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George Clooney is a kidnapped actor in the Coen brothers 1950's Hollywood spoof |
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin (Eddie Mannix), George Clooney (Baird
Whitlock), Alden Ehrenreich (Hobie Doyle), Ralph Fiennes (Laurence Laurentz),
Scarlett Johansson (DeeAnna Moran), Frances McDormand (CC Calhoun), Tilda
Swinton (Thora Thacker/Thessaly Thacker), Channing Tatum (Burt Gurney), Alison
Pill (Connie Mannix), Jonah Hill (Joseph Silverman), Emily Beecham (Diedre),
Clancy Brown (Co-star Hail Caesar!),
Michael Gambon (Narrator)
The Coen brothers’ CV is a bit of a strange thing. It’s one
part thriller, one part engagingly brilliant comedy – and then there are a
collection of screwball-style entertainments, off-the-wall lightweight comedies
(usually about dummies or sharp-talking professionals), as if every so often
they needed a palate cleanser. Hail
Caesar! falls very much into that final camp.
Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a studio manager and fixer in
1950s Hollywood, whose job is to keep the stars in line and the films running
smoothly. The latest fly-in-his-ointment is the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock
(George Clooney), the star of the studio’s prestigious
sword-and-sandals-and-Christianity epic Hail
Caesar!. Mannix has to settle the ransom demand, while struggling to keep
the news quiet – and manage the production of several other problems including
a secretly pregnant Hollywood sweetheart (Scarlett Johansson) and a
cowboy-turned-actor (Alden Ehrenreich) struggling with his latest movie
requiring him to speak and act rather than just sing and ride a horse.
Hail Caesar! is a
mixed bag. There are some wonderful comic sketches in here, the sort of
brilliant highlights you could quite happily watch again and again. The problem
is these sketches are part of a narrative framework that never really catches
fire, that can’t seem to decide how much it is a surrealist comedy and how much
it is a genuine Hollywood “behind-the-scenes” slice of life. So I found I
delighted in the sketches, and the hilarious reconstructions of some of the studio
fodder of the 1950s – while drifting through the general plot of the movie. The
laughs are very tightly focused on the stand-alone sketches, and rarely develop
from the plot of the movie itself.
Those sketches, though, are brilliant – and the Coens have
secured what are effectively a series of stand-out cameos to deliver them. The
highlight is certainly a hilarious sequence featuring Ralph Fiennes as a
superior English director and Alden Ehrenreich as a cowboy-turned-actor crammed
into a period drama in order to “change his image”. It’s a brilliant idea, that
revolves around Fiennes’ barely concealed frustration Ehrenreich’s awkwardness
in front of the camera, eagerness to please and most of all his accent which so
badly affects his elocution that he simply cannot pronounce the line “Would
that it were so simple”. The sequence is brilliantly funny – take a look at it down
here. In fact it’s so good, it might be too good. Nothing else in the film
really touches it.
There are some other good sketches in here as well. Most of
them revolve around the loving recreation of Hollywood movies. The
movie-within-the-movie Hail Caesar!
is a perfect recreation of the Quo Vadis
style of movies: large sets, hilariously over-blown dialogue, heavy-handed
Christian messages (“Squint at the grandeur!” Clooney’s character is directed in
one reaction shot to The Christ – as the filmmakers persist in calling him) and
gaudy colour and sets. Clooney himself does a pitch perfect parody of the style
and delivery of Robert Taylor.
We also get some spot-on parodies of Hollywood musical
styles of the time. Scarlett Johansson plays a Esther Williams-style actress
who stars in a series of swimming pool musicals (a bizarre fad of the time).
Fiennes is directing a creakingly glacial Broadway-adaptation. Channing Tatum
plays an actor in a Minnelli style musical. The tap-dancing sequence we see
being filmed is, by the way, another brilliant sketch – a toe-tapping parody
song, which also showcases Tatum’s grace and style as a dancer. It’s such a
good parody that it actually sort of crosses over into being a genuinely
enjoyable slice of song and dance.
I also struggled, as I tend to sometimes, with the
artificiality of the Coens’ comedy – there is always an air of them (and their
actors) wanting the audience to know that they are far smarter than the dummies
in the film. I get this feeling a lot from Clooney in particular – while his
film-within-a-film sequences are brilliant, it feels like he never feels much
affection for the character outside these sequences. He wants us to know that
Clooney is not as dumb or vain as Whitlock is. It’s this lack of empathy that
doesn’t quite make the performance work. Empathy is why Eldenreich is the
stand-out performer of the film. He plays Hobie Doyle with a real affection and
warmth – he makes the character feel like a sweet and genuine person. While Hobie
is always a comic spoof, he also feels like he could be a real person – making
him so much easier to relate to for the audience.
Hail Caesar! is a
film that works in fits and starts, not all the way through. Josh Brolin is
fine as Mannix, and his fast-talking, plate juggling, problem solving throws up
some funny lines – but his story never really engages the audience as much as
it should, and the Catholic guilt Mannix balances in his life never really
becomes clear. The Coens are reaching for some point about art and faith - of how film makers may tell themselves they are making something for art, when they actually work for faceless businessmen interested only in making money – but it never really brings this art vs. money argument into place. Does a picture have worth if we talk about worth enough? It's a question we may as well ask about Hail Caesar itself.
Because the parodies and sketches of old Hollywood movies
are so brilliantly done, whenever we drift away from them to the actual plot
you find yourself losing interest. It’s a film that actually works better as a
few sketches extracted from YouTube – I could happily watch Fiennes and
Eldenreich’s scene, or Tatum’s dance sequence, or Clooney’s Taylor spoof in
isolation – I don’t really feel the need to watch the entire movie again.