The Coen Brothers' 2016 Comedy Hail, Caesar! Is Pure Entertainment
The Coen Brothers are extraordinary, peerless entertainers who have made some of the most beloved, enduring films of the last half century. But they’re also such incorrigible smart-asses that even at their most roaringly fun it can feel like the Oscar-winning duo is making fun of their audiences as well as the very concept of popular entertainment.
This might explain why 2016’s Hail, Caesar! received an abysmal C- Cinemascore from audiences despite being a song and dance filled extravaganza with seemingly everything a mainstream audience could want could want in an old school extravaganza.
Hail Caesar offers an embarrassment of riches, from unforgettable production numbers simultaneously sending up and saluting the Hollywood of yesteryear to riotously funny performances from top stars like George Clooney, Scarlett Johannson, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton and Josh Brolin to an irresistible, star-making turn from newcomer Alden Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy with an irresistible drawl who absolutely burns up the screen.
Yet audiences who gave the movie low marks were not entirely wrong in thinking that the Coen Brothers were making fun of them and their expectations in the sense that Joel and Ethan Coen are making fun of pretty much everything here.
An equal opportunity offender, Hail, Caesar! makes delicious satirical sport of pretentious Communist screenwriters who thought they could help bring about a Marxist utopia by clumsy inserting heavy-handed messages into their scripts and a Red Scare that saw anti-American subversion everywhere and imagined a Soviet invasion looming just over the horizon.
But Hail Caesar also makes fun of musical westerns and Esther Williams-style aquatic musicals, highbrow comedies of manners, patriotism, Catholicism, bloated biblical epics, Carmen Miranda, the studio system, gossip-hunting parasites in the Hedda Hopper/Louella Parsons mold and everything else it touches.
Hail Caesar! is one of the Coen Brothers’ lightweight goofs, which can be easy to under-estimate because not only do they not ask to be taken seriously; they angrily demand not to be taken seriously at all.
Like many of the Coen Brothers’ most inspired goofs, at least the ones that don’t star Jeff Bridges as a White Russian-swilling stoner and amateur detective, Hail Caesar! has a wonderful performance from George Clooney as an ingratiating airhead, a lovable idiot who is easily manipulated by Communist schemers who know just how to play to his enormous ego.
Hail, Caesar! follows Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading as damn near perfect showcases for Oscar-winning smart guy Clooney’s genius for broad physical comedy and inhabiting the skin and easily confused and manipulated minds of the almost impressively idiotic.
Josh Brolin leads an extraordinary ensemble cast as Eddie Mannix, a fictionalized version of a real show-business figure, in this case a “fixer” for MGM who controlled his stars’ personal lives as aggressively as he did their professional careers.
Mannix was a professional problem solver with an Irving Thalberg-like gift for cleaning up messy situations, onscreen and off. In a studio and an industry full of spoiled, overgrown children selfishly pursuing their own pleasure at all costs he’s a ruthlessly self-disciplined grown-up.
The Coen Brothers have a unique understanding of both the genius and the absurdity of a Studio System that treated actors and filmmakers like spoiled children who need to be alternately indulged and punished.
It might seem unseemly for an executive to handle the private lives of his biggest stars but in Hail, Caesar! Mannix does a much better job of handling the romantic liaisons of his galaxy of movie stars than actors who cannot be trusted with anything as important or as tricky as real life.
Hail, Caesar! follows a characteristically eventful stint in Eddie’s life as he puts out fires all over his studio, professional but mostly personal in nature, and fights a heroic battle against Communist infiltration of the movie business.
Unlike the real Mannix, who had a messy, controversial, scandal and mystery-wracked personal life of his own, the reel Mannix is a straight shooter, a devout Catholic, proud patriot and dedicated family man with a near-religious sense of devotion to a job that’s more like a sacred calling.
In Hail, Caesar! there is no such thing as ordinary day on the job. Each morning brings its own set of challenges. When, for example, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), an Esther Williams-style superstar who is all grace and beauty until she opens her mouth to reveal a grating honk of an industrial-strength New York accent, ends up pregnant out of wedlock it falls upon Eddie to either find a husband to provide cover for her little problem or arrange for the oft-divorced actress to adopt her own baby.
Then there’s the aforementioned Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), an effortlessly charismatic, natural born movie star who excels in cowboy roles that lean into his easy charm and hypnotic drawl who finds himself fatally miscast in a highbrow comedy of manners directed by Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), a European auteur who has no idea what to do with his new leading man.
Relative newcomer Ehrenreich steals the film from his more famous and experienced cast-mates. That’s no small feat when playing a preposterously good-looking doofus of a movie star in a Coen Brothers comedy where George Clooney breezily, confidently inhabits a very similar role.
In another bravura comic turn Clooney, plays Baird Whitlock, a pretty boy movie star who is kidnapped by an aggregation of Communist writers who seem inspired by personal grievances against a studio system that holds them in very low regard, as interchangeable cogs in an all-important machine, rather than an authentic sense of solidarity with the working men and women of the world.
The Marx-loving ink-stained wretches who hold the movie star hostage for a one hundred thousand dollar ransom quickly and easily manage to convert the actor to their cause by positing Communism as the answer to all of the world’s problems, creative, economic and otherwise.
For a very stupid man who desperately wants to seem smart, the idea that the foolproof solutions to all of the world’s ills exist and have just been revealed to him is enormously seductive.
Baird is held for ransom and radicalized at the lavish home of song and dance man and die-hard Communist Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum). Like Gene Kelly, Burt proves that it’s possible to sing and dance and remain not just masculine but macho.
Tatum channels On the Town and Anchors Away-era Kelly in “No Dames”, a big production number redolent of the glorious spectacle of MGM’s Freed Unit that finds a pack of sailors lamenting the woman-free hell they’re about to endure for the sake of Uncle Sam in the most hilariously homoerotic manner possible.
Our square-jawed hero is offended by the Communists in his midst for political and moral as well as practical reasons: the studio is Eddie’s church and hyper-efficiency his religion so when Baird disparages the capitalist wet dream that is the studio system he takes it very personally.
Like Quentin Tarantino’s simpatico, similarly entertaining Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Hail Caesar finds filmmakers in total control of the craft letting their fertile imaginations run wild as they recreate Hollywood’s foggy past in their own idiosyncratic image.
The Coen Brothers may be die-hard cynics but Hail, Caesar! nevertheless emerges as a heartfelt valentine to the magic of film and the wonder of storytelling in all its forms.
The Coen Brothers’ movies are so dense and layered that you haven’t really seen one unless you’ve seen it more than once. That holds true of Hail Caesar as well. Its lightness of touch represents a big part of its fizzy, dizzy appeal but true to form it is full of exquisite details and glorious intricacies that it’s impossible to catch everything the first time around.
Hail Caesar! illustrates why it’s not just good to re-watch the Coen Brothers movies; it’s damn near essential, and an absolute joy as well.
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