HAIL CLOONEY!
George dons a toga to poke fun at Hollywood’s heyday — and he’s hilarious
THE Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, by all accounts told their friend George Clooney years ago that they wanted to write a film called Hail, Caesar! poking fun at Hollywood’s golden age.
He’s been nagging them to make it ever since, and now, gloriously, they have. Clooney gets the title role, too, as none-too-bright Fifties matinee idol Baird Whitlock, who togas up for the movie-within-themovie, a swords-and-sandals epic called, you’ve guessed, Hail, Caesar!
The Coens have always known how to help Clooney release his inner idiot. He was a memorable i mbecile i n their 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and as Baird he’s similarly dim-witted, making him the perfect victim of an almost-bungled kidnapping.
If the film has a pivotal scene, the HOWEVER, Baird Whitlock kidnapping is probably it.
for those who prefer a story with a beginning, middle and end, or in screen-writing terms a bit of rigidi ty i n the narrative arc, Hail, Caesar! might c o me as a disappointment.
Indeed, there barely is a narrative arc, the Coens instead delivering what amounts to a series of pastiches, parodies and sketches.
Busby Berkeley spectaculars and Anchors Aweigh-style musicals are lampooned beautifully, the latter with Channing Tatum playing a Gene Kelly type, leading a distinctly homoerotic sailors’ dance routine in a bar.
‘We’ll see a lot of fish, but we won’t clock a dish,’ he croons, in a song called No Dames, about the regrettable dearth of women at sea.
There are three or four scenes in this film that are worth the price of admission alone, and that’s one of them. Another comes courtesy of Ralph Fiennes, once again reminding us (as he did in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and more recently A Bigger Splash) that heavyweight dramatic actors sometimes make the best light comedians.
He’s priceless as a prissy English director, painstakingly trying to get another intellectually challenged star, singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), to enunciate
his lines properly in a drawing-room comedy of manners, a film for which, apart from his immense box-office appeal, he is ridiculously ill-suited.
The Coens and their excellent cast have huge hammy fun with all this, and also target much that went on off-camera in Fifties Hollywood, such as the e vindictive gossip-mongering of collumnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons (represented here as feuding twins by Tilda Swinton,) and the McCarthyite paranoia about Soviet-led Communist plots (with which the Coens deal by showing, hilariously, that there was plenty to be paranoid about).
There's also a fleeting but lovely turn by Scarlett Johansson. She plays the brattish DeAnna Moran, an actress manifestly based, in terms of image if not brattishness on MGM's watery star Esther Wil- liams. Weaving together all these disparate strands is the film’s core character, Eddie Mannix ( Josh Brolin). Mannix really existed; he was MGM’s celebrated fix er, responsible for covering up any number of potential scandals involving Hollywood stars, from drinkdriving accidents to homosexual relationships.
He was also energetic ally promiscuous, although Brolin’s version is racked with painful Catholic guilt only for keeping his cigarette habit from his wife.
Hail, Caesar! really just chronicles a standard day in Eddie’s life: managing problems as varied as Baird’s disappearance and DeAnna’s illegitimate pregnancy, while frantically trying to keep the gossip columnists at bay.
In some ways the film is a compan- ion piece to the Coens’ 1991 picture Barton Fink, which shone an unforgiving light on old Hollywood’s treatment of screenwriters. But it’s infinitely more playful and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.
So is London Has Fallen, only it’s not meant to be.
The last time we encountered beefy U.S. secret service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), he was saving the White House, and in particular President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), from North Korean terrorists in 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen.
This time, he’s in London, detailed to protect President Asher during a funeral for the British Prime Minister, who — look out, David Cameron — has mysteriously expired in his late 40s.
The event poses a security nightmare, with 40 heads of state descending on St Paul’s Cathedral and scarcely any time to plan their protection. Worse still, militant Islamic terrorists have somehow infiltrated the Metropolitan Police and Household Cavalry i n massive numbers.
They launch a devastating attack in which multiple heads of state are killed, though only by way of collateral damage, since the primary target is, of course, noble President Asher.
It’ s hard to overstate how preposterous all this is.
London might have fallen, but not as low as Morgan Freeman, who signed up to this rubbish. He plays the US Vice-President, safely back in the White House watching a U.S. news broadcast stating solemnly that the attack ‘has decimated most of the known landmarks in the British capital’.
SURE enough, St Paul’s, Buckingham Palace, Chelsea Bridge and several double- decker buses all cop it, in a series of CGI explosions of varying technical quality.
So does Westminster Abbey, which is a terrible shame for Italian Prime Minister Antonio Gusto, who (being Italian) has decided to skip the funeral for a spot of rooftop canoodling with his mistress.
The evil mastermind is sinister arms-dealer Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul), plotting dreadful vengeance for a drone attack on his daughter’s wedding in Pakistan. But he’s not half as guilty in this enterprise, directed by Babak Najafi, as screenwriters Creighton Rothenburger, Katrin Benedikt, Christian Gudegast and Chad St John, who all deserve to be named and shamed. I could just about forgive them the way Banning knows London’s back doubles as if he spent four years away from his military training studying the Knowledge. But making the Met’s head of counter-terrorism (Colin Salmon) a chief inspector, which (being foreign) t hey obviously thought sounded like the highest imaginable rank, is unforgivably slapdash. Moreover, he’s Chief Inspector Hazard. I couldn’t have laughed more if they’d made him Corner of the Yard.