Inside Llewyn Davis

Bob Dylan wrote about the times that were changing in his book ‘Chronicles’ (2004). He sits in a Greenwich Village apartment staring out the window and he ponders on the nature of that change. He might well have seen Llewyn Davis walking down Bleecker Street, guitar case in his hand, heading for a coffee shop basement.

The year is 1961 and it is a significant period of time when singers and song writers were learning their craft by singing in basket houses – where a basket was handed round for donations from the audience. This is the backdrop to a fictional story that starts with a violent incident that we don’t realise is unfolding in the past to explain the beginning at the end. Getting inside Llewyn Davis is a challenge because we don’t really get to see a depth of his character other than a desire for destiny to give him a break. A mediocre contemporary singer whose previous partner is no longer with us, he is not willing to join up with another partner or combination of singers.

Davis’s life seems to be in so many places because he has no permanent home, like a rolling stone. And that is the zeitgeist of the times – a man in a search for something and living for the moment. Very few of the characters, if any, including Davis endear themselves to us. Each one either successfully able to live for the moment, or react angrily because of change forced upon them.

There is an escaping cat (Ulysses) whose odyssey not only helps to create a vehicle for the story but his re-appearance as the wrong cat half way through the film gives us an inkling to the journey of Davis. There are times when he might be the wrong man in the wrong place. Whether he will ever become he right man in the right place is not the objective of the film.

‘Down in the Village nothing seemed wrong. Life was not complex. Everybody was looking for openings. Some would get ‘em and then they’d be gone and others never did. Mine was coming but not just yet.’ (Dylan, Chronicles, 2004)

Anyone who was growing up in this period, particularly in London, will have some attachment to this film. Walking down Greek Street in a donkey jacket, diving down the steps into Les Cousins for the all nighter, shelling out a few shillings for the entrance, sitting in a warm and friendly environment and listening to established and wannabee singers with their acoustic guitars. Journeying on our own odyssey as we try and discover ourselves.

For this reason, the story will not resonate with everyone. For all that, the Coen Brothers should be applauded for a well observed period in time.

The Railwayman (2013)

Eric Lomax was an engineer and a railway enthusiast who was captured by the Japanese in the Second World War. He was put into forced labour to help build the railroad across South East Asia. The British had wanted to build this before the war but abandoned the plan because it would have been inhuman in such extreme conditions to undertake the project without treating a workforce as slaves. This is what the Japanese Imperial Army decided to do.

The book upon which the film is based tells the story of what happened to Lomax particularly from the point of view of the torture that he endured and his post traumatic stress disorder after the war. The manifestation of which prompts his new wife to get him to face the cause of it. This is through a return visit to South East Asia to meet face to face with his tormentor who they discover is not only still alive but working at the site of the prison camp as a tour guide at the visitor centre that was created to tell the history of the prison camp.

The key players are Colin Firth as Lomax and Nicole Kidman as his wife with Jeremy Irvine as the younger Lomax. Hiroyuki Sanada plays the Japanese prison guard and torturer. The narrative is told in layers – how Lomax meets his wife – how she discovers his support system to deal with his stress disorder (via his comrades) – flashbacks of the events in the prison camp – and the resolution of his stress disorder. There is criticism about the absence of other background information, such as Lomax’s first wife and children. However, to include all of this would have detracted from the purpose of the film which was to tell the story of his torture and the resolution to his post war trauma.

This is not a fictional account of Lomax’s story. The facts of the story have been proven and so this film is a factual account and Lomax’s frame of reference on what happened to him is that he was the subject of cruel and inhuman torture the brutality of which had scarred his ability to function properly after the war. This detail we need to know because the resolution to his personal conflict is what makes this film work. Without it, it might have become another David Lean adventure story.

Meeting his tormentor face to face and putting him through the motions of Lomax’s own torture, enables the audience to see how the need for truth and reconciliation is at the heart of all conflict resolution. In this story that resolution is powerfully told and portrayed by Colin Firth and his tormentor.

A good and powerful story translated into film is what cinema is good at and in this case, it doesn’t come much better.