Movie Review : Hail, Caesar! (2016)
To claim that America has a complicated relationship to celebrity and more precisely Hollywood would be an understatement. Film actors and actresses are the closest thing contemporary culture has to a pantheon of Gods. They live their lives according to different rules than us and never seem to age. The folklore of Hollywood has been cultivated over a century of moviemaking and in Hail, Caesar!, Ethan and Joel Coen decided to tribute to this weird, important an oddly unspoken part of our culture.
Hail, Caesar! is set in mid-century Hollywood and tells the story of a fixer named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a shadowy, mythical character in charge of keeping the studio's talent in line and productions under budget. When the star of his big Christian production Baird Whitlock (a George Clooney who looked born to play a mid-century film actor) is inexplicably kidnapped on set, he has to navigate the underworld of a rapidly changing post-war society in order to make things work.
The Self-Defeating Cycle of History
When they're not busy making iconic films, Ethan and Joel Coen loved to work on slightly impenetrable passion projects that may or may not involve religion. It's kind of hard to pinpoint where Hail, Caesar! stands on this spectrum because it has characteristics of both. It feels like they've tried their hardest to make the best, most entertaining possible film about something only they care about, which is something I respect the hell out of. Because I think Hail, Caesar! is a film that questions representation.
In good Coen brother fashion, it works on several levels. On the most superficial level (and arguably the most fun), it questions the representation of God in movies through the special meeting Eddie Mannix organized with the different religious leaders because he wanted to know if his representation of Jesus was respectful or not. The fact that he can't get a clear answer from different factions that are supposed to believe the same thing is not only hilarious, but it also underlines the uselessness of the endeavor.
Because if Hail, Caesar! looks originally like a period piece, the longer you stick with it, the deeper it breaks from its original premise and enters an intellectual argument about economics, breaks into a musical number at some point, toys with stereotypical Hollywood myths and straight out turns into a spy comedy near the end. They’re fucking with you. They're consistently reminding you that they’re in control and that you're not watching history. You're watching a very, VERY loose interpretation of it.
What is the point of all this? There's the whole love-letter-to-Hollywood aspect of it, sure. But there's more to it. Such a mocking and personal view of the past does not necessarily embrace the fucking past. I'd say Hail, Caesar! is more in the territory of fascination and obsession than it is in the territory of love. Two brothers who have been in the game of representation their whole adults lives are entitled to become obsessed with how it evolved even if no one else is interested in how the illusion works.
I guess that’s why Hail, Caesar! is a little uncomfortable to watch? It keeps breaking down when you expect it to build up.
So what is it? Good Coen brothers or Weird Coen brothers?
I'd say Hail, Caesar! is in the good, memorable Coen brothers movies column even if it feels a little ideologically charged. The spy thriller aspect of the movie almost comes to a halt when it hits a more intellectual patch and you kind of have to love and understand the Coen brothers already to let them get away with such a lackadaisical approach to their own storytelling. You kind of have to want the film to have these surreal conversations going in, otherwise they will frustrate you.
But that's something about Ethan and Joel Coen's work that you have to respect. The dedication to their craft and their supreme confidence in their own wit. Their movies have an aesthetic and philosophical identity that few other creators can boast to have and Hail, Caesar! has all the qualities of the best of them: dry wit, subversion of stereotypes, this particular visual tone, etc. It gets a little idiosyncratic at times, but we're nowhere near A Serious Man territory. There's joy in there.
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Hail, Caesar! was probably meant to be watched on a big screen. I'm sure it makes a lot more sense given the focus on the mid-century epics. Otherwise it's a film that is brimming with interesting ideas that don't quite reach the soaring heighs a No Country for Old Men or a Burn After Reading did. It's too scattered. Too iconoclast. I don't think it should be a part of the Coen brothers' canon, but it should definitely be one of the first stops for completists.
