By now kidnappings should be familiar territory for the writing/directing duo Joel and Ethan Coen, with such films under their belts as: Raising Arizona, Fargo and The Big Lebowski. By all accounts, Hail, Caesar! should feel stale, and yet this Hollywoodland farce is one of the Coen’s most exciting and loveable outings in recent years.
The film follows Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” in charge of keeping a major Hollywood studio’s contracted film stars in line in a whacky, alternate 1951. He’s one-third studio head, one-third public relations army and one-third private investigator. But all of Mannix’s skills are about to be put to the test when major star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) – a sort of fictitious Charlton Heston or Kirk Douglas – is kidnapped by a group known as “The Future.”
It’s paramount that Mannix finds Whitlock. He’s staring in the studio’s major upcoming prestige release Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ, an epic reminiscent of Ben-Hur or Spartacus, and if this movie goes awry, the studio is going to be in a tough spot. We then see this alternate reality version of Hollywood through the eyes of the square-jawed Mannix as he negotiates with a fussy British director (Ralph Fiennes), a cowboy going through an image change (Alden Ehrenreich), a pregnant and unmarried starlet (Scarlett Johansson) and twin gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton in dual roles) all while trying to locate Whitlock.
Hail, Caesar! is one of the most humorous films from the Coens – whose most recent fair includes the depressing Inside Llewyn Davis, the hard-edged True Grit and the bitter-sweet A Serious Man – and is perhaps one of their most charming.
While it doesn’t have the immediate grab of something like Fargo and is not as laugh-out-loud funny as The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona, it is one of their most endearing, especially if you love classic movies.
While a mystery of sorts, the film never plays at a fever pitch. No, the Coens have written Mannix to be a man who knows what he’s doing and knows that he’s going to find Whitlock and keep the studio in check. The fun comes from watching it all happen.
One of the great personal joys from watching this movie was spying all of the connections and parallels to classic American movies and icons, from an era where pictures and the stars in them were the thing to see.
Fiennes as musical director Laurence Laurentz conjures up imagery of many of the great Lawrence Olivier or an English version of George Cuckor. Ehrenreich as baby-faced cowboy Hobie Doyle reminded me a great deal of Ricky Nelson and Johansson is written so that she could be any number of dancing starlets from the time.
But, it’s Channing Tatum as a Gene Kelly-ish song and dance man who in one tap/song routine almost steals the entire movie. I would actually venture to guess that come NEXT Oscar cycle, we may get to see Tatum perform the delightfully period “No Dames” on stage. It’s that fun.
A friend of mine admired the film, but was less fond of it when we walked out, saying it didn’t add up to much. Dwelling on his remarks, I was reminded later of the ending quote from the Coen brothers’ own Burn After Reading: “What exactly did we learn from all of this?” one puzzled CIA exec says to another. The answer in that film, as well as this one, is: nothing.
But that’s OK in my book. Even though the end result isn’t much, it’s a hell of a lot of fun getting to that end result. So to all audiences, I say hail to Hail, Caesar! and hail to the Coens as well for this fun, beginning of the year romp.
Brian Laughran
Editor-in-Chief