I stay at home and look after the children
phenergan cost If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord. Some of its joys are gleefully precise, like the quartet of white-sweatered harmonizing Irish crooners, or the novelty number “Please Mr. Kennedy,” which Llewyn, Jim, and Al Cody (Adam Driver) chant for Columbia Records. Yet something in the movie fails to grip, and it has to do with the hero. Bud Grossman, again, gets it right, telling him, “You’re no front man.” If that is bad news for a musician, it’s worse for a dramatic lead, and, as though to compensate for this lack of energy at the core, the Coens plump up their peripheral figures—people like Roland Turner (John Goodman), a jazzman who is given not just a pair of walking sticks, like the lawyer in “The Lady from Shanghai,” but a drug habit and a funny toupee to boot. Being Goodman, he provides a juicy distraction, though before long we return to the gloom of Llewyn. He’s such a grouch and an ingrate, and so allergic to human sympathy, that, like his friends, we can’t always be bothered to extend it. Also, he never looks as poor and as starving as he is meant to, or even very down-at-heel. In fact, the whole movie is so beautifully shot, by Bruno Delbonnel, that, if anything, the beauty hazes over the shabby desperation that, by custom, should plague the struggling artist. (“Bound for Glory,” Hal Ashby’s 1976 biopic of Woody Guthrie, was no less immaculate, even in the wake of a dust storm.) Al Cody calls his apartment “a dump,” but, when Llewyn shows up, it looks pretty neat and clean.