If you have never seen The Graduate, you can’t really call yourself a film buff. This astounding 1967 movie, directed by the late, great Mike Nichols, co-written by Buck Henry, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, took the world by storm when it was first released. The bizarre love triangle – boy has affair with married woman, then falls in love with her daughter – is riveting, and under Nichols’s direction, the blend of comedy and drama are interwoven perfectly.
Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers’ 16th full-length film, and their first in three years, since 2010’s True Grit – the latter a work that earned a whopping 10 Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, but won none. Though they directed two segments and contributed as writers to other projects in between, Joel and Ethan Coen’s body of work as directors started with 1984’s Blood Simple and has included 14 other works between that and Llewyn Davis, among them such works as: Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man.
Professional baseball faced a similar postwar influx. More than 500 major leaguers and 4,000 minor leaguers had swapped jerseys for military fatigues during the previous four years. Two former big leaguers, Harry O’Neill and Elmer Gedeon, plus more than 100 minor-league players, lost their lives.
In curating this lineup, I selected four films that all share one specific point of commonality: flawed people trying to make it through their day despite the odds being stacked against them. Some stories are more successful than others, yet these four films demonstrate a unique perspective in their search to make sense of our current American lifestyles.
