Astrology: Film: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ (2013)

Dec 2, 2013

CBS Films

CBS Films

The fictional Llewyn Davis, a struggling early-’60s folk singer eager to achieve success gigging in New York City’s halo’d Greenwich Village, may have developed his musical and vocal talents. However, his Saturnine self-mastery skills are utterly abysmal.

To watch Inside Llewyn Davis, written and directed by Joel Cohen and Ethan Coen, is like being dunked into a musical epoch when acoustic guitar strums were typically the only instrumental accompaniment in a performance and when every folk song sort of sounded the same.

Our unwitting guide through this period, atmospherically rendered by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, is Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) himself, whose wayward lifestyle, which includes sleeping on friends’ and even strangers’ couches, starkly contrasts with his belief in his musical talent.

Llewyn, you see, comes with baggage that extends far beyond the guitar he shleps around. He was part of a singing duo, up until the time his partner committed suicide. He has indiscriminately slept around and gotten girls pregnant, possibly including vocalist Jean (Carey Mulligan), who’s married to musician and fellow-folkie Jim (Justin Timberlake). She, in unfiltered fashion, tells Llewyn: “Everything you touch turns to s ** t.”

Most of all, Llewyn is incapable of organizing himself, which is number one on the Saturn archetype’s how-to-live check list. He’s constantly without cash, which is the planetary task master’s survival mechanism. Despite his earnestness, he exudes a pervasive Saturnine melancholy and self-righteousness which often detours into an unlikable pomposity.

Not even an older academic husband and wife, whose son was Llewyn’s musical partner, are safe from his verbal lacerations. And his inability to look after the couple’s prized ginger-striped cat is an apt metaphor for this folkie’s dilemma. The fleet-footed feline keeps eluding his sitter’s grasp, just as success keeps slipping through Llewyn’s fingers during an odyssey that includes meeting a bunch of riveting characters (John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham, Stark Sands and Adam Driver).

Although Inside Llewyn Davis, which is named for Llewyn’s debut record album, is a cautionary tale about what happens when talented people don’t take control over their day-to-day activities, the Coens make a strong case for fate and Saturn-ruled timing. Although Llewyn doesn’t realize it yet, his chances of making his mark are diminishing by the minute. Folk music, as he knows it, is about to be blown away by a Minnesotan named Bob Dylan who’ll reinvent the entire folk-music genre.

Associated with tradition and security, Saturn is about remaining in one’s comfort zone. Llewyn, like many of the real-life folkies of that era, including Dave Van Ronk, is no innovator, and he pays dearly. Is Llewyn nothing more than a musical failure, after having, in his mind, given it his all? And what about the rest of us? When viewed in this light, Inside Llewyn Davis, despite its music-soothing veneer, is a brutal, cutting work.

Astrology Film Rating: ♄ (Saturn)

Facebook Twitter Email

Recent Posts

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Gone Girl’ (2022)

Containers abound in Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher and based on the popular novel by Gillian Flynn, who wrote the screenplay. There are envelopes, which hold the clues for the treasure hunt Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) has prepared for her husband Nick...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The Giver’ (2014)

Many people refer to their homeland as the mother country. Those people didn’t know The Chief Elder, a matriarch as stern as they come who’s running the show in the country depicted in The Giver. Directed by Philip Noyce and based on the YA book by Lois Lowry, The...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Get On Up’ (2014)

It’s all there. The riffs, the shoes that swivel maniacally as though greased, the slurrified words, the clipped throaty growls. But Tate Taylor’s Get On Up, the biopic of soul-funk innovator and icon James Brown, ups the ante by letting us see the legend living out...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘The Congress’ (2014)

Can the veil that separates Saturnine corporeal reality from the transcendent Neptunian realm actually be a cruel trick devised by Hollywood moguls? Yes, indeed, and it’s the premise of Ari Folman’s part live-action, part animated film The Congress, loosely based on...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Calvary’ (2014)

Everyone has a cross to bear. But a parish priest tending his flock in Ireland’s County Sligo has really gotten more than his share in Calvary, a movie that addresses archetypal Pluto issues of power, abandonment and revenge, as well as Neptune themes of sacrifice and...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Lucy’ (2014)

Luc Besson’s new sci-fi thriller Lucy could easily have been titled Mercury in Hyperdrive, a breathless tale about the archetype that rules thought and communication gone cinematically ballistic. Bigger, faster and stronger describe the new-and-improved mental...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘A Most Wanted Man’ (2014)

The grim espionage business relies, for its success, on Neptunian deception and Plutonic penetration of secrets. The most clever master spies throw a third archetype into the mix: the Saturnine User, who’ll exploit the captured by making them spy on their own people...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Magic in the Moonlight’ (2014)

If art is the beautiful lie, can love also be ushered into existence by duplicity? That’s the question at the center of Magic in the Moonlight, a movie inspired by early 20th century Europe’s fascination with spiritualism, seances and communicating with the dead....

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘I Origins’ (2014)

The old adage – that the eyes are the gateway to the soul – gets all scienced up in I Origins, a movie that asks whether Saturnine, data-driven science trumps knowledge that bypasses logic. Directed and written by Mike Cahill, the movie’s core question – Can reality...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ (2014)

In the annals of history, many liberators of the oppressed freed their citizenry only to become tyrants themselves. It’s this age old cycle of restrictive Saturn sidling up to revolutionary Uranus – a rhythm that topples and rebuilds civilizations – that’s at the core...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Boyhood’ (2014)

For most of us, life is way too busy to allow for keen observations of minute gradations of growth and blossoming of family members, friends and other significant individuals who help grace our time on the planet. Perhaps it’s for this reason – our lack of attention...

Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Tammy’ (2014)

Mention the word “Tammy” and “movies” in the same breath and, with any luck, the visuals that come to mind center on Debbie Reynolds’ vocal rendition of the song “Tammy,” put to exquisite use by Terence Davies in his The Long Day Closes (1992). Reynolds’ tune is that...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Happy Christmas’ (2014)

As an exploration of the gifts and curses of creative vision, nothing beats the short, snappy Happy Christmas. Written and directed by Joe Swanberg, the movie takes a hard look at what happens when archetypal Neptune – whose bailiwick is artistic inspiration, music,...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘Venus in Fur’ (2014)

If you couldn’t get enough of Jack Baker’s (Jeff Bridges) cinematic jaw-drop in The Fabulous Baker Boys, as soon as seemingly tone-deaf loser and gum-snapping chanteuse Suzie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) starts to soulfully warble her heart out and blow him away,...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘How to Train Your Dragon 2’ (2014)

Is every critter, human or otherwise, trainable? And, because training elevates the game and aptitude of the instructed, does the core essence of tutored trainees remain the same? Those questions – as well as Saturnine boundary issues about whether to label entities...

Astrology: Film: Review: ‘The Rover’ (2014)

Set in a post-apocalyptic world in the Australian Outback, The Rover is a Saturnine story about two archetypal loners, each having suffered a huge personal loss that needs to be rectified in a land where procedural justice is a thing of the past. Written and directed...