HAIL, CAESAR! (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen). 106 minutes. Opens Friday (February 5). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Movies like Hail, Caesar! are the reason I will follow Joel and Ethan Coen anywhere. (Well, almost anywhere. I still can’t get behind The Hudsucker Proxy.)
The brothers invariably follow a thoughtful, well-received masterwork with a goofy, chaotic mess-around: Fargo begat The Big Lebowski No Country For Old Men begat Burn After Reading and Inside Llewyn Davis begat Hail, Caesar!, a celebration of studio-era silliness as kinetic and ridiculous as anything they’ve ever done.
Hail, Caesar! spends precisely 28 hours in the company of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the no-nonsense president of production at Capitol Pictures, an MGM-like studio in 1951 Hollywood.
Over the course of these 28 hours, Mannix will have much to contend with – a fussy director (Ralph Fiennes), a miscast cowboy actor (Alden Ehrenreich), a pregnant swimming sensation (Scarlett Johansson) and the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the star of Capitol’s gargantuan Biblical epic Hail, Caesar! A Tale Of The Christ, by a shady group that calls itself The Future – all while keeping a pair of rival gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton playing sisters, because why not?) in the dark.
As you may have guessed, this is not a serious movie. But it’s delightful, both in its details and its giddy excess. The Coens don’t half-ass anything, meticulously recreating half a dozen types of period movies and plunging into them for our entertainment.
Johansson gets the full Esther Williams treatment in a mermaid production number Ehrenreich’s good-natured rube is transplanted from an oater to a stuffed-shirt society drama, and Whitlock’s Biblical epic is a goof on Ben-Hur with painted backdrops, gloriously portentous dialogue and a focus on a peripheral character redeemed by the barely glimpsed Christ.
Also, somehow, there’s Channing Tatum in an absolutely delightful cameo as an acrobatic leading man (clearly patterned after Gene Kelly) who steals the picture with a musical number that riffs on the unspoken homoeroticism beneath crowd-pleasing family hits like Anchors Aweigh and On The Town.
But the Coens being the Coens, they’ve also made sure this film slots neatly into their larger body of work. And it’s not just that Capitol Pictures is the same studio that brought Barton Fink out west in the early 40s. Hail, Caesar! lets the brothers get back to the theological questions at the heart of one of their finest movies, A Serious Man, though from a very different direction.
This time, it’s a studio executive who’s trying to know the mind of God, but only insofar as he can use it to make his costume drama more palatable to the masses. Sure, people have the Bible, Mannix tells the clergy he’s assembled to vet the movie’s script for offence, but they need the pictures to show them what it looked like.
The clergy, it turns out, are more interested in whether the chariot race will seem “fakey.” And that’s the pleasure of watching the Coens work: they aren’t trying to tick every box or satisfy a mass audience. They just do their own thing, making themselves laugh between the big questions, and we can ride along with them if we want to.
