Watch Hail, Caesar! for a break from La La Land
When the 2017 Academy Award nominations were announced last week, the one real pang I felt was over the fact that Joel and Ethan Coen’s wonderful period movie Hail, Caesar! had been locked out of the major categories.
Like La La Land, which racked up a record 14 nominations, Hail, Caesar! is a look at the pleasures and perils of working in the movie business. With that kind of hardware at stake, La La Land has its skeptics, especially among those who see it as another celebration of Hollywood’s own power that might shut out movies with more challenging social messages, such as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight.
If that’s your objection to La La Land, I can’t recommend Hail, Caesar! highly enough: It’s a movie that bites gently but persistently at the heels of the industry it depicts.
If La La Land embraces the entertainment industry, it’s not an unambiguous endorsement. Aspiring actress Mia ( Emma Stone) spends a lot of the movie shlepping from audition to audition for roles that are patently ridiculous and humiliating, including on a show that’s described as “Dangerous Minds meets The O.C.”
People who lean into this inanity, including a screenwriter Mia’s friends try to set her up with who is working on a script for a project that is “Goldilocks and the Three Bears from the perspective of the bears,” are rewarded. The people who cast these absurd projects are fundamentally indifferent, checking their phones while Mia acts her heart out and dismissing her after a line or two.
When Mia finally does land an audition for the kind of movie she always dreamed of doing, a project where the lead actress is to have a vital role in the creative process, and where story rather than concept is what matters, it’s more a matter of luck that proof that the system as a whole functions properly. The right person happens to come to her one- woman show, and that person happens to reach her ex- boyfriend Sebastian ( Ryan Gosling), who happens to be able to talk Mia into coming back to Los Angeles for the audition.
La La Land may be a validation of Mia’s persistence, or of the people who are developing a project that made her a star. But her ultimate success doesn’t retroactively validate all the idiocy that lay in her path along the way, just as the movies that are nominated for Oscars don’t automatically make the Transformers franchise a major contribution to cinema.
Hail, Caesar! is also a story about someone who has the option to leave the movie industry but decides to stay because he believes the products it makes are important and worth the irritation and long hours his job causes him. In a single day, Eddie Mannix ( Josh Brolin) has to deal with a pregnant, unwed starlet (Scarlett Johansson); a star of Westerns ( Alden Ehrenreich) who is making a rocky transition to a drawing- room drama helmed by a temperamental director (Ralph Fiennes); twin gossip columnists ( both played by Tilda Swinton); a theological dispute over the depiction of Jesus; the kidnapping of one of his biggest movie stars (George Clooney) by a group of communist writers; and the defection to the Soviet Union by another matinee idol ( Channing Tatum). A job in the aerospace industry would mean more money and shorter hours, but Mannix ultimately sticks with his movie studio.
Where Hail, Caesar! differs from La La Land, though, is in its focus on the compromises and cynicism that are required to produce even the most idealistic movie.
In La La Land, when Mia finally gets the audition that makes her career, all of the irritation san dun professionalism that dogged her previous efforts to break into the industry fall away. In Hail, Caesar! chaos and tough choices are essential to making even the movies with the highest aspirations and most noble social goals.
Want to tell a story about the life of Jesus? You’ve got to assemble a group of theologians and argue that “this swell figure from the East” will be seen “only fleetingly and with extreme taste.” Want to make a gorgeous aquatic ballet? You have to make sure your star can still fit into her fish tail, and also maybe find a way for her to adopt her own child, because actors are human, and therefore messy.
Hail, Caesar! is no less loving about the movie business than La La Land is; in fact, Hail, Caesar! is even more committed to its classic-Hollywood montages than La La Land is. But unlike La La Land, there’s never a moment in Hail, Caesar! where the business aspects of the moviemaking process go away. The romance never obliterates the work it takes to sustain these glorious illusions, or the fact that someone has to bring these projects in on time and reasonably on budget while managing all the interpersonal hassles that eventually emerge. And dumb movies where fat ranchers toss themselves in water troughs help pay for the magnificent religious epics.