The Coen Brothers would be my first choice to direct a farce on 1950s Hollywood Studios. Their love of old films and specific brand of humor for me would fit the genre perfectly. Aside from the loosely connected plot, Hail, Caesar! mostly supports that thesis, featuring some great Coeny scenes of humor, right up there with the Big Lebowski.
Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is the Hollywood fixer. In the era before TV where people wanted to believe the stories and movie stars, Mannix is the guy that keeps the actors and directors in narrative line. Things start to get weird for Eddie when Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), mega star of Hail, Caesar about Jesus Christ, gets kidnapped and is nowhere to be found. Mannix then spends the rest of the film trying to find Whitlock and progressing production of the other films on the lot.
The biggest issue with Hail, Caesar! is the kidnapping storyline. Smartly, the Coens realized they needed some sort of through line; they just picked the wrong one. If Mannix just focused on fixing issues with the release of the 4 films, this film could have been a classic farce. The kidnapping storyline adds thriller elements that the Coens love as well as some hysterical scenes, but the storyline literally meanders off the lot, draining the movie’s momentum generated from the studio productions.
Because oh man, the Coens version of a 50s studio production would be fantastically hysterical. They find these angles most directors would not think of when creating a film, usually involving juxtapositions. A Laurence Olivier type (Ralph Fiennes) directing a southern drawled actor (Alden Ehrenreich), brilliant. Twins (Tilda Swinton) who hate each other’s jobs and confuse the hell out of everyone? Great. And my personal favorite, gathering elders from all the world’s religions to discuss the depiction of Jesus? Just razor sharp hilarity. I didn’t even get to the staging of the multiple films going on, like Channing Tatum Gene Kellying it up or Scarlett Johansson in a Mermaid production. The Coens use old Hollywood stories and really think about what goes into those productions to give the movie some great juice.
Also helping is the Coen’s friends in Hollywood. Nearly every great actor has worked with them, and they are all in use here. Brolin is the star, but he is basically playing the straight man. This is great during the scenes of absolute silliness, but most of the plot is relegated to his character, and he comes off boring. Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, David Krumholtz, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and Wayne Knight all show up and give a few scenes of charming hilarity. The two standouts though are George Clooney, playing a larger-than-life but innocent version of himself, the immaculate superstar actor. Alden Ehrenreich is the biggest surprise, using his aw shucks accent to potent effect: in addition, there’s a scene where he is waiting for someone and just lassoing to himself, and he kills. I can’t wait for him to do more stuff.
Hail, Caesar! is silly fun. The Coen’s playing around, their version of “slumming it,” is still better than most other films out there. I hope some studio gives them money to make a 50s epic: there’s a real chance that movie could be among the greatest satires ever made.