Movie review: ‘Hail Caesar!’

| Senior Cadenza Editor

Directed by: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich

Films by the Coen Brothers—the directing and writing team of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen—fall into two rough camps: the goofy ones and the existential ones. Of course, the lines between the two aren’t firm. Each has a little of the other, but you can often sense a leaning towards one side.

I tend to prefer the existential ones. The Coens excel in the quirks of language—vernacular, pronunciation, rhythm, inflection—misunderstandings, characters moved by forces they can’t comprehend. The broader the Coens get, the further they dip into screwball comedy homage, and the more beholden they become to their influences. It’s not an entirely awkward fit, but the pratfalls don’t bite like the circular conversations or small moments of crisis.

At their best, the Coens have it both ways. Their 1998 film “The Big Lebowski” is a masterpiece of misdirection in which a purposefully confusing plot becomes its own source of pleasure, but it also opens up room to appreciate the isolated moments that comprise it. It’s silly, but measured to the note. It makes convolution look easy.

“Hail, Caesar!,” their most recent effort, is big and messy and neither resolves that messiness nor puts it to good use. You’re left to wonder where, exactly, the film is going, and when it ends, you suspect the Coens didn’t know either.

The film opens on Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” for the fictional Capitol Studios in the 1950s. He works tirelessly, and without joy, to put out scandals involving the studio’s stars and snuff out impending public relations disasters before they happen. This human whack-a-mole wears on the gruff Mannix, played with appropriate melancholy by Brolin.

Brolin is a savvy choice. He can make big men seem small and sad, kept afloat only by the endless grind of work. He pulled off a similar feat in 2014’s “Inherent Vice,” playing a straight-edge detective in the 1970s who gets off on squashing hippies. But Mannix doesn’t have the same capacity for sadistic glee. He works because, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Tragic performances in comedies are hard, but Brolin has the awareness to keep Mannix’s sorrows from weighing down the film.

It’s business as usual for Mannix until Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the star of Capitol’s latest tentpole (also titled “Hail, Caesar!”), goes missing, drugged and kidnapped by extras from the film. Mannix never seems quite as worried by Whitlock’s absence as you might expect. He moves quickly and dispassionately. You get the sense that he’s done this before.

The third prong in this flabby triptych is Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a boyish, budding Western star entirely at the whims of Capitol. His nonsensical casting in a prestige costume drama gives the film a rare opportunity to play to the Coens’ strengths when his director’s (played by a delightfully passive-aggressive Ralph Fiennes) hopeless efforts to fashion Doyle a passable British accent quickly devolves into an absurd closed circuit.

While the film’s three tracks intersect on occasion, they largely operate in parallel. None has the internal coherence to operate on its own, so you wait and wait for the pieces to fall into place. They do briefly, near the film’s end, but the meeting feels incidental. Without an overriding structural integrity, each strand drags on the other two. Built like a meandering arthouse film but asked to fit into a classical, linear narrative mode, the film is shaggy in all the wrong ways.

Maybe that’s the joke. The Coens include extended sequences from fictional films on the Capitol roster, each an homage to 1950s big-budget spectacles. There’s the aforementioned sword-and-sandals epic and high-minded period piece, a Western, a couple of musicals. The end result is something of a Russian doll that’s in part tribute, in part spoof and in part a critique of the way stars were controlled like puppets during the “golden age” of Hollywood.

But, mostly, it’s a chance for the Coens to indulge in their love of golden age filmmaking. These sequences work, for the most part, particularly a musical number starring Channing Tatum and a crew of sailors who bemoan the lack of “dames” they’ll encounter on the sea.

The scene serves no narrative purpose, which is OK, because it temporarily elevates the mess around it. Tatum makes a convincing case for more screen time with a performance that is earnest and winking in just the right proportions. He’s a subtle physical comedian who should thrive when a feature-length musical comes calling. (He was recently cast in a musical comedy with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)

If only the Coens had brought that sly brand of hat-tipping satire to the rest of the film, which seems to exist mostly to let them play “1950s big-budget studio directors” for a little under two hours. The money’s there, to be sure, in the big sets, bright costumes and pinwheel of stars (Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Jonah Hill make brief appearances) deployed as bit players. The problem is that the Coens have more enthusiasm for scale than for ideas. You can’t help but wonder if they’re making the film for us or for them.

Many Coen brothers’ films have a searching quality to them. The characters look for inspiration, criminals, redemption, money. The films look for the gaps between who we want to be and who we are.

“Hail, Caesar!” searches for a way to make its characters and set pieces work in the same direction. The search never ends.

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