Originally published February 8, 2016 on FrontRowCentral.com
In its day, the Hollywood studio system was a remarkable machine with thousands of cogs working to churn out prestige pictures and cheap genre fare like clockwork. It’s a machine that falls right into Joel and Ethan Coen’s wheelhouse with Hail, Caesar!, a relentless farce about a day in the life of a 1950s film studio. While this is very much a work of fiction, putting real life Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix at its epicenter lends the film an air of truth. The Coens use Hail, Caesar! not only to play around with the iconography of Old Hollywood, but also to ask questions of faith, and even stop to consider their own legacy as filmmakers working in that very machine. If that sounds like a bunch of navel-gazing, well… It is. This is definitely that kind of movie.
Josh Brolin stars as Mannix, Head of Production at Capitol Pictures (see also: Barton Fink), who spends his days solving as many of the studio’s litany of problems as he can. The stress drives him to smoking, which his wife (Alison Pill) begs him to quit, and it also drives him to consider leaving the movie business for a much cushier position at Lockheed. And with the day he’s about to have, he’s definitely considering it.
His studio’s big prestige picture is a biblical epic, also titled Hail, Caesar!, about a Roman soldier who has a life-changing encounter with Christ. The film’s star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), has been kidnapped off the set, and without a star to deliver the film’s climactic speech, the film is dead in the water. While Mannix rounds up the demanded $100,000 ransom and evades twin gossip journalists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (both Tilda Swinton), Whitlock awakens to discover he’s been abducted by a gang of screenwriters. Calling themselves The Future, these guys are a cabal of disgruntled employees looking to cash in (see also: The Hudsucker Proxy) all in the name of Communism and Soviet Russia. The longer they discuss seizing the means of production, the more fascinated Whitlock becomes.
That’s the primary story, which is simple enough to let the Coens branch off into different vignettes about the various productions around the Capitol lot. One of the best follows singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) as he’s plucked off the set of his latest western and dropped into the middle of a stuffy period drama. Doyle can sing, he can do stunts, but he sure as hell cannot act, and it drives director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) up the wall. Seeing the two go around in circles on the pronunciation of one particular line is nothing short of hysterical.
Elsewhere, we catch glimpses of a pair of musicals, from a Busby Berkeley-esque mermaid starring DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) to the slightly more modern stylings of Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) in a showstopping number reminiscent of a Gene Kelly film. We also get to see a few ludicrous moments from one of Hobie Doyle’s films, because if you introduce a singing cowboy in the first act, you damn well had better have him sing by the third.
What’s interesting about Hail, Caesar! (specifically punctuated, no doubt, to avoid confusion with this little gem) is that each of the films we see around the studio are decidedly outdated. The titular bible epic might be the closest to a legitimate draw these days, what with films like Risen and The Young Messiah on the way, but the Coens’ choice to feature musicals, westerns, bible epics and period dramas feels deliberate. Each of these genres firmly plant Capitol Pictures as a studio of a bygone era. There’s a general sense among the characters that their studio may not be long for this world. They all, in one way or another, brace themselves for a future that probably won’t include them.
In the Hail, Caesar! within Hail, Caesar!, Whitlock’s character describes Christ as “a new truth written in light,” and it’s hard not to imagine the Coens talking about the state of cinema as a whole. Cinematographer Roger Deakins recently explained that the infrastructure for shooting on film stock is beginning to fall away in favor of digital, and while his work on this film is a testament to the look and feel of celluloid, it’s just one more piece of Old Hollywood to throw onto the pyre. Digital is the new truth, and whether filmmakers like the Coens, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan like it or not, the future is here already.
Drawing all of these elements together into something cohesive is ultimately where the film stumbles. Hail, Caesar! is a shamelessly self-referential genre pastiche, and while it’s A-list who’s-who is an embarrassment of riches, the film is at times too shaggy to know what to do with them. As Eddie Mannix, Josh Brolin is the steady rock at the center of a chaotic whirlwind, but the Coens put the urgency of his story on the backburner, which coincidentally, is where they put all their other stories. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it lends the film a breezy, lighthearted tone that undercuts the self-important airs of a story about Old Hollywood, Communism, and all that jazz. On the other hand, the Coens cut these threads so much slack that things never quite tie together the way they all should. Like the films contained within, Hail, Caesar! is enjoyable, but not quite the masterpiece we all hoped it would be.
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