Llewyn Davis may not be top-flight Coens. But it's pretty dang good. And if you're a fan of their stuff (and lordy is this boy), you'll see it makes an excellent companion piece to 1991's Barton Fink, another movie casting a second-tier artist—arrogant, aloof, married to a burdensome "life of the mind"—as irresistible cannon fodder for the universe's mean streak.
If Barton Fink is a bit of a hot mess, though, its supernatural freak-out climax incoherent in much the same way the final stretch of Kubrick's The Shining is, then Llewyn Davis is maybe a mite too leashed. It could sure use Fargo's wood chipper. Or No Country for Old Men's air tank. Or A Serious Man's tornado. Or something. After building a nice store of eerie tension (it's testament to the Coens' powers they can do this with a whole lot of Greenwich Village folk music playing), the movie arrives at its abrupt shrug of an ending, basically its opening scene all over again with one bit of added info. So unsure are the brothers how to finish their movie that they heap the job onto poor Bob Dylan. It's a would-be disarming ending that, unlike Sheriff Ed Bell's telling of twin dreams at the end of No Country, doesn't particularly reward reflection or scrutiny.
