Hail, Caesar!

Film (2016)
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

With Josh Brolin (Eddie Mannix), George Clooney (Baird Whitlock), Alden Ehrenreich (Hobie Doyle), Ralph Fiennes (Laurence Laurentz), Scarlett Johansson (DeeAnna Moran), Tilda Swinton (Thora Thacker/Thessaly Thacker), Frances McDormand (C. C. Calhoun), Channing Tatum (Burt Gurney), Jonah Hill (Joseph Silverman)

This film is a total scream, and it’s very well made. Hovering around the personality of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who was an actual studio executive under the notorious Louis B. Mayer, it depicts all sorts of films in the process of being made and creates a putative set of hijinks to keep the ball rolling.

Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is playing a Roman general in a film entitled Hail, Caesar: A Tale of Christ and he gets waylaid by a group of Communists who seek to gain a ransom from the studios in exchange for his return to the set and to shooting. Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) – at once stolid and indeed manic – the studio executive responsible for keeping things going, is beside himself – every day without the star costs thousands in added expenses.

Meanwhile, other cinematic escapes unfurl. DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johanssen) – the last name’s overtone is no mistake – is a water-ballet star who, contrary to her pure as the waves screen-image is actually a moody and tough talking broad. The Busby Berkeley water scenes in which she appears are done with incredible style and zest – they’re beautifully choreographed, with red and yellow on the flip sides of bathing suits so that when the swimmers flip over in unision everything changes.

There are any number of production numbrs which are similarly startlingly good. Channing Tatum stars as a sailor who participates in a real Gene Kelly-esque number with a ton of sailors bemoaning being at sea without any women. The dancing is spectacularly good, again the choreography is great and who imagined Channing Tatum could dance like that?

Of course, in this day and age, one never quite knows what is actually being sung, danced or acted and what is CGI wizardry, but whatever the means, the result here is beautifully executed.

Alden Ehrenreich (Hobie Doyle) plays a young star used to playing cowboy roles who gets commissioned to be in an English-style drawing room comedy directed by Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). His inability to mimic Laurentz’ direction to say “would that it ’twere so simple” is hilarious, and Laurentz doesn’t let up, repeating and insisting on Doyle’s repetition endlessly. Fiennes and Ehrenreich also pull off endless riffs on Doyle’s mispronounciation of Laurentz which are very funny and develop, given the innate funniness of the name, in a superbly ridiculous direction.

Cameos of one great actor or another abound. Frances McDormand (C. C. Calhoun) plays an intense film-editor whose scarf gets trapped in a film feed. She’s wizened, weary and wonderful.

Favorites from other Coen brothers’ films like Fred Melamed, who had a big and wonderful role in A Serious Man (2009), shows up here as well.

Tilda Swinton (Thora Thacker) is sharp and exquisite as the Hedda Hopper type gossip columnist.

Brolin is intense and believable, weirdly funny in his no-nonsense role as Eddie Mannix. The film hovers around him and he carries it off nicely.

George Clooney is, as he was in the Coen’s O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), happy being silly and broad, which he does a fine job of.

There is, near the beginning, a wonderful round-table discussion between Mannix (Brolin) and representatives of various Christian denominations and a rabbi about the themes and overtones in Hail, Caesar! The conversation is quick, witty and, in many ways, one of the best parts of the film. The various clergymen are quite funny, in particular, Robert Picardo who plays the rabbi and Aramazd Stepanian who plays the Eastern Orthodox cleric.

In this discussion, overtones from A Serious Man, in which one rabbi after another is consulted by the protagonist, rise up. The result is a sense that, though humorous throughout, there is a penetrating inquiry in the core of the film. The portrayal of Christian mythologiy in the films of that era gets called into question, as does everything else about the entertainment industry.

Whitlock (Clooney), while in captivity with the communist cell, gets to converse with them about the inequities of capitalism. At the meeting is Herbert Marcuse, one of the great emigre German social philosophers strongly influenced by Marxism. The school from which Marcuse came is the so-called Frankfurt School which expanded Marxist critiques to a broad range of social and artistic phenomena. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, also both members of the Frankfurt School, wrote a noted essay on Walt Disney. The inclusion – no doubt fictional – of Marcuse in this Hollywood crowd – is a kind of nod in the serious direction amidst all the hilarity. The Coens seem to be saying, as they do in A Serious Man, that the laughs are couched in something more profound and reflective.

The current film, while a totally entertaining send-up of the various genres of filmmaking sixty years ago and before that, is also a reflection on the role of filmmaking in society at large. What does it mean to create a religious myth in the context of an epic about Rome? With spoofy highlights of Mannix (Brolin) in a confession booth, Hail, Caesar! calls to mind some of the scenes in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) in which the profundity and laughability of religious practices and institutions stand sie by side.

Like the recent excellent Trumbo (2015), this film also calls into question the sorts of things that communists, and other socialist critics, dared to ask about the popular culture industry of the era. And, perhaps, the Coens, in a higher level reflection are looking at the interplay beeween Hollywood and the Communists of the era.

This melange of influences creates the entertaining collage that Hail, Caesar represents, providing straightforward charm in its renditions while yielding, in its more subtly drawn reflection on the era, pause for onsidering how this powerful institution helped to shape habits of thinking for a generation.

(2/19/2016: Another review of Hail, Caesar by Charles Munitz (aka BADMan) appeared in the 2/19/2016 issue of The Jewish Advocate with the title Hollywood Without Jews? Not Exactly. It’s republished here.)

– BADMan