the crossroads of the past and
present. The reference implies the twin forces of duplicity and shifting
circumstances that swirl in the fragrant atmosphere of The Two Faces of January, an old-school, sly, seductive Southern
Europe-set tale of moral compromise and misdirection. Based on the Patricia Highsmith
novel of the same name, Amini’s film has its own two faces; it’s at once an
involving character drama and a gripping suspense movie, a pleasurable period piece
of precision and class and a tight and tidy thriller as shrewd, sleek, and
scintillating as its characters.
