FEBRUARY 9, 2016
In the 1991 film “Barton Fink,” filmmakers Joel & Ethan Coen created the colorful world of Capitol Pictures, a fictional movie studio where dreams were made and sometimes dashed. That 1940s-set black comedy followed a young New York City playwright who is lured out to Hollywood to write screenplays at Capitol Pictures, and while the young writer is ready to celebrate Hollywood on his arrival, his experiences there lead him to torch the town.
25 years later, the Coen Brothers have returned to Capitol with the same wit and same bite but with a new protagonist. He’s Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin in one of his best performances), who is Capitol’s “fixer,” cleaning up potential scandals by the studio’s misbehaving stars. It’s the early 1950s, and with the studio feeling increasing pressure from the emergence of television, Mannix has his hands full keeping these scandals away from the prying eyes of rival twin gossip columnists (and don’t you dare call them that!) Thora and Thessily Thacker (both played by Tilda Swinton because…well, she’s Tilda Swinton).
Because his boss, the never-seen Mr. Schenk, is East-Coast based, Mannix also the de facto head of production, and Capitol is cranking out movie after movie in an effort to keep up.
The studio is about to release its latest western, “Lazy Ol’ Moon,” starring its singing-cowboy sensation Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich, who’s sensational), but Mannix has a problem. “Merrily We Dance,” a sophisticated drawing-room comedy, directed by effete Brit Laurence Laurentz (a hilarious Ralph Fiennes), is about to start shooting, and all of the studio’s urbane leading men happen to be drying out in clinics. So they decide to put Hobie in the part. Hobie and dialogue are not very well acquainted, so putting him in a tux, spouting Noel Coward-esque lines in a cowboy twang, could be a disaster. It is.
Then there’s the latest aquatic spectacle from the studio’s Esther Williams-like star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), who has the face of an angel and the accent of a truck driver. She’s also single and just a little bit pregnant, so Mannix has to come up with a complicated plan by which she secretly has her baby but then publicly “adopts” it. (This is modeled on what really happened to actress Loretta Young in the 1930s.)
Shooting on a nearby stage is Capitol’s big musical “No Dames!” starring Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), a Gene Kelly-type singer/dancer who leads a group of lovesick sailors on shore-leave in a tap-dancing extravaganza, whose dance moves get gayer and gayer as the number goes on. The Coens give us the entire dance number, and it’s absolutely wonderful, especially Tatum, whose dancing is reliably terrific but who also displays a good set of singing pipes. (Get this man a real musical now!)
However, the studio’s pride and joy is the Biblical spectacle “Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ” (a title that, if you think about it, makes absolutely no sense). Nonetheless, it stars one of Hollywood’s great leading men, the dashingly handsome Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who’s also an absolute lunkhead. Baird is slipped a mickey and abducted, waking up in a Malibu beach house, surrounded by a cabal of Communist screenwriters, eager to convert the movie star to their cause.
Got all of that? Yes, there’s a lot going on in “Hail, Caesar!” as you might have guessed from the film’s dazzling trailer that’s been playing for months. All of those funny, enchanting moments are here, but you have to slog through a lot to get to them.
The Communist writers’ scenes are eye-rollingly dull at times, and though the struggle between the state and the proletariat can be applied to the studio system, its arguments seem tangential to what we came to see. (When the Communists show up, it’s a good time to go out for popcorn.)
Better, however, is the film’s overlay of religion, or more specifically, faith. Mannix is a devout Roman Catholic, and I mean going-to-confession-every-day devout. (Even the priests tell him it’s too much.) He is obsessed with doing the right thing in his job, even insisting on consulting with the clergy on the accuracy of Christ’s depiction in “Hail, Caesar!” In one of the film’s best scenes, he collects a Catholic priest, a minister, a rabbi, and a Greek Orthodox priest for religious guidance on the film, and all they want to give him are studio notes. The Orthodox priest found the scene where a soldier jumps from one moving chariot to another…well, he just doesn’t buy it.
As Mannix grapples with a safe comfy defense job offer from Lockheed, he begins to question where his real faith lies — is it in the Church or is it in the studio?
“Hail, Caesar!” has been dismissed by some critics as a trifle, but, for better or worse, it does have a lot on its mind. Not all of the parts come together. Oh, but what dazzling parts they are!
GRADE: B
