Film Review: Hail, Caesar!

I once tried to write one of these about what the Coen brothers' 1998 masterpiece The Big Lebowski was all about. All I managed to do was try. A detective movie where the detective is so inept he barricades his door from the wrong side, and a bowling movie containing almost no bowling; it had to be about something, didn't it? I might get round to finishing it some day. In the meantime, the Joel and Ethan Coen continue to be brilliant and frustrating in a ratio of about 80% to 20%.

Whatever you think of them, they generally don't make objectively bad films. With the possible exception of a mid 2000s blip which saw them try to apply their trademark screwball comedy slant to screwball comedies Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers which yielded mixed results, they have been a uniquely odd and addictive proposition. Their idiosyncratic tendencies towards repeated dialogue, bizarre character names, plots involving botched ransoms, and the vague notion that they are deliberately undermining everything they do mark them out as both pioneering auteurs and almost reliably safe at the same time.

From 2004s The Ladykillers, they have (almost) alternated between fun capers and intellectual dramas, with the lines blurred between the two. They have followed classy New York folk scene snapshot Inside Llewyn Davis with another light caper, Hail, Caesar! and this follows a vague trend. 2007's brutal and sparse Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men was followed by the underrated Burn After Reading. Too silly to be anything other than a caper, albeit a creepy and violent one, they made a film about the complex workings of the CIA with a plot so complex that trying to follow it was a redundant exercise; a screwball meta-comedy? It then ended with the brilliant J K Simmons' CIA chief stating “I guess we learned not to do it again... I'm fucked if I know what we did.” At this point I was doubled over with laughter in the cinema, having realised that the Coens, as well as mocking the workings of the intelligence services, had been laughing at us, the audience, all along.

Had they been doing this all along? Is trying to unravel their mysteries another redundant exercise? Weird plot tics like the cat from Inside Llewyn Davis, the siren/frog sequence from O Brother Where Art Thou, or the the actual detective popping up in The Big Lebowski; have these all been jokes at our expense? If so, I applaud them for it.

More so than the audience, they appear to have been poking fun at aspects of American culture and cinema genres from very early on: gangsters, divorce lawyers, folk musicians, cowboys, the CIA, detective noir, the Deep South and the birth of the blues, various geographical oddities (Arizona, Santa Rosa, Minnesota, Texas) and Hollywood itself. Their films can simultaneously have both a strong sense of time and place, and be strangely otherworldly and detached.

Hail, Caesar! while in no way a classic, is a thoroughly enjoyable caper through the glorious studio system era of Hollywood. Josh Brolin's studio 'fixer' (think Malcolm Tucker without the mobile phone or the swearing) attempts to arrange the release of George Clooney's kidnapped leading man so the titular biblical epic can be finished. This effectively sums up the plot, however the Coens embellish it with a series of loosely woven vignettes, the point of which... well I'm really not sure. Perhaps they're just poking fun at another aspect of Americana: the film industry.

The subjects covered are well known aspects of 1950s Hollywood lore, shown through the prism of Brolin's Eddie Mannix whose job is to protect the studio's finances and public image by ensuring that actors don't 'misbehave', and that films are completed. We get to see Mannix at work: he prevents an up-and-coming actress damaging her image (and that of the studio) with sleazy nude photos (he knows the police officers who show up by name); arranges potential marriage partners for Scarlett Johannsen's stroppy pregnant-out-of-wedlock star; finds a last minute replacement for an actor in a expensive period picture (resulting in Alden Ehrenreich's popular singing cowboy hilariously miscast in the role); and keep embarrassing stories out of the gossip columns with promises of exclusives.

Hail, Caesar! shines a spotlight on things that were major issues at the time but are now the stuff of comedy: Communist writers secretly influencing the content of films (the Senator McCarthy witch hunts were a huge issue in the day, with several people blacklisted as Communists); the moral outrage at an actress being pregnant but not married; the idea that an actor could be homosexual could cause reputational damage (Clooney's character is an amalgam of several actors, including Rock Husdon); the bloated Biblical epic, and the requirement for the studio to seek approval from religious groups. There is also a brilliantly inappropriate moment where a man trying to headhunt Mannix for munitions company Lockheed discusses nuclear testing in a Japanese restaurant.

Bearing all that in mind, you would think that Hail,Caesar!, too comic in tone to be a drama, is a satire of the period. But the Coens, as they frequently do, keep the tone too detached to do anything approaching making a point. This is where they can be frustrating. They stage brilliant parodies of Hollywood staples in Johannsen's aquatic musical number, Ehrenreich's cowboy ditty 'Lonely Old Moon' and Channing Tatum's pitch perfect Gene Kelly musical parody 'No Dames', but don't do so with any real degree of affection. They seemingly refuse to condemn, condone, or even really comment on any of the content. Granted, the Communist writers' cell is largely comprised of idiots who are unable to agree on their own ethos (brilliantly, Alfred Molia's character is told to shut up every time he speaks), but so is the entire film studio. None more so than Clooney whose A-list star is easily converted to Communism without understanding it, and then back from it via a slap from Mannix. Nobody is presented as right or wrong, good or bad and the only real emotional payoff is Mannix' decision to remain with the studio instead of moving to Lockheed, ending the film with a smile. All they're really doing throughout the film is showing you stuff and saying “this happened”. The most satirical thing they do is cast some of the biggest stars in the world and then barely use them.

The Coen brothers off-form are comfortably better than most directors on top form, and they're not even really off form here. Hail, Caesar! could be a warm and affectionate love letter to their industry at a time of strife; it could be a satire of an absurd industry at a particularly absurd time. It manages to be neither. It's thoroughly enjoyable but, like Burn After Reading or Lebowski, don't bother trying to work out what they're getting at; it's probably nothing. In my opinion, the joke is again on the viewer for trying to work it out: you find yourself looking for subtext throughout the film and then two thirds of the way through, an actual submarine turns up...

*applauds the Coens.