Wacky, Wonderful 'Hail, Caesar!' is the Coen Brothers' Valentine to Classic Hollywood

Rating: 9/10 (12 February 2016)

Around the halfway mark of the Coen Brothers' newest film, Hail, Caesar!, an audience member was heard voicing his thought that, this was the weirdest movie he had ever seen–and this reviewer wouldn't say his evaluation was all that far off.
Yet it's exactly this sort of "weird-ness" that defines any Coen Brothers' movie, where colorful but mentally clouded characters are typically confronted with cosmically coincidental events, leading to a type of larger, dead-pan comedy, that's dripping in drop-dead seriousness that forces them to question the meaning of life and their place in the universe.
The universe at large in Hail, Caesar! is the 1950s back lot of the fictional Capitol Pictures, an MGM-like Hollywood studio whose theatrical world offers such wonderfully wacky tangents as bumbling cowboy movie stars lassoing with their spaghetti, as well as looming scares of Communism and learning of the first Hydrogen bombs.
At the center of this world, the ringleader of the Circus, is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the studio's stars in line, but whose own personal certainties are less assured. As if trying to quit a light smoking habit wasn't the biggest hiccup in his day (the film covers a twenty-seven-hour day), Mannix learns of the kidnapping and ransom demand of the studio's biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), during the shooting of his lead role in the grandly epic big-picture event, titled, 'Hail, Caesar!'
Mannix proceeds to bop around from one looney tuned character to the next, including the Dixie-whistling cowboy turned bumbling big screen star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), twice- divorced movie star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), twin sister newspaper journalists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton), and tap-dancing Gene Kelly inspired Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who all amount to being an embarrassment of riches in Coen-land.
The Hollywood send-up may be much more divisive than the directors' other films, and likely because it's packaged as a mainstream movie with the likes of George Clooney and Channing Tatum cartooning around as old-timey Hollywood movie stars. But the Coens' only take the shell of old Hollywood and collapse the facade, exploring stories of kidnapping and hijinks, as well as much larger, universal themes of exploration and questioning, such as Politics, Religion, and other head-scratching questions akin to, What Does It All Mean? This search for meaning in a world so ridiculous, that it allows its audience to see the coded philosophic themes and lessons that its harebrained characters can't, makes this another winning outing for the Coen's.
The Coen's continue to eschew conventions of narrative structure, allowing their incredible style to drive the film here. Audiences expecting a more classic kidnap comedy will most likely be disappointed by the odd tangential story lines, but should know that the minds of this machine are operating on a top-tier level of intelligence that makes a minute long scene, of Hobie Doyle fumbling the phonetics of a sophisticated line like, "Would that it were so simple," give resonance to the entirety of the story–if only life were so simple.
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