After “True Grit” (2010) and “Inside Llewyn David” (2013), the Coen brothers seemed to be becoming very serious men. But their latest “Hail, Caesar!” (2016) returns the duo to their “Big Lebowki” (1998) comedic roots, in which the riotous romp of carnivalesque characters takes over any desire to maintain a moving plot. While the film may lack the makings of a cult classic, it highlights the Coens’ almost cultish fondness for a classic period of American filmmaking.
The film follows Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a Hollywood fixer — the repairman of the studio who ensures the tabloids stay at bay, his stars are happy and the films run on schedule — through his daily life at the fictitious Capitol Studios in the 1950s. During the filming of their year’s big epic, “Hail, Caesar!” (which centers on a Roman consul who leads the prosecution of Jesus but converts to Christianity at the foot of the cross), Capitol’s megastar, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), is drugged and held captive by a band of communist screenwriters. This detective tale drives Mannix all around the studio lot, dodging scandals and job offers to escape this insanity and allows the Coens to showcase the diversity of daily cinematic madness.
The studio quickly becomes a carnival, where tabloid twins (both played by Tilda Swinton) hover like vultures, a chain smoking editor (Frances McDormand — also Joel Coen’s wife) is almost choked by her scarf and communists and homosexuals lurk in broad daylight. If the Coen brothers paint in colorful characters, then “Hail, Caesar!” promises a rich and scintillating impasto of performers. Some highlights include a corrupt notary (Jonah Hill), a sailor-mouthed starlet in a mermaid costume (Scarlett Johannson), an urbane, closeted British director (Ralph Fiennes) and western star turned period dramatist (Alden Ehrenreich). As the tuxedoed cowboy fails to say, “would that it were so simple” indeed. The narrative often takes a backseat and merely strings along the hilarious cameos and set pieces — stuffing a zeitgeist into a glitzy 100-minute package demands a peripheral plot.
“Hail, Caesar!” ends up feeling like a grown-up “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) with the same elocution gags and extravagant dance numbers. But the Coens remove another veil to expose the ideological underpinnings of communism and hyper-conservatism that defined 1950s Hollywood — something Gene Kelly couldn’t really tap dance to. “Singin’ in the Nuclear Fallout” doesn’t sound as catchy, does it? Communism in Hollywood seems in vogue this season as Jay Roach’s “Trumbo” (2015) examines the life screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (“Roman Holiday” (1953) and “Spartacus” (1960)) during the paralyzing McCarthyism era. Perhaps in today’s era of paranoiac terrorism panic and xenophobic political rhetoric, these films pertinently remind audiences that our senseless hatreds are nothing new. Fortunately, the film makes light of communists and treats them as just another band of clowns that populate cinema’s heartland rather than heinously cruel villans bent on destroying the American way of life.
Ultimately, “Hail, Caesar!” tries to convert us to the religion of film, with theatres our congregations, the films our services and Capitol Studios the almighty, invisible Creator behind it all. The film begins with a sculpture of Jesus on the cross, but by the end we are taken by the film’s passion of the Cinema.
The Coens were born in the ’50s, and infuse every frame with a reverent nostalgia for their cinematic birthplace. They pay parodic homage to each of the major genres of the time, including a hyper-acrobatic western, an overtly-homoerotic sailor musical, a Broadway adapted period drama and a kaleidoscopic water-ballet, while leaving the film noir to structure the film itself. The ’50s were a rocky period in Hollywood, in which the new medium of television began robbing theaters of their audiences and films battled the moral stringency of the Hays Code. Yet “Hail, Caesar!” honors the foot soldiers of the studio system who ensured the dream machine never flagged and that films were always big spectacles to sate America’s postwar thirst for the bigger and the better. While the film may feel stylistically old-fashioned or thematically trite (how many more movies about movies do we really need?), “Hail, Caesar!” pastiches the time capsule drama and seeks to spectacularize even further the spectacles that defined midcentury culture, and most importantly the Coens themselves.
Rating: 8.5/10
“Hail, Caesar!” is now playing at the Hanover Nugget at 4:20 p.m. and 7 p.m.