11 Film Endings That Didn't Solve Anything
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
When you sit down to watch a film, you're usually of the mind that whatever occurs on-screen will be significant. The audience must be thrown a bone, and a movie without a plot would be naught more than attractive people going about their daily lives. Sure, there's experimental and auteur projects out there, but if your film's released into the multiplex, it's usually got to be structured in a certain way and come ripe with pay-offs of some sort. Yet apparently, someone forgot to tell the Coen Brothers. But make no mistake, this isn't a cause for complaint.
The brothers sit among only a handful of filmmakers who would not only have the chutzpah, but the backing to do such a thing - ensuring their films always have the capacity to surprise. However, the true genius lies in the fact that for the longest time, you think that the week you're spending with the eponymous Llewyn Davis is an extraordinary one. Hell, it certainly looks extraordinary: he ends up accidentally owning a cat, informed he's impregnated his friend's girlfriend, hitchhikes eventfully to Chicago to fail an audition, inadvertently screws himself out of royalties on a novelty single, and decides to jack in his music career for a failed stab at being a merchant seaman.
But then the rug is pulled under our feet with an incident outside the Gaslight. Earlier in the week Llewyn is beaten up by a shadowed figure for an unknown slight. You take this with a pinch of salt - Llewyn is thoroughly unlikeable, and it's well within character that someone would want to hurt him. But as you wind a week on and events unfurl, this exact incident happens again, albeit now with context. Llewyn is being beaten up because he unfairly belittled an old lady performing at the Gaslight. It's then that the penny dropped: for all the turmoil Llewyn undergoes while the camera is fixed on him, this is but an ordinary week for him in a cycle of disappointment, despair and failure. It's a crushing realisation that the events you've just watched were wholly unremarkable, but it certainly provides an excellent dramatic punch.