EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM: The TerryReport

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The Coen brothers are one of the most successful pairs of movie producers/directors in American movie history. No doubt. They’ve been making movies for close to 30 years and they continually get funded for new movies, having a new one out now, called “Inside Llewyn Davis”. This movie is said to be about the folk music scene in the Greenwich Village, Manhattan, circa 1961.

Over the years, their movies have been frequently depressing and most often violent, in the extreme. I have never understood the intention or purpose of the violence. I am sure they are making some huge philosophical point about America, its culture, bla, bla, bla, but I don’t get it, okay?

They are out with another movie about an ugly and rather disgusting human being trying to fake his way through life and get something out of it. The film is said to be based, very loosely, on folk singer Dave Van Ronk, a guy who apparently was associated with and friendly among the great and the never-would-be-great who traipsed through the Village in the early ‘60s, playing an important role in defining what “folk music” was supposed to be and showing others, including Bob Dylan, the way.  Van Ronk is apparently portrayed as a kind of a leech, a moucher extraordinarire who used anyone with whom he came into contact to provide him with what he needed. I get it. People are imperfect and often do things that, seen from the outside, have incredible selfishness about their action. Yeah, what else is new?

These kinds of stories are depressing, but that makes them “deep” and meaningful to movie critics, who give the Coen brothers lots of ink, which helps them keep their downer carnival moving right along toward the next film.  Why do I want to spend two hours with ugly and depressing people, meandering hopelessly toward their next crisis or  breakdown, apparently finding little or nothing of redeeming value along the way? Oh, I am supposed to learn something about myself from watching this? Thanks for the cue cards, Hank.

Hey, I know that life is difficult and often chaotic and I know that people who call themselves artists bang around in life trying to piece together the disparate parts of a life while they cobble together their artistic efforts.  Been there, done that, okay? The story is not just Dave van Ronk, who came and went, or Bob Dylan, who got to be world famous, nor even Susie Rotolo, who got her picture on the cover of an album with Dylan. The story is life itself in all its complicated, messy, glorious risings and fallings and failings, and pretending to follow around one of the worse, and best, losers of a period does not encapsulate the whole truth, or even half the truth. Once again, from the reviews it seems we get ugly from the Coen brothers when we need, more than anything, insight. I am going to avoid this movie well into 2014 and perhaps beyond. Maybe forever. Don’t need it.

Doug Terry, 12.8.13

In the New York Times:

Over at Vulture, there’s a first-person account of how accurately the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” represents the folk scene in the West Village in 1961, courtesy of two women who were there: Terri Thal, the wife of Dave Van Ronk (the musician whose memoir “The Mayor of Macdougal Street”€� inspired some of the film); and Sylvia Topp, wife of the writer and singer Tuli Kupferberg.

Ms. Thal said the Coens’ portrait was too bleak and bitchy: “The performers reflect absolutely nobody I knew in the folk-music world,” she told Katie Calautti. “The world that they live in is a depressing, unhappy place, and we lived in a fun, musically vibrant, intellectually interesting world. People were competitive only in the sense that they were trying to be heard, they weren’t out to score above anybody else.”

But, Ms. Topp added, the film does get the distance between mainstream and bohemian culture right: “Artists tended to feel superior, and everybody else was just wasting their time and their talent or they were selling out,”€� she said. “Being a struggling artist was something to be very proud of.”

David Denby writing in the New Yorker about what he considers to be the best movies of 2013:

Van Ronk’s memoir, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”, is full of affectionate details about the Village in the early sixties. So is Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles”. €� And so are my own (very minor) memories of MacDougal and Bleecker and West Fourth and other legendary Village streets. In other words, there’s nothing intrinsically depressing about the subject of the folk scene in the Village in the early sixties. But the Coens surround Llewyn with rain and cold and treat him and his friends with their own derisive, sour-spirited sarcasm. Yes, creators have the right to make their palette, and “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a  beautiful-looking, gloomy movie. But I dislike the apparently widespread assumption that the unified look and the despair of “Inside Llewyn Davis”€� signify that it’s a work of art. The despair makes it a Coen Brothers film, which is not necessarily the same thing. But more on this another time.

CLICK HERE if you’d like to read the full New Yorkeryear end review, which includes thoughts on other movies as well.

How could the New Yorker critic and The TerryReport wind up making close to the same point, even using some of the same words? I don’t know, but I do know that my commentary was published ahead of  Mr. Denby’s, as witnessed by the date on my comments at the left.

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