If there’s one thing you can predict about the Coen Brothers is their unpredictability. They followed the wonderful No Country For Old Men with the almost unwatchable Burn After Reading, they made the incomparable Fargo and the frankly awful Ladykillers. They are just as capable of being brilliant as being plain bad.
Their homage to the folk scene of the early 1960s fits somewhere around the Serious Man Coens it’s lovingly made, superbly detailed and well-acted, but has a huge gaping hole where its heart should be.
Inspired by a book about a talented but unknown folk singer, the Coens’ version is the Davis of the title, a sad, shambling loser who sleeps on friends’ floors in between poorly paid gigs at the Gaslight Club in Greenwich Village. He can sing, and is a reasonable guitarist, but has no charm, no charisma and, to make it worse, his former singing partner has committed suicide.
The film is actually virtually plotless Davis wanders from one friend’s flat to the next, tries to borrow money, goes to Chicago to try his luck there, comes back, and that’s about it. To make up for the story’s inertia the Coens decide to insert a maguffin, a cat, who he carries around on the Tube, trying to return it to its owner. Frankly the whole feline sub-plot becomes a bit of a bore, but at least it moves the story about an inch an hour.
The main problem here is that Davis is such a completely unlikeable character he is rude to his friends and agent, and a complete wet drip when confronted by the only love interest, a very angry Carey Mulligan. Frankly I could have done without Mulligan’s be-sweatered angry folkie, a scene in the park should have been very funny but she merely comes across as moaning. When he is asked to audition for a gig he plays the most downbeat song about death it’s possible to sing.
As in all Coen films there is a smattering of increasingly bizarre cameos, but while they entertain they go precisely nowhere. John Goodman’s Doctor John-style jazz junkie is very funny but he disappears just as he’s getting interesting, and there are other brief glimpses of Coen magic, which are simply cut off and forgotten. Such a huge amount has been invested in the look and design of the film but so little on the script and structure.
The look of the film is a marvel, taking its colour palette form the cover of an early Bob Dylan album. The Gaslight is grubby and smoke-filled, the streets of New York filthy and litter-strewn, and Chicago has never looked less appealing. One shot inside a diner is almost Edward Hopper-like. The sound is obviously crucial here, and T-Bone Burnett has done another great job for the Coens, reproducing the scratchy, acoustic sounds of the pre-Dylan folk scene with huge affection. Timberlake’s song, which Davis is asked to play on, is a very funny moment but of course Davis still manages to end up a loser from it.
Overall verdict: Wonderful to look at and listen to, painful to sit through, the Coens’ homage to folk music is frankly hard work. It’s detailed and beautifully produced but has at its heart a character who is impossible to care about. Not the Coens’ finest work by a long way.
Reviewer: Mike Martin