My wife and I went to see Inside Llewyn Davis at 2:00 on a Saturday in the Union Square 14. It was playing the big theater and it was packed! There was a long line for the showing after ours. Every intellectual in the whole fucking world is flocking to see this movie. And they all love it! A.O. Scott loves it! Manohla Dargis loves it! The New Yorker loves it! The Guardian loves it! Cannes loved it. The aging academic woman sitting next to me had her mouth wide open and her hands on her face the entire movie, like she was witnessing the second coming of Christ.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a wretched, wretched, wretched film, and all I can say is it never ceases to amaze me how easily the intellectual class is dazzled. It is not a beautiful film, it is not an interesting film, and it’s not an artistically impressive film. It’s a nothing film: there is no story, no character development, no interesting ideas about music or anything else, no humor, and the music is simply bad: awful songs badly performed, badly recorded, and badly filmed. My wife was in a rage after this movie, and made me promise her that we were never going to any more Coen brothers movies, no matter how desperate we are, no matter how intriguing it seems, no matter how visually seductive the cinematography looks in the preview, and regardless if every one of our favorite actors happen to be in the film. I promised, happily.

Inside Llewyn Davis is like a sensory deprivation tank; even that flat color pallet that looked so gorgeous in the preview becomes a kind of torture device in the absence of any narrative substance whatsoever. Basically, you spend two hours watching a grade-A asshole: wandering around in the snow, sleeping on couches, riding in cars, singing the occasional bad folk song, and acting out on everyone around him. Llewyn is completely unlikable, completely uninteresting, and he never changes. The film is structured in ham-handed fashion to “suggest” (through a megaphone) that his life is something of a circular, recurring nightmare of banality and disappointment, as if this was not clear in the first 15 minutes! On top of this vacuous core, the Coen brothers sprinkle their usual fetid stew of distractions: there’s a John Goodman character who makes weird faces and says a bunch of desperately uninspired lines that are supposed to pass for comedy, there’s an array of weird-looking incidental actors affectedly speaking tedious, empty dialog, there’s random bloodshed tarted up like it’s conveying the fucking meaning of life, and believe it or not, large sections of the film are devoted to having Llewyn Davis chase or carry around various orange cats.

The question that is on my mind is: why do people like the Coen brothers so much? What are they offering? They’re not visual filmmakers (they probably think they are, but compare them to Antonioni, or Terrence Malick, or even Kurosawa or Stanley Kubrick.) They’re not social or political filmmakers. They’re not romantic filmmakers. They’re not “idea” filmmakers. They’re not “character” filmmakers. They’re not storytellers. If anything they’re absurdists, but what kind of absurdists? They’re not funny, and their films have no grain of truth to them. They’re unfunny absurdists with nothing to say.

In other words, the Coen brothers are consummate time-wasters. They play to the lowest common denominator of the egghead intellectual class: fear of appearing lowbrow. They mesmerize their audience with Rorschach-like invitations for mental masturbation. Their films are abominations of random distraction and facile erudition, always wrapped in the same three-fold narrative progression: from ambiguity, to disappointment, to oblivion. Obviously this formula fills some deep need in their sizable fan base.

A word about the performances. It’s a bit unfair to judge actors on the ungodly shit the Coen brothers force them to do – remember Tommy Lee Jones’ bizarre mental disintegration in No Country for Old Men? But I will say the following: I’ve never seen a worse performance from Carey Mulligan. She may be making lots of money, but her career as an interesting actress is in a death spiral; I noted this trend in my Great Gatsby review six months ago, and Inside Llewyn Davis simply confirms the steep downward trajectory. She really needs to take a more “Kate Winslet” approach to her career. And poor Garrett Hedlund has the ignominy of playing a character who’s only utterances are to croak like the Looney Toons singing frog!

Inside Llewyn Davis is as sure a bet for Oscar nominations as anything besides 12 Years a Slave and Blue Jasmine. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if Inside Llewyn Davis beat them both for Best Picture. Everyone adores the Coen brothers. They are the cinematic geniuses of our time, apparently. I’ll never understand it.