Hail, Caesar!
tickles a lot of my moviegoing fancies: it’s a dark comedy farce courtesy of
the Coen Brothers, in which an all-star cast of buffoons blunders their way
through old Hollywood while the plot twists and turns like a postmodern poodle
chasing its own tail. That may not be everyone’s cup of tea, recalling the
plotless meandering of The Big Sleep
and its successors, but for me it’s the most fun I’ve had at a movie in a long
while (yes, maybe even more fun than Deadpool).Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has the unenviable job of being the chief “fixer” for Capitol Pictures; when something goes amuck, it’s Eddie’s task to make sure the motion picture shows go on. The latest catastrophe he’s tasked with suppressing is the abduction of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), Capitol’s number-one star, though somewhat of a lush and a dim bulb. Of course, the Capitol lot is busy with numerous other crises, including a disgruntled mermaid (Scarlett Johansson), a highstrung director (Ralph Fiennes) and his twanging lead actor (Alden Ehrenreich), twin newspaper columnists (Tilda Swinton and Tilda Swinton), and a chipper musical star (Channing Tatum).
I’m reviewing Hail, Caesar! as someone who has very much partaken of the Coen kool-aid, so if The Big Lebowski was never your cup of tea or if Burn After Reading left you feeling parched, this is really more of the same, and you’d be better off watching something else. I say “more of the same” not as a negative, because I’m personally delighted to see more of the madcap mania the Coens have turned into a personal brand because it’s not something I get anywhere else at the cinema. No one does horseplay like Joel and Ethan Coen.
As for the plotlessness of Hail, Caesar!, the film is akin to an indoor amusement ride in which the audience shuffles from film set to film set to peek in on a day (27 hours, to be precise) in the life of 1950s Hollywood, and each of these individual setpieces is an exercise in the line between straight-face and satire. The Coens are masters at straddling this line, allowing the characters’ idiocy to penetrate to the foreground without the need to resort to caricature or signposting. On the surface, there’s nothing intrinsically funny about Tatum’s song-and-dance routine, but there’s something about the deadset sincerity, coupled with the amazingly insightful small nods to clichés of the era (such as taking the bartender’s dish rag and polishing his bald dome with it), leave the audience rolling with laughter – a continuous giggle punctuated by bursts of glee. Which is not to say there aren’t jokes; the moment when an Eastern Orthodox priest dismisses a chariot stunt as “fakey” is as funny as anything in a comedy special, and the moment when Hobie finds it difficult to drop his accent when saying “Would that it twere so simple” gets funnier the longer the gag goes on.
Then there’s the ever-present Coen delight of seeing a team of A-listers perambulating through the spectacle. Brolin is engaging as the over-hardboiled fixer, gritting his way through exaggerated Catholic guilt, and his interactions with the other cast members carry the film on his tensed shoulders. As ever, it’s a delight to see George Clooney playing the quintessential Coen idiot, who here scratches his head at his own kidnapping while being naively dazzled when his captors introduce him to the writings of Karl Marx. Even Coen mainstay (and spouse) Frances McDormand pops in for a vignette as a film editor whose scarves get caught in the projection reels. Delightfully madcap cameos like this one make Hail, Caesar! a standout.
At the conclusion of Hail, Caesar! everything wraps up fairly quickly and tidily. Whether this is a ending far too pat for the demands of realism, or whether I simply didn’t want the film to end, is up for debate; or is it, as the film suggests, a commentary on the function of films in society, as illusory dreams constrained by their own rules, entirely divorced from reality? It’s the final indication that Hail, Caesar! is something much smarter than it might initially present. The joke is on the characters, not on the audience, and the steadfast refusal of the Coens to pander is a tremendous credit to us and to them. Hail, Caesar! indeed!
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