Review: Hail, Caesar!

Hail, Caesar! (12A)

USA 2016 106 mins Dir: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson

For all of the masterworks the Coen brothers have turned out over the years, the terms ‘sweet’ and ‘affectionate’ are ones that can rarely be ascribed to their work. From the brooding violence of Blood Simple and No Country For Old Men to the bleak existential crises of A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens have a deserved reputation for toying with the fates of their characters (and thus with the expectations of the viewing audience) to a rather cruel, albeit often darkly comic, extent. Even their comparatively lighter works tackle relatively unpalatable subject matter, from child kidnapping in Raising Arizona to the horrendous results of mistaken identity in madcap farce Burn After Reading.

That’s why their latest, Hail, Caesar! is an effervescent breath of fresh air, an unashamed celebration of the movie system and, along with 1998 cult classic The Big Lebowski, surely the most heart-warming movie they’ve ever made (one could also argue Fargo, in spite of its violence). Somewhat unusually for a Coen movie, it also features a protagonist whose emotional trajectory is treated with utmost warmth.

Said person is movie ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a staple figure of the 1950s Hollywood studio system whose job it is to grease the wheels and keep A-list scandal at bay, preserving the integrity of the cinema industry at all costs. (A little in-joke reveals the studio as Capitol Pictures, the same that featured in the Coens’ extraordinary 1991 Hollywood satire Barton Fink to which this is the decidedly more innocent flip-side.)

With multiple productions on the go, including prestige Bible picture Hail, Caesar! featuring megastar Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), Mannix has his hands full at all times. Barely present for his wife and kids and wracked with Catholic guilt as a direct result of the behind the scenes machinations he engineers, Mannix is then forced to deal with another catastrophe when the aforementioned Whitlock is kidnapped from under his nose by insurgent Communists.

Add to this an unwanted pregnancy for Esther Williams-inspired aquatic star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) and a hilarious bit of miscasting in the form of cowboy-icon-turned-serious-actor Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), and Mannix is barely keeping it all together. (Hobie’s faltering attempts at high-brow diction with director Laurence Laurentz, played by Ralph Fiennes, provide arguably the film’s funniest scene.)

Scrappy and episodic though Hail, Caesar! undoubtedly is, the movie’s optimistic tone and endless charm carry the viewer through the occasional patchy sections. The attention to detail is typically extraordinary, Roger Deakins’ luxuriant cinematography and Carter Burwell’s genre-hopping score drinking in several fabulously intricate song-and-dance routines that manage the tricky balance of being both nostalgic and ever-so-slightly satirical, the Coens poking fun at the Dream Factory’s inherent reliance on fakery and glamour. One of the highlights is the On the Town-inflected sailor spectacle No Dames featuring Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), a mixture of kitsch ludicrousness and fleet-footed enjoyment that perfectly distils our contradictory experience of watching such movies in real life.

This being a Coen brothers movie, the lightness of touch is all relative: the siblings are never ones to completely leave deeper material at the door and indeed Mannix’s spiritual crisis touches on that familiar theme of a person doing their deal with the Devil, in the process putting their “soul at hazard” to quote the Oscar-winning No Country . The key difference is all in the tone: in-spite of the duplicitous role Mannix occupies the Coens clearly love him as a character, a consummate professional who so loves his job in pictures that a vastly superior rival offer from aviation moguls Lockheed takes some serious mulling over.

It’s this deep-seated affection that makes the movie so enjoyable to watch. Anchored by strong performances from Brolin and Clooney (the latter absolutely nailing the essence of a swaddled, self-important Hollywood star working with material that is clearly way over his head), it’s a delicious souffle of a movie that ultimately wants us all to feel better about our inclination towards escapism and fantasy. Hail, indeed.