There’s an exhilarating combination of empathy and contempt in Hail, Caesar!, the latest comic concoction from Joel and Ethan Coen. Immersed in the day-to-day of a Hollywood studio in the 1950s, the film follows the travails of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” tasked with holding his looney actors in-check and keeping their scandals out of the press. Mannix is a gatekeeper, a storyteller tasked with preserving illusion and maintaining civility. In some instances, he’s an object of derision for the Coen Brothers: a man who quietly buries truths and enthusiastically promotes lies. But in others he’s an admired figure, manufacturing a sense of harmony behind-the-scenes to keep the wonders shown on-screen untainted, and open for full embrace.
Even for the Coen Brothers, this is a disorienting, destabilizing and decentralized work, one that places Hollywood gloss and blind faith side-by-side in an effort not to instruct or satirize, but to search. Through methods equally absurd, heartfelt and dramatic, the film meditates on notions of enlightenment and escapism. It’s not quite madcap, like Burn After Reading or The Big Lebowski, but it’s not somber, either. The formal and thematic bases for Hail, Caesar! are more ambitious and, perhaps, less sturdy. There’s undeniably too much going on here — cinematic homages, send-ups of classic actors, caper side-plots, lectures on communism, ruminations on religion — but that seems entirely the point. This is an overstuffed love letter to the movies — to the act of falling into an epic fantasyland or a musical fantasia for a few hours and checking reality at the door.
Its main event is the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a mega-star heading up a Ben-Hur-style epic entitled Hail Caesar, which intends to tell the story of Christ in a way that, according to Mr. Mannix, “doesn’t offend anybody.” (He seeks counsel from several religious authorities.) A league of communist writers holds the dopey Whitlock for ransom, all but converting him in the process, while Mannix is left to hunt for his missing star and deal with a series of smaller crises along the way.
Within that construct, the movie tends to drag its feet — it lacks a narrative thrust as even those aforementioned Coen comedies do not. Though riddled with references and imbued with a strong sense of purpose, Caesar is often too disjointed to really click beyond its spurts of brilliance. Its best moments don’t tie the film together in any significant way; they’re interludes instead, building in nostalgic contrast with the reflexive critique that drives the central plot. As a Gene Kelly type, Channing Tatum all but steals the show in a sparkling tap-dance number, while Scarlett Johansson gets a dazzling showcase in a synchronized swimming routine. There’s also a masterfully comic reimagining of the Kirby Grant-fronted Western, with newcomer Alden Ehrenreich playing the part of the “singing cowboy” with ruthless charm. These set pieces are individually and collectively absorbing, and they fit within the film’s complex emotional template.
The film builds by juxtaposing its characters' true selves and constructed personas. In one revealing discussion, Mannix undermines the desire of two gossip columnists (rivaling twins, both played by the great Tilda Swinton) to break a scandalous story on the past relationship between Whitlock and Olivier-modeled director Laurence Laurentz (a sublime Ralph Fiennes). He questions the social impact of such journalism, challenging the women to consider what it means to dismantle an illusion that evokes warmth and positivity.
These conversations, too talky and played a little too straight, are indicative of the consistent problem that Hail, Caesar! runs into: the Coens strain to have their cake and eat it too, to build a farce out of a determined, even melancholic method of inquiry. It’s a dramatically challenging balance that the filmmakers only occasionally pull off. Yet it’s exceptional when they do. There’s a scene in which a newly-“educated” Whitlock sits down with Mannix and rattles off some Communist propaganda; the ensuing back-and-forth is rich with both surprising wisdom and, given Whitlock’s limited intellectual capacity, gleeful absurdity. Later, on-camera, he’s in the midst of delivering a speech so stirring about God and goodness and all things profound that he practically reels you in — until he forgets the most important word, “Faith,” to cap it off. There’s the penetrating reminder — he’s just there to read his lines.
Hail, Caesar! is enveloped by that scale of movie — by the enrapturing epic. The Coens procedurally peek behind the curtain, but find that blind faith still tends to win out over the ugliness of authenticity. There’s an embedded critique in their message, from pregnancy scares that turn actresses into symbols, to questions of sexuality that are buried to preserve “traditional” conceptions of masculinity. It acknowledges that what we perceive on-screen may not be so — but that’s sort of the implicit agreement between a film and its patron, isn’t it? Moviegoing isn’t always about knowing what’s what; sometimes, in fact, its purpose can be the exact opposite.
It’s hard not to admire what this film attempts, and what I think by the end it manages with competence. The Coens have been much funnier and more dramatically precise, but rarely do they go so directly, unflinchingly deep. It’s an odd line of praise, considering the streak of uneven weirdness that runs through Caesar — cameos from Frances McDormand and Jonah Hill spice it up plenty in that regard — but this has never been a conventional filmmaking team. If a flawed, somewhat confounding finished product, what they create here is distinct and ideologically assured.
Hail, Caesar! never generates the momentum it needs to; it never gets into a solid groove, wherein a pacing issue or two could easily be forgiven and forgotten. Indeed, even if intentional, the movie is too busy — it jumps around so messily that its ideas and revelations lack crucial staying power, and the humor and dramatic quotients are left volatile. But its reckoning with sin and artificiality is effective, and in an appropriately existential context. Hail, Caesar! begins and ends with a recharged Mannix stomping his grounds — navigating the concrete lots, bordered by cathedrals of studio spaces and prop warehouses, and waving to the legends within them, made up of myth and imagination. It's where the sun shines down and where the stories live on. It's legitimized by believers and emboldened by skeptics. It's God’s Country.
Grade: B