Year: 2016
Director: The Coen Brothers
There are in my mind at least two types of Coen pictures. The ones with tightly wound plots and thrilling suspense. Fargo, No Country, TRrue Grit, Miller’s Crossing. Then there’s the shaggy dog movies, where what passes for a plot ambles along as a peg on which to hang snappy dialogue, goofy characters and exercises in style. Lewbowski, O Brother! Have their mcguffins, but surely it’s the other stuff where the true enjoyment lies.
It’s fair to say that Hail Ceasar belongs in the second, in fact it’s their most extreme baggy movie to date.
Ostensibly it’s a day in the life of Eddie Mannix, studio boss of Capitol Pictures in the late forties/early fifties, as he negotiates the many trials that errant stars, demanding directors and ungrateful writers put him through. In practice the film throws out plots at seemingly random intervals, some of which turn out to be fairly important, others are discarded or resolved abruptly offstage. What perhaps passes for a main plot – the kidnapping of George Clooney’s Kirk Douglas-esque leading man during the filming of a biblical epic, turns out to be a surprisingly mellow experience for George as takes the whole thing in his stride, only discomforted by his sword. Scarlett Johansson’s grumpy leading lady’s secret pregnancy likewise is treated whimsically. Only the halting transformation of Alden Ehrenreich’s chaps-wearing cowboy singer into smooth leading man material is given sufficient airtime to feel like a proper plot. By the time the Russian navy intervenes it’s clear that the story takes firmly second or even ninth place to all the other stuff the Coens want to do.
The joy – and joy there is in regular intervals – lie in a raft of meticulously-crafted homages to the films of the golden age of Hollywood. There are renditions of singing cowboy numbers, South Pacific-style tap and singing musicals, the aforementioned biblical epics, period Broadway frocks and tux romantic dramas, and even the sight of Johansson’s ‘fish ass’ in a Busby Berkeley aquatic number.
As well as a homage to these films, it’s also a homage to the ‘making of the movie movie’, with the studio lot and it’s kooky inhabitants the excuse for a host of cameos from Ralph Fiennes’ luvvie screen director to Tilda Swinton’s gossip columnist and Frances McDormand’s night bird film editor. There’s cracking dialogue almost all the way through, and if there is anything more substantial than the goofballing and pastiche it’s the tortured character of Mannix, confessor and fixer to the stars, who himself rushes to confession. Tempted by a job offer, he has to decide whether to opt for security or the seductive madness of life on the lot.
I loved this. It may not stack up as a terribly coherent story, and it’s not somewhere to go for a coherent and critical take on the commie-fearing Hollywood of the early fifties, but it’s a film in love with films and film-making, even terrible ones.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
A Star Is Born, New York, New York, Sunset Boulevard, The Player – and many of the Hollywood films about Hollywood.
Saw it on Saturday. Thought there were a lot of clever and amusing elements, but the whole was less that the sum of its parts. Most of their movies stand up to a second or third viewing, but I don’t think that’s the case with this one.