For their first comedy since 2008's Burn After Reading, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen return to Capitol Pictures, the fictional studio that employed the doomed protagonist of 1991's Barton Fink. Hail, Caesar! offers the tale of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a no-nonsense Capitol exec who must contend with a whole lot of nonsense from pregnant mermaids, extortionist Marxist screenwriters, bickering religious experts, competing twin gossip columnists (played by Tilda Swinton) and a plot to kidnap the star (George Clooney) of the studio's latest Ben Hur-style epic, the film-within-a-film that gives this one its name. It's literally all in a day's work.
Hail, Caesar!
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum. Opens Feb. 5. HailCaesarMovie.com.
The real-life Eddie Mannix was, like Brolin's character, a notorious "fixer" at MGM during the heyday and twilight of that studio's golden age, whose possible role in the death of George Reeves was dramatized in 2006's Hollywoodland. In the Coens' universe, the fictionalized Mannix is gripped by a crisis of faith. A devout Catholic and loyal company man to his core, he finds himself, not unlike the Roman legions whose story he's bringing to the screen, a foot soldier for an empire whose façade is beginning to crumble.
On the one hand, he's tempted away from his demanding job doing the often-misguided bidding of studio boss Nick Skank (a constant presence, despite never appearing on screen) by the offer of a much cushier position with a maker of apocalyptic war machines. On the other, he must contend with a shadowy cabal that literally dub themselves "The Future." Whether he will stand firm as a defender of the American way of life (that Capitol is but a few letters different from capitalism is no accident) marks the film's central dramatic tension.
The joy of this setup is how it allows the Coens and cinematographer Roger Deakins to luxuriate both in period details and in classic Hollywood tropes: singing cowboys, bathing beauties, even a not-so-subtly homoerotic song-and-dance number featuring Channing Tatum (doing his best impression of Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra from On the Town).
But given such a broad palate from which to work, the film should feel a lot more fun than it does. It is, in the parlance of our times, "low energy." Many of the jokes don't land. In the effort to give us the full studio tour of Capitol Pictures, Hail, Caesar! detours into too many ill-conceived subplots and thinly realized characters. The screen is dense with stars, but some make only the briefest of cameos, while others – including Scarlett Johansson, Swinton and even Clooney himself – make do with broad caricatures that play as rehashed versions of work they've done better elsewhere.
The film's closest cousin in the Coens' oeuvre likely is The Hudsucker Proxy, with which it shares a time period, a knack for Old Hollywood pastiche and a generally sardonic take on American institutions. But it ultimately lacks either that film's frenetic joke density or its black heart. Not unlike the pictures it satirizes, Hail, Caesar! is a frequently entertaining visual feast that ultimately falls short of the work of art it might have been.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2016.