Joel and Ethan Coen (2016)

Curzon cinemas and BFI have been showing two different trailers for Hail, Caesar!  The BFI one – centred on an exchange between a movie director (Ralph Fiennes) and his miscast leading man (Alden Ehrenreich) – is especially enjoyable but both the trailers are appetising.  They raise expectations high enough to make the Coen brothers’ latest film, in its entirety, disappointing.  The trailers include several of the best bits in the movie and Ralph Fiennes’s dialogue with Alden Ehrenreich is the best bit of all.  Although you suspect this might be the case when you see the trailer, you nevertheless look forward to the pleasure of Fiennes’s company – and the company of George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and others – over the course of the whole movie.  None of these star turns is given enough to do, though.  As for Jonah Hill and Frances McDormand, they don’t appear much more in the hundred and six minutes of Hail, Caesar! than they do in the trailers.  Leaving the audience wanting more is usually reckoned to be a smart tactic but in this case it’s frustrating.

Hail, Caesar! has, as well as a good title, a nifty strapline – ‘Lights, camera, abduction’.  It’s a return to Hollywood past for the Coens (more than twenty years after Barton Fink) and the latest example of the kidnap plot to which they’ve long been partial (Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc).   The film’s title is also the title of a film-within-the-film.  In 1951, Capitol Pictures are shooting ‘Hail, Caesar!’, a ‘prestige picture’, set in Ancient Rome and Palestine.  Its subtitle is ‘A Tale of the Christ’.  The cast is headed by one of the studio’s most bankable stars, Baird Whitlock (Clooney).   Whitlock is kidnapped by a Communist cell calling themselves ‘The Future’.   The type of movie that ‘Hail, Caesar!’ is, the realisation of a Red Menace, a subplot involving a star of aquamusicals who’s temporarily unmarried and pregnant – these things (and more) make it clear the Coens are visualising the Dream Factory through a pop-retrospective lens.  In other words, their story and characters reflect today’s received ideas about Hollywood preoccupations in the early post-war years.   The pivotal figure in Hail, Caesar!, however, is based on a real person.  The studio’s head of production and chief ‘fixer’ (a large part of his job is putting distance between  Capitol’s big names and scandal) is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin).  The real Eddie Mannix, a one-time bouncer who became a senior executive at MGM, numbered among his achievements (according to Wikipedia), ‘help[ing] Spencer Tracy avoid a jailbait morals rap’ and ‘getting a drunken Clark Gable out of a hit-and-run driving [offence]’.   (Eddie Mannix also featured, as a character supposedly closer to his real self, in Allen Coulter’s 2006 film Hollywoodland.)

Nearly everything to do with the spoof ‘Hail, Caesar!’ is enjoyable:  the vivid-verging-on-tacky colouring of the set decoration and costumes; the rushes; the spot-on dialogue; the straight-faced playing of George Clooney in the main role (Autolycus) and Clancy Brown in a supporting one (Gracchus).  In contrast, the Communist kidnappers are funnier as an idea than in actuality.   Once one of them addresses his pet dog as Engels we know who’s behind the abduction, but it’s the repeatedly even-paced, pedestrian conversations within the cell that make this part of the film draggy.   There’s too much of The Future (Max Baker, Fisher Stevens, Patrick Fischler, Tom Musgrave, David Krumholtz, Greg Baldwin, Patrick Carroll) and their mentor (John Bluthal as either Herbert Marcuse or another anti-capitalist sage of the same name).  The climax to this part of the story is the cell’s fraternal attempt to hand over the ransom money for Baird Whitlock to a Russian submarine.  This ends, thanks to Engels, with the money lost at sea.  Even this sequence is rather a fizzle or, to put it more positively, only mildly funny.  Those last three words apply to a lot of Hail, Caesar! – too much to ward off feelings of anti-climax.  I wasn’t sorry the film wasn’t frenetic but it could have used more urgency.  It hits a few flat spots and develops next to no comic momentum.

It’s striking that critics are divided between those who see here either a ‘droll tribute’ to 1950s Hollywood (Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times) or ‘a dispiritingly vitriolic … satire … [which] verifies a suspicion long held … that the Coen brothers … really hate the movies’ (John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal).  The sometimes listless quality of Hail, Caesar! might seem to contradict the latter view; the prevailing tone certainly isn’t ‘vitriolic’.  But John Anderson isn’t wholly wrong:  I don’t get the sense from this film that the Coens have affection for the world they’re making fun of.  But they do love making movies.   (I’m reminded again – see A Serious Man – of Joel Coen’s acceptance speech for his and Ethan’s Best Director Oscar in 2008: ‘We’re very thankful to all of you out there for letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox …’)  That love is evident in their staging of spoof musical numbers in Hail, Caesar!:  the synchronised swimming routine, with Scarlett Johansson as  DeeAnna Moran, the Esther Williams-inspired mermaid-who’s-expecting;  Hobie Doyle (Ehrenreich), a junior Gene Autry, strumming his gee-tar as he sings a moonlight  serenade; ‘No Dames!’ (a pastiche song written by Carter Burwell, Henry Krieger and Willie Reale), with a sailor-suited Channing Tatum et al dancing on bar-room tables.  (This sequence feels like a crash course in the history of Hollywood’s singing-and-dancing seamen – from Footlight Parade to Anchors Aweigh/On the Town with South Pacific lying ahead.)  Each of the set pieces is nicely done although they collectively reinforce the sense that the film is, in Michael Wood’s phrase in his LRB review, ‘a set of exercises in parody tinged with nostalgia’.  If these interludes stir up warm feelings, I think those feelings are an expression of audience nostalgia, rather than nostalgia on the part of the Coens, for the Hollywood product being spoofed.  The brothers’ delight is rather in showing off their parodistic skill (which got in the way of this viewer experiencing warm feelings during the musical bits).

Josh Brolin does a well-judged, sympathetic job in the difficult role of Eddie Mannix, the glue of the film as much as Eddie is a fixative at Capitol Pictures.  Eddie, given his long working hours at the studio, is a remarkably conscientious Catholic – so much so that, on one of his visits to the confessional, the priest tells him he comes too often (‘You’re not that bad’).  Eddie convenes a meeting with a quartet of religious representatives – a Protestant pastor, Catholic and Greek Orthodox priests, and a rabbi – to check they have no objections to the ‘Hail, Caesar!’ screenplay.  Not surprisingly, the Coens drop Eddie’s Catholicism so that it doesn’t get in the way of their comic priorities in the scene.  He is, for its duration, a standard spiritually insensitive Hollywood executive; the theological squabbles among the men of God quickly make them ridiculous; the especially argumentative rabbi, when Eddie asks him for a final opinion, says he doesn’t have one.  This is all par for the sarcastic Coen course, although I did like the Greek Orthodox priest’s criticism of a chariot race, as described in the script, on grounds of realism.  The Coens may well see a practising Catholic as nothing more than a guilty conscience (Eddie is troubled chiefly by fibbing to his wife about his attempts to quit smoking) but some reviews of Hail, Caesar! have suggested that ‘A Tale of the Christ’ refers to Eddie Mannix as well as Jesus.  This reading seems to be based entirely on the gag of Eddie’s being repeatedly tempted by the offer of a senior job with the Lockheed Corporation (worldly riches plus the superterrestrial connotations of aircraft manufacture).  If this was the intention, it’s been realised very flimsily but other glancing bits of satire in Hail, Caesar! are among the Coens’ most effective strikes.  It’s a nice comment on the domestic culture of the time (or, at least, the way it was conventionally presented by Hollywood) that, when Eddie asks his supportive wife (Alison Pill) her opinion as to whether he should accept the Lockheed offer, she replies, ‘You know best, dear’.  The Communist cell part of the story is redeemed somewhat by the fatuous, egotistical Baird Whitlock becoming instantly, if briefly, a convert to the Marxist cause.

George Clooney does mostly high-grade mugging as Whitlock although it gets a little too frantic in the closing stages.  This is Clooney’s first appearance in a Coens film since Burn After Reading – ditto Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton.   McDormand’s cameo is as a chain-smoking film editor who nearly strangles herself, Isadora-like, on swathes of celluloid.  Swinton plays antagonistic identical twin-sister gossip columnists:  although this adds up to more screen time than McDormand has, you feel even more starved in Swinton’s case.  She spits out her acid drops with panache; in her final scene, she wears a ludicrously small hat at a ridiculously jaunty angle (the costumes by Mary Zophres are excellent).  At least Swinton is around long enough to make you feel that Trumbo might have been better if she’d played Hedda Hopper.  Michael Gambon provides occasional voiceover narration of proceedings.  It’s an awkward device because the style of Gambon’s delivery, unlike most of the other elements, isn’t firmly anchored in fifties Hollywood.

As indicated above, the highlight of Hail, Caesar! is the confrontation of Ralph Fiennes, as the film director Laurence Laurentz (kin to Noel Coward, in spite of his name), and Alden Ehrenreich’s Hobie Doyle.   Hobie has been catapulted from his usual light-horse-opera territory into the screen adaptation of a drawing-room comedy that was a Broadway smash.   Laurentz, although he very much likes the look of Hobie, suffers agonies of exquisite exasperation in teaching the young man to deliver the line, ‘Would that it were so simple’.    This obvious idea is turned by Fiennes’s comic skill (and with the help of Ehrenreich) into a beautiful piece of comedy.   Would that we got more of Ralph Fiennes. Perhaps there’s a slight surfeit of Alden Ehrenreich but he’s very entertaining, not least in a scene in a restaurant, after the premiere of Hobie’s latest oater, with his companion, the starlet Carlotta Valdez (Verónica Osorio).  Carlotta may be named (except for the last letter of the surname) for the lady in the portrait in Vertigo; her Hollywood USP links her rather to Carmen Miranda.  The Coens’ jokey references are more likeable when they get this crazily hybridised.  As usual, their cinematographer is Roger Deakins, their production designer Jess Gonchor and their editor Roderick Jaynes (aka Joel and Ethan Coen).

8 March 2016