"Well, I think he himself made his life messy." Cheryl said. She is a very smart and wise woman who always pinpoints the critical elements promptly. Our discussion was very short. Watching a great movie could be a journey that you go through the same experience with the characters together. I guess too much emotion expressed in the movie had filled our brains, even penetrated into all cells, which prohibited us from thinking and reasoning.
Actually the story is not complicated, even too ordinary and simple. A folk singer Llewyn Davis stopped singing with his two partners Jane and Jim. He didn't have money and had to sleep on the couch at different houses: a professor friend, his band partner Jane, and a new friend just met. Jane got pregnant and was mad with him because obviously he was not a responsible and reliable one for her. He accidentally locked the professor's apartment when the cat ran out of the apt. He had to take care of the cat for a couple days but the cat eventually ran away after a few times of attempts.
He saw the cat when he was in a cafe and Jane was saying that you never thought about your future. I am not sure if Llewyn heard about that because he just rushed to the street and caught the cat, and brought him back to the professor and his wife.
He saw himself a genuinely talented musician because he made a CD with his old partner Michael. I think he stopped working with Jane and Jim because he thought himself better than them and wanted to perform alone. He looked down upon other singers at the bar. He looked like surprised when his partner JIm told him that the new song was composed by Jim himself. He might think everyone around him was not as good as him. His harshness and rude made the professor's wife cry. Then, they found that the cat he brought back was not their cat. He left their apartment and had a road trip to Chicago. He took the second cat with him together. Yes, he had his plan and ambition: he wanted to record his music and become a successful musician rather than just a folk singer at the bar. However the agent told him he didn't see a lot of money in his voice.
He went back to New York immediately because he even could not find a warm place to stay for a while. He was left in the frozen coldness like the second cat who was left by him in the car abandoned at somewhere on the high way.
He got back. Jane aborted the baby. He got back to the bar singing there again. He was punched by an old man when he smoked outside of the bar after his performance.
It is the story - daily life of a folk singer named Llewyn Davis for perhaps only a couple weeks. His frustration, arrogance, confusion, helplessness, depression and something else was very well expressed according to these conversations and music.
Llewyn's life was like these two cats in this film: one left him and the other one was left by him. The cat who ran away found his way back to the professor's apartment by himself, which was like he found his way back to New York from Chicago. The cat who ran away from him also reflected part of him who tried to leave his singing partners. The other cat that he caught on the street and was abandoned by him in the wild was another part of him, who was rejected by the music agent in Chicago, the university music band, and other opportunities he was looking for. The other cat that was left by him in the wild also was like his talent in music that was messed by his arrogance, impatience and almost zero-tolerance .
His life seems a combination of these two cats, wandering, trying to escape, desiring attention, being cherished by certain people but being rejected by some others. The end of the movie is even endless because his face and eyes were still filled of confusion, struggling, and something and nothing in the darkness of night.
Music is the nearest place to touch and listen to our genuine feeling and emotion. Music is another way of living. Llewyn undoubtedly had the gift in creating music and a great voice to realize music. However, the other part of him, his personality such as unreliable, impatient, and arrogant, restricted his talent and development. His trip to Chicago was a moving from nowhere to another nowhere. Oscar Isaac did an excellent job in this film. His wonderful performance and music successfully involved audience in experiencing these subtle and rich emotions occurring inside of Llewyn David.
Two cats live in the inside of Llewyn, and they symbolized as well as formed his encounters and his fate. The other reason these emotions expressed in this movie were rather infectious is because these emotions are what everyone experiences in our daily life. The frustration when talent and ability cannot be appreciated and admitted, the disparity between the ambition and realistic; the struggles between reason and emotion; the dream and poverty; the difficulty to balance the intuition and nature for the art and the adaption to the social life, and so forth. We experience these various emotions at this moment or that moment. The movie just collected and presented these emotions intensely and more deeply. Probably at certain moment, we are Llewyn Davis but we just don't know.
For me, the greatest part of this movie is still how it successfully expressed and externalized the emotion and feeling in a seemly natural but also deliberate and artistic way: those genuine and subtle emotions that we cannot help experiencing together when watching the movie but cannot describe by words completely and specifically.
We almost don't know anything about the life stories of all characters in this movie and some of them appear just because they need to appear, no logic reason, no results, no connection, and even no sense for a few circumstances. So what? This is a movie just about emotion, a feast for expressing and appreciating the subtle and invisible emotion, which is the most naughty but also precious part of us as human being!
"He was a pathetic character, who made bad decisions, and created his own problems to a large extent. He did a very good job portraying his character and evoking the emotions of the audience the director likely intended for him- pity, disgust, wanting to shake him and say, "look what you are doing to yourself!" I always tend to like happier movies- there is enough sadness and difficult things in life." -- comments from Cheryl.
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