More grins than laughs in showbiz satire
With any sort of comedy set in Old Hollywood, the characters’ names become weirdly important because, well … they just are. In “Hail, Caesar!” there’s a smooth British director by the name of Laurence Laurentz, whose trademark billing is “Laurence Laurentz Presents.” The studio head, mentioned but not seen, is a Mr. Nick Skank (think Joseph Schenck, a real-life mogul). Dueling Hedda Hopperbrand gossip columnists, who happen to be identical twin sisters, go by Thora Tacker and Thessaly Tacker.
These details, like the perfect, vaguely threatening hats those last two wear, kept me smiling through much of “Hail, Caesar!” But it isn’t a laffer, in the parlance of Daily Variety. It’s a grinner at best, and the jokes are surprisingly meager. When Joel and Ethan Coen adapt their sensibilities to accommodate a broader comic style, as in “Burn After Reading” or “The Ladykillers,” the results become forced, and slightly off. That’s the case here. Still, there are compensations.
Set in 1951, the Coens’ latest takes a wryly sinister look at the Dream Factory as a blithely Commieinfested industry, where the struggle between capital and labor resumes with every dawn. The movie’s motor is a real person, fancifully and sentimentally fictionalized by the Coens’ script. Real-life MGM mogul and legendary “fixer,” Eddie Mannix, has been played in the movies before (notably by Bob Hoskins, in the underrated “Hollywoodland”). For the Coens’ purposes Mannix, nicely handled by Josh Brolin, is a bulldog in a fedora, always on the move. He’s the one keeping
Scarlett Johansson plays an Esther Williams-like aqua-star.
the studio’s unruly and/or insufferable commodities in line through arm-twisting, blackmail, strong-arm tactics, gentle persuasion and coolheaded negotiation.
So it’s Brolin’s show, mostly, even though many in the audience would’ve preferred an Old Hollywood comedy with a little more Scarlett Johansson (she has a couple of scenes as an Esther Williams aqua-star, dealing with an
inconvenient pregnancy), or a different sort of George Clooney clowning (he’s the mugging, fatuous swordand-sandal marquee attraction, Baird Whitlock, speaking of excellent character names, who gets kidnapped by a mysterious cabal declaring itself “The Future”). The Coens have rarely if ever given “the people” what the people think they want. They make their own kinds of movies, and often their
MPAA rating:
Running time: movies contain many different movies within one movie.
“Hail, Caesar!” takes that to the limit. It contains more genre parodies than an old Sid Caesar show. The Coens devote many of their 100 minutes to scenes being filmed or screened from various (fictional) Capitol Pictures (fictional) attractions. Channing Tatum plays the studio’s resident Gene Kelly, or thereabouts, performing a sailors-on-leave tap number titled “No Dames.” (His character has other purposes in the plot as well.) Alden Ehrenreich is the Gene Autry-style singing cowboy struggling with the verbiage in a stuffy Somerset Maugham-ish drawing room property, a “Laurence Laurentz Presents” production. “Hail, Caesar!” is the name of the “tale of the Christ,” in the “Quo Vadis”/ “Ben-Hur” vein, starring the Clooney fathead. These characters and subplots combine inside the kidnapping plot, involving Whitlock and a deeply disgruntled collection of screenwriters determined to strike back at the forces of capitalism.
The tone of “Hail, Caesar!” is even and assured, yet the comic inspiration is sporadic. Something’s missing; the momentum sputters; for every spot-on turn (Ralph Fiennes as Laurentz, perfection; Tilda Swinton as the fearsome columnists, ditto) you have a Channing Tatum merely guessing at the style required to bring this stuff off properly.
The script makes much of Mannix’s soul-searching; he’s entertaining a job offer from Lockheed, where he can make some serious money. But it’s dirty money; it’s weapons and warcraft money. “Hail, Caesar!” sees Mannix as a practical warrior in his chosen field, and if the real Mannix was a great deal more troubling and flawed a character (there’s plenty on the historical record), well, the Coens don’t owe us a factual treatment of Mannix, simply an interesting one. This one’s more of a conduit than a fully realized engine.
The film this one evokes within the Coens’ career, “Barton Fink,” was a much stranger and more idiosyncratic achievement, though in its Hollywood studio sequences, dominated by Michael Lerner and Tony Shalhoub, the pacing was breathless and priceless and really, really funny. “Hail, Caesar!” is more of a mild satiric stroll through familiar territory. In Mannix it’s possible to read a kind of idealized self-portrait of the Coens themselves, who are the ultimate Hollywood insider/outsiders, making big hits (“True Grit”) and wormy, crabby, more interesting work (“Inside Llewyn Davis”).
There’s also a slightly wearying air to the genre parodies, though I did love the director’s on-set coaching of Whitlock, gazing upon the Son of God: “Squint! Squint at the grandeur!” I may be paraphrasing but that’s my favorite line in the picture; it has the throwaway quality of Kaufman and Hart’s 1930 birth-of-the-talkies stage comedy “Once in a Lifetime.” What the Hollywood studio mogul declared, proudly, in that play, rings through the ages. “That’s the way we do things out here,” he said. “No time wasted on thinking!”