The Good:
I'll be honest: NPR had the soundtrack to this movie on "First Listen" a month or so ago and I wore out the repeat button. Even if you hate the story being told in this movie, if you have a soft spot for folk music, you'll enjoy it. Oscar Isaacs has a beautiful, slightly-imperfect voice with just the right amount of pathos in his intonation to make these songs work. T Bone Burnett previously worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is well-recognized as one of the best country/bluegrass compilations in recent memory, and while I don't think "If I Had Wings" has the same ear worm quality as "Man of Constant Sorrow", the love and care taken with the music in this movie is stunning.
The atmosphere, as a whole, is lovely: all the grays and blues of a New York winter, brown tweed and corduroy. The overall feel is immaculate -- it's a little too clean to ring "authentic", but it's the well-shot nostalgia-veiled version of authenticity (everyone smokes, but you never smell it or feel that grittiness). I'm actually complimenting this slight shininess -- Llewyn is a fairytale, albeit a depressing, frustrating one. Hopeless dreamers don't feel that grit, and they don't remember it, even when it gets all over them.
The Bad:
I'm so, so frustrated by the construction of this film. In a movie that is explicitly straightforward -- there are no flashbacks, no intercutting of different scenes/people -- WHY is there an out-of-time bookend? It throws off your entire understanding of the story. I'm sure there's an explanation (any movie this carefully constructed doesn't just do something like that without a good reason), but for the life of me, I can't figure it out.
Really, the central problem in Llewyn is that our eponymous protagonist is kind of a drip. He doesn't act... he is acted upon and the script uses that failing against him to no end, but there's no redemption, no learning. There's a theme running lackadaisically through this movie of the unintentional hero, or the epic-journey-by-necessity (the cat's name is Ulysses, he walks past a movie poster for The Incredible Journey, etc). The implication is that Llewyn's journey is supposed to fall into that same mythic realm, but there's no payoff -- instead of Ulysses, he's Sisyphus, endlessly having that rock roll back down the hill. For more on the mythopoetic aspects of this film, I refer you to this post by Richard Brody who explicates these far better than I could.
Llewyn's impotence is also illustrated in the picaresque structure of the narrative itself -- when you're not the actor in your own life, events become vignettes of excitement between stretches of nothingness with no true flow between them. This was actually an element of this film that I enjoyed, but my dear viewing companion and most of the reviews I've read choose to disagree (hence its inclusion here, rather than above).
The Ugly:
I wish I hadn't seen the trailer for this before I watched it. Actually, I wish they'd re-cut the trailer to remove certain sequences. More than most movies, the ad for this spoiled the experience -- lines that you recognize from the trailer should have hit like sucker punches, but they're blunted.
Carey Mulligan, Carey Mulligan... what are you doing? It's a tough role, to be fair: the tightly-wound, secretly-desperate friend/lover, but it's played for full harpy effect. On paper, she's one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, but her delivery undermines the rapport she could have generated with the audience.
Overall, Inside Llewyn Davis isn't a perfect film by any standards, but if you have any affection for folk music and the dreamers (and potentially losers) who sing it, there's something worthwhile here. Even if I may intellectually have significant qualms with it, this movie worked for me emotionally in a way that I can't entirely validate rationally.
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