Hail, Hollywood!
The Coen brothers’ latest is part homage, part critique of 50s moviemaking
Funny but not that funny, smart and striving to be awfully smart, Hail, Caesar! belongs to the middleweight rank of the Coen brothers’ catalogue. It’s a movie about movie love, and about the woes of making movies, or at least studio movies, the constant pain of working in that carnivorous system in which its members nibble on one another, and in which the faceless bosses are taking the biggest bite. You can tell from the poster that this is a tribute to the old Hollywood of 1950s, but since this is a Coens’ movie, it sprawls into satire, slapstick, musical numbers, and religious mockery, with a darker undercurrent of the post-war ideological theatre played out in the Californian backlot.
At the centre is a kidnapping story, which isn’t as thrilling as it may sound. George Clooney — playing what looks like a mad mix of Richard Burton and Tony Curtis — is Baird Whitlock, a slightly dumb superstar actor working for the fictitious Capitol Studios. He’s shooting a period epic in which he plays a red-caped Roman general who finds his faith at the sight of Jesus’ crucifixion. On the set, someone drugs Whitlock and hauls him into a truck, and he wakes up at a glass-fronted beach house among a group of stern-faced intellectuals who’re discussing economics, division of labour and the vice of capitalism, especially how the movie business suppresses the workers. One of them even looks like Karl Marx, so we know that this sexy Malibu villa isn’t as innocent as it seems.
But the Whitlock kidnapping feels like a sidebar. Hail, Caesar!, with its balancing act of parody and homage, is really about Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the industrious head of production at Capitol Pictures and an allround troubleshooter whose job is to ensure the smoothest operation of his boss’s movie empire. Mannix rushes around different studios trying to solve problems even before they become problems, including his dealings with the pregnancy of the tough-talking actress DeeAnna Moran (played by Scarlett Johansson, clearly modelled after Esther Williams). There are also the glitches of a young Western actor Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) wrongly cast in a costume drama directed by the posh Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). And then Tilda Swinton turns up, twice, playing flamboyant-dressed twin gossip reporters looking for saucy scoops.
The Coen brothers played Hollywood before in their cynical satire Barton Fink, back in 1991, in which the dream factory becomes an irredeemable nightmare for artists. They haven’t gone soft here; instead, I think they’re able to laugh with the system that they may not entirely like though it’s the only system available at the moment, just like capitalism. Actually it’s more than that: Hail, Caesar!, for all its kvetching that the Coens love and that one may share their giggling, is at heart a sentimental ode to vintage Hollywood. We see here two MGM-style dance sequences (Capitol Studios is clearly modelled after MGM), one featuring a blooming squad of aquatic gymnasts, shot from above; and the other showcases Channing Tatum (playing something of a Gene Kelly) as a footloose seaman in a barroom escapade. Only those who have passion for old films can craft these two scenes with such loving details, right down to the way they are edited.
So naturally, Hail, Caesar! was shot on 35mm film (not digital) by Roger Deakins. The scene when Mannix, the fixer, visits a film editor (Frances McDormand in a winning cameo) as she’s working on her flatbed — a primordial hand-operated editing machine that no longer exists in our digital age — serves no narrative purpose but says everything about what the filmmakers are doing here: how film was made in those days. Wearing his worry like a badge of honour, Mannix is our guide into the bowels of the studio machinery, a factory of image and fame, and even if it is a prime example of capitalistic exploitation, like the kidnappers believe, where artists and writers are subjected under the whims of studio bosses, Mannix — and perhaps the Coens — embraces that with a grudging, knowing smile.