With 1994's Hail Caesar, Anthony Michael Hall Struck out as a Leading Man, First-Time Director AND, God Help Us, Rock and Roller
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Anthony Michael Hall enjoyed tremendous success as a baby-faced teenager. His filmography is chockablock with Reagan-era hits and cult classics, including 1983’s Vacation, 1984’s Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club and Weird Science, both of which were released in 1985.
1985 was the same year the seventeen year old joined his buddy Robert Downey Jr. as a Not Ready for Primetime Player on perhaps the single most disastrous season of Saturday Night Live.
Hall scored a string of iconic hits playing soulful, ingratiatingly awkward geeks trying to navigate the emotional landmines of adolescence. Then Hall had a growth spurt that cost him the lucrative image he’d developed as a teenager in the John Hughes factory.
Seemingly overnight Hall went from playing the kind of adorable little nerd who get bullied by jocks to playing jocks who bully nerds, most notably in 1990’s Edward Scissorhands.
Hall would eventually appear in a series of noteworthy films such as 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation, 2001’s The Caveman’s Valentine and Freddy Got Fingered, 2008’s The Dark Night and 2014’s Foxcatcher.
But before Hall embraced his destiny as a character actor/supporting player he first struck out with a series of vehicles: 1990’s A Gnome Named Gnorm, 1992’s Into the Sun, which I had never actually heard of before but will have to cover for my book The Fractured Mirror, because Hall plays a movie star preparing for his next part in it and finally 1994’s Hail Caesar.
With Hail Caesar Hall fails in multiple capacities. He’s charmless and dull in the thankless lead role of aspiring rock and roller Julius Caesar McGruder but he also directs forgettably AND for good measure, wrote and performs most of the regrettable ditties on the subpar soundtrack.
Hail Caesar gave its star a chance to prove that he could do everything. Hall unfortunately illustrated that he could do everything badly but to give him credit, it’s not as if Robert Mittenthal gives him anything to work with.
Mittenthal has written a uniquely witless and unsatisfying script full of characters and developments that make no sense and ring utterly false. The protagonist is a dumbass college dropout who devotes most of his energy to trying to make his awful band happen in spite of God’s will and the wishes of the universe who is inexplicably dating Buffer (Bobbie Phillips), who seems to be going out with him solely because she knows that seeing an under-achieving schmuck will piss off her rich asshole Republican dad Bidwell (Nicholas Pryor). There’s nothing to Bidwell beyond hatred for non-Conservatives. That’s a political orientation, not a characterization.
It’s never particularly clear why a preppie, misanthropic snob like Buffer would be interested in a nobody like Julius though it is apparent why Bidwell hates his daughter’s new beau. The apoplectic old snob hates Julius so much that he offers him one hundred thousand dollars to stop dating his daughter.
Julius is offended. The two haggle and eventually make a wager to determine the future of Julius and Buffer’s relationship. If Julius can come up with one hundred thousand dollars in six months then he can continue seeing a cold, deeply unpleasant aristocrat who clearly despises him. But if he can’t come up with the moolah then Julius has to stop dating Bidwell’s daughter.
Disagree!
This makes no sense. Why would a man want to pay dearly to be in a relationship with an awful woman who despises him? For that matter, why would both parties agree to such a nonsensical bet, with Buffer inexplicably also aggressively cosigning an agreement that reduces her to being the property/potential property of awful men?
In keeping with the script’s violent contempt for logic and plausibility, Julius then agrees to a low-paying job in Bidwell’s rubber eraser company. He’s given an entry-level job at a wage so low he would only be able to raise the 100,000 dollars in a matter of years rather than months but quickly rises up the corporate ladder when a manager played by Frank Gorshin is murdered to cover up corporate malfeasance.
For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, a LOT of Hail Caesar’s impossibly bloated ninety-seven minute runtime is devoted to a subplot involving corruption and embezzlement at the pencil eraser company.
This subplot feels like a variation on the diamond smuggling subplots that inexplicably littered 1980s and 1990s comedies that most assuredly did not need them, most egregiously the infamous Anne Rice adaptation Exit to Eden, which was mostly about sex and BDSM and transgression but also criminals stealing precious stones.
Though he seems for all the world like a complete dumbass, Julius isn’t quite as dumb as he looks and does a surprisingly solid job in middle management. He subsequently finds himself torn between chasing money and success by pursuing a rich man’s daughter and moving up in the world of pencil erasers or pursuing his dream of becoming a rock star alongside his two bandmates, one of whom is a woman solely so that our hero can climactically choose her over Buffer even though they have no chemistry and nothing in the film up to that point suggests a simmering attraction or any attraction whatsoever.
The screenplay for Hail Caesar is perfectly balanced in that everything in it is equally uninteresting. The film’s various threads are locked in a death match to determine which can be the biggest of time and space.
Will it be the scenes devoted to white collar misdeeds in the pencil industry? Or will the scenes involving Julius trying to make enough money to win a useless bet that makes no sense take the prize for pointlessness and incoherence?
Samuel L. Jackson, god bless him, throws his all into the masochistic role of a mailman terrorized by Julius’ big, mean dog. Jackson appeared in Pulp Fiction the year this came out yet he gives his all to cartoonish canine slapstick that, like the rest of the film, never even threatens to be funny.
Did Robert Downey Jr. throw his pal a pity cameo in Hail Caesar? He sure did! Was he high when he filmed it? Probably! Is it clearly ad-libbed? Also yes!
Hail Caesar would like to be Hall’s Billy Madison. Instead it feels like a precursor to Shasta McNasty. In keeping with the Shasta McNasty vibe the movie ends with a full-on musical performance by Hall and his band.
The closing song is not a treat so much as it is a final insult.
Then again, Hail Caesar did give us the transcendently terrible tagline “It’s hard to rock n’ roll when you’re knee-deep in rubber!” So, you know, at least it’s got THAT going for it.
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