Hail, Caesar! mainly takes place in the span of just over a day in the life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin). Mannix works as a “fixer” for Capitol Pictures, a major Hollywood studio in the 1950s. We follow Mannix as he deals with one problem after another, making sure that the studio, its films, and its stars keep on the right track. That day, he is also considering a potentially lucrative job offer from outside the industry. But before he can to that, he must first figure out what happened Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the star of an overblown, big budget biblical epic.
Hail, Caesar! doesn’t have much of a distinct throughline. It’s more of a collection of sketches than it is a complete story, the movie treating the audience to an absurd yet weirdly grounded tour of old Hollywood. It is very loosely structured, the movie more than happy to linger in a bit of strangeness that does little to push the meager plot forward. But the movie delivers plenty of wacky old Hollywood fun, its scenes putting forward a world that matches the craziness of the movies within.
There are plenty of ideas that could be picked out of the film. It is probably significant that Mannix is portrayed as a religious person, and that the very nature of his work forces him to reckon with his belief. It is probably no coincidence the movie within the movie that shares the title is about meeting the Christ. But this all feels secondary to the film’s more basic impulses. It mostly becomes a delivery system for pastiche, for stilted imitations of films from the era. Within the film’s runtime, it stages a water ballet, an overwrought melodrama, Western stunts, and a full-scale musical dance number.
It’s pretty funny stuff, and it’s all pulled with the kind of craft that one expects from the Coen brothers. Their parodies of old Hollywood films aren’t entirely accurate, but they still clearly put a lot of work into it. Some of the jokes are a little on the nose, such as the homoerotic undertones of the film’s central musical sequences. But for the most part, the film just keeps chugging along, bouncing from one absurd piece of Hollywood nostalgia to the next. There are several scenes here that could go down as some of the funniest that the brothers have ever put together.
The cast is just astounding. The film features some of the biggest names working today, many of them in small roles. Josh Brolin is magnetic as Eddie Mannix, the character’s conflicting feelings about his work always visible on the actor’s face. George Clooney is having a lot of fun plating a Hollywood buffoon. Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, and a whole bunch of others give this film an embarrassment of riches on the character side. But the standout might be Alden Ehrenreich, playing the Kirby Grant singing-cowboy archetype. In a cast of bright stars, the young man still manages to stand out.
Hail, Caesar! likely won’t go down as one of the Coen brothers’ best films. It’s just a little too loose, its themes unable to penetrate the air of pastiche. But it’s also still a whole lot of fun. This is a screwball caper that punctures the glamour of old Hollywood, that revels in the tendency of humans to be really silly and stupid, even amidst the pretensions of art and ideology. The movie may be more of a collection of sketches than a story, but those sketches happen to be really funny.
My Rating:
