The Expectations Game

Two highly anticipated releases from favorite directors fall just a bit short. Each deserves a re-assessment down the road.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (B+) - Normally I can go on and on about the latest Coen brothers masterpiece. They had a spectacular run from 2007 to 2010, including "No Country for Old Men," "A Serious Man" and "True Grit."

This one is unique among their films. There is very little quirk here -- aside from John Goodman's fop of a character and a harried woman holding up a cat and demanding, "Where is his scrotum?!" -- and instead we get a straightforward, somber story about a struggling singer-songwriting in Greenwich Village in 1961 on the brink of the explosion of the folk scene into the public consciousness. The Coens are not working broad here, but rather shunning farce in favor of a sober narrative.

Llewyn Davis is talented, but he's a bitter asshole. (Carey Mulligan -- miscast as a pal's wife, Jean, whom Llewyn has slept with -- repeats that word a lot.) He has good reasons: he's got father issues, he has split from his former singing partner (losing perhaps his best shot at stardom); he's broke; his manager's a bum. One business insider tells Llewyn that he's not a bankable solo artist and that he doesn't connect with the audience like other performers. He has more of the sad intensity of Phil Ochs than the philosophical playfulness of Bob Dylan. Nothing seems to make him happy. He seems doomed to obscurity and resigned to that fate. He's one of the many non-Dylans who won't make it big (or at all).

Oscar Isaac is brilliant in the lead role, as singer and sardonic smart-ass. He gives a heartbreaking performance, and even if you can't stand Llewyn you probably can feel for him. The versions of "Hang Me" that open and close the film are transcendent.

My problems with "Inside Llewyn Davis" are in the execution, which is a little too slick and familiar for its own good. The streets and alleys and fire escapes of Greenwich Village look like backlots; the snow piles on the sidewalks are a little too perfectly sculpted; the period details -- meant to evoke the album cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" -- are overly mannered; the manager and his ancient secretary are pale replicas of the rabbi and his old secretary in "A Serious Man"; the "Dylan" cameo at the end is awkwardly staged. As noted, Mulligan is out of place as a brunette hippie chick (Jeanine Serralles, who plays Llewyn's sister, Joy, is eminently sharper), and her marriage to Justin Timberlake's character becomes a forgotten after-thought, as if the Coens could arrange for only two days of shooting out of JT's busy schedule. Some of the plot points are a little too obvious: what became of Llewyn's partner; his signing away of royalty rights on a studio session for the quick buck.

Llewyn Davis is a man who makes terrible choices. That character flaw is driven home by his handling of a friend's cat, which Llewyn must carry around the city until he can get it back to its owner. (One of the film's triumphs is how the Coens make the cat a fully functional character.) At times the tabby dashes off comically; but at a crucial point in the story, Llewyn can't be bothered with the cat anymore. (Not to mention another human being.) Elsewhere, the idea of becoming a father doesn't register with him. Repeatedly, when called upon to be human and to make the right choice, he veers off down his destructive path, which is padded with free couches to crash on.

This is a cautionary tale that reminds us, once again, that the most talented performers do not always become the most popular. "There's no money in it," Llewyn is told after he pours his heart into one of the many powerful songs exquisitely performed in the movie. So what else is left?

A TOUCH OF SIN (B+) - Jia Zhangke is a master filmmaker from China, who directed one of the best films of the past decade, "The World."  You also can't go wrong with "24 City" and "Still Life."

Here he weaves four stories of present-day China, all involving startling acts of violence meant to deal with the ills of modern society. The first involves a gunman seeking revenge against corrupt politicians; he wields his shotgun as if in a classic spaghetti western. Another involves a woman trapped in a dead-end job as a receptionist at a spa, where she must dodge the creeps who mistake her for the women who perform happy-ending massages. The final segment involves teenagers, and the hope is that this new generation will end the cycle of violence; and while no attack on another person takes place, Jia shocks us with a surprising suicide, also realistically rendered.

The violence is graphic and matter-of-fact, always a jolt. It's not stylized or tempered; like in real life, it is sudden and direct.

Jia uses animals as parallels throughout. The man with a shotgun uses the symbol of the tiger as his inspiration, and he stalks his prey methodically before pouncing. A heartless street thug is paired with dead-eyed oxen headed to slaughter. The receptionist at one point enters a caravan full of snakes, and she, when cornered, lashes out with a pocket knife.

The pieces don't hold together in any apparent way. Like the Coen brothers film, the nihilism is laid on thick. Our fate is sealed early on and we are the victims of the random acts of the universe.

And the end isn't necessarily pretty.