Hail, Caesar! *** (2016, Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jonah Hill) – Movie Review

Josh Brolin stars as Eddie Mannix, a Hollywood fixer for Capitol Pictures in the Fifties, who solves problems for big Tinseltown names. George Clooney co-stars as studio star Baird Whitlock, who disappears, kidnapped from the set of a Ben Hur-like sword-and-sandal movie, giving Mannix a major headache as he tries to find out what’s happened to him.

Mannix has other problems. Cute young budding star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) is a dim and useless actor fluffing his lines on the set of a drawing-room drama directed by the waspish Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), while hard-living starlet DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) is causing serious problems in the morality department.

The Coen Brothers’ smart comedy about the golden age of movie-making is both mischievous and silly. They are obviously in love with the old movies, and re-create a couple of cheesy typical set pieces from them, an Esther Williams-style synchronised swimming water ballet with a nifty Johansson and a Gene Kelly-type toe-tapping dance number (‘No Dames’) with a game and nimble Channing Tatum (as Burt Gurney). Also in the mix are Tilda Swinton playing sister gossip queens Thora and Thessaly Thacker, Frances McDormand as C C Calhoun and (briefly) Jonah Hill as Joseph Silverman. 

Some of Hail, Caesar! is good daft fun, some of it is silly, slack and self-indulgent. The two production numbers are in the good daft fun category, and so are the performances of Brolin, Ehrenreich and Fiennes, who turn out to be the outstanding players here. The admirable Brolin is absolutely rock solid at the centre of the movie, while Ehrenreich and Fiennes’s all-too-brief double act provides the film’s biggest laughs. Who’d have though that Fiennes could be funny like this?

Some of the other performances are in the silly, slack and self-indulgent category. Clooney’s turn is not a success. He’s just no good at this kind of farcical comedy.

Nor, to be honest, are the Coen Brothers. Broad farce, and discovering their silly side, might make for a fill-in movie till we get back to the great stuff, like Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men. Black comedy is the Coen forte. Get back to where you belong guys!

Their script is a bit of an untidy mess, for writers of this calibre. It starts to get messy and run out steam after half an hour or so. Its effort to take funny into the serious zone with observations on Fifties film-making and the communist Hollywood personnel of the era is awkward, to say the least, in a farce. It makes Trumbo even more essential. Unusually for a Coen script. another couple of re-writes would be good.

The movie reminded me of those Seventies movies of Peter Bogdanovich, At Long Last Love (1975) and Nickelodeon (1976), where the director was so keen to show his love of old movies that it made you simply go watch some old movies. The simple, perhaps naive charms of the Fifties original movies often trump the Coens’ over-contrived, over-deliberate ones.

Nevertheless, the Coen Brothers film with infectious relish and evident craft. It’s a beautiful period production by Jess Gonchor with glorious cinematography by the great Roger Deakins, and Carter Burwell’s score is essential too. And, though it’s a farce, it is a thinking person’s farce, civilised entertainment with some good laughs and some strong performances from a sparkly cult cast.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3272

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