Movie Review: Hail, Caesar!
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
The Coen brothers first started publicly discussing their idea for Hail, Caesar! over a decade ago, but the resulting film feels jauntily tossed together in a fraction of that time. In some ways that’s a good thing. The film has a loose comic energy that allows it to slip easily from lengthy sketches to plottier sequences. But it’s also lacking in coherence. The Coens seem unsure if they’re making a 
statement about old Hollywood or just riffing on it, and audiences will likely become confused as to whether the brothers’ treatment of classic cinema is delivered laughingly or lovingly.
The 1950s-set film follows Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a movie studio “fixer” whose already hectic existence is burdened by the disappearance of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the bumbling star of a Biblical epic called Hail, Caesar! Baird, it turns out, has been kidnapped by Communists, whose plans for him are a bit different from your typical ransom scheme. However, that situation is only the biggest of many thorns in Mannix’s side. He’s also juggling the tense relationship between a preening director (Ralph Fiennes) who’s been handed a doltish cowboy (Alden Ehrenreich) as his new star, a foul-mouthed actress (Scarlett Johansson) with an unexpected pregnancy, and twin gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton) threatening to reveal dirt on just about all of Mannix’s charges. With a lucrative job offer from Lockheed Martin in the offing, Mannix starts to question whether all the stress of showbiz is really worth it.
This ensemble of kind-hearted sufferers, preening aristocrats, self-absorbed intellectuals and buffoons aplenty is pure Coens, and the brothers trip through the interweaving stories with glee. Several sequences are well executed and transcendently comic, like the old-fashioned musical number that introduces Channing Tatum’s character or a lengthy sketch in which an increasingly exasperated Fiennes attempts to teach Ehrenreich how to enunciate a line. The cast is pitch-perfect across the board, particularly Brolin’s infinitely capable Mannix. And let’s hope that Ehrenreich, who has been consistently excellent in small roles and forgotten films over the past few years, will finally get the career boost he deserves for his hilarious portrayal of the good-natured but empty-headed Hobie Doyle.
The cast is a true embarrassment of riches, and the actors apply themselves wholeheartedly to the material – even a number of scenes that fall truly flat. That’s not because those scenes are bad; it’s just that many of them don’t feel like they all fit in the same movie. There’s a nice, cynical edge to a scene in which Mannix sits down to run the religious elements of Hail, Caesar! (the movie within the movie, not the movie itself) past a group of squabbling spiritual leaders. It works as a comment on the politics of the time (and our politics today, for that matter). But it doesn’t gel with the film’s often juvenile spoofing of old cinema. The aforementioned dance number is delightful and feels like a gently humorous tribute to classic musicals…until Channing Tatum winds up with his face between a man’s buttocks in a dopey gay-panic joke. And the film’s attempts to address the Red Scare veer from clever zingers to total absurdism, never arriving at anything like a complete statement.
The Coens are good at a lot of things: period pieces, black-comic philosophical commentary, ludicrous flights of fancy, and over-the-top humor. Here they throw a little bit of everything at the screen, but a lot of it doesn’t really stick. The brothers seem to be just messing around here, which is still better than many filmmakers doing their absolute best, and as such Hail, Caesar! is an above-average film. But it’s still not a very good one.
Patrick Dunn
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