Inside Llewyn Davis

Samsara is the wheel of repeated existence, turned by grasping and aversion, and the way off the wheel is not better luck but insight into how you keep it spinning. The film is a samsaric loop rendered as one week of a man's life. Every station of Llewyn's suffering is one he generates: he sabotages relationships, mocks the sincerity of others, refuses partnership, treats every kindness as beneath him, and calls it integrity.

Watch the cat. Llewyn loses the Gorfeins' cat, chases the wrong one, and carries the animal through the film like a burden he half-tends and half-resents. The cat's name, revealed late, is Ulysses, the wanderer who spends ten years failing to get home. Llewyn is Ulysses without the wisdom, circling because he will not surrender the grasping that keeps him circling. When he heckles an older woman singing on the Gaslight stage, then steps out to take his beating, and the film closes the loop, the lesson is left sitting in plain sight. Nothing external will change until the grasping stops. The wheel turns on him because he keeps his hand on it.

Every initiation requires a descent to the underworld and a return bearing something. Llewyn's is the drive to Chicago, and the Coens load it with underworld imagery: a night highway, a heroin-nodding jazz musician who calls him a loser and dies, or nearly does, in a diner, a car abandoned in falling snow. Llewyn arrives at the throne of the underworld, the office of Bud Grossman, and plays "The Death of Queen Jane," a song about a woman who begs to be cut open so her child can live and dies in the process.

Grossman listens, then says the film's cruelest true sentence: "I don't see a lot of money here." The initiation offers Llewyn its terms. Grossman tells him to get back together with his partner, to stop being alone, to accept form. Llewyn refuses and turns back. He returns from the underworld carrying nothing, because he would not pay the price the descent asked, which was the surrender of his solitude. The failed initiate is condemned to repeat the threshold. He drives home to the same alley, the same fist, the same song.