Inside Llewyn Davis Analysis

Inside Llewyn Davis plays like a real-time thought process of a damaged and longing soul. The title alone may be the most literal title ever to be given to a Coen brothers' film - the film is truly inside Llewyn's mind. His mind is how we see his world and his world is a weaving, incomplete and constantly unsettled pieces of a contemplative puzzle, held together by nothing more than the next thought or meditation. It's lost, but in a way we're here to find it as it beautifully pits a human crossroad into quiet beauty of the highest order.

The film begins and ends with the simple question of who would beat up a folk singer, but through it all we see life, death, maturity, immaturity, James Joyce, compassion, disregard, self-loathing, cats,

All as scenes taken from a greenish hue put upon each shot which could be every folk album from the '60s, the absurdity of it all as if just chasing a cat through the New York streets, and the cold bitterness of consequences that must be overcome some way or another. He sees it and we feel it, not necessarily because we're the person that the film was boded after, but because in some varying way or another we've been in the same mindset of self hatred and uncertainty of what comes

The sounds of the powerful and at times humorous soundtrack take us right to the place of Greenwich Village and give Llewyn's mind to us. Oscar Isaac's perfectly played flawed man poring himself out and letting his surroundings form a dream of his various disjointed pieces of thought: the idealism through Timberlake's Jim, his newly found playing partner who he then throws away; the upmost reproach though Mulligan's Jean showing his flaws with unflinching nasty truthfulness that he looks away from and takes the easy way out on; and of course the imprint of musician he wants to become but is scared of in Goodman's ailing Roland Turner - they're all him and his inner turmoil cast upon him and for us to look at. We see him look, turn away from and then learn from, quietly but subtlety.

It's self-discovery and the unearthing of stones to reveal what there is to change and better, done through postmodern absurdism but by no means confined to that. It hits hard when the closing song comes and final piece of self-contemplation has finished for now. We glance and we see the Coens at the hight of their carriers, an artist in Llewyn at his most refined and self-sure, hopeful to make better after his internal dream has finished, and more than any of this we