A refreshing return to comedy for the Coens

Rating: 8/10 (10 February 2016)

You have to love movies to make a movie like Hail, Caesar! We're thrust into the hectic world of a big-picture studio, with Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) trying to keep all of his plates spinning, be they the production of movies, the love lives of their stars, or keeping their scandals out of the newspapers. That's a tale that could be trite and uninteresting in the wrong hands, but the Coen brothers weave it with sincerity and fun, blending parody with homage.
It's amazing that any big-budget movie survives to completion, and Hail, Caesar! is no exception. There are many faces required to be in big movies, and many crew members to film them. To make a movie about big movies, you have to go big, too. We have lavish synchronized swims, huge sound stages for ancient Rome, fancy drawing rooms, corny dance numbers, and a Western so bad it's good.
The Coen brothers give us a small lesson in Hegelianism which Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) eats up faster than a crustless sandwich. Could the motion picture industry create the death of itself? Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas claimed as much three years ago. Surely, if the spectacular movie is powerful enough to maintain its survival, the spectacular movie is equally capable of destroying itself.
There are genuinely good performances by pretty much everyone in the huge cast, especially from Brolin, Clooney, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, Alden Ehrenreich, and Ralph Fiennes. Mannix tries so hard and so calmly to keep the studio and its employees progressing, but we ultimately leave with a sense of fatalism and the nagging suspicion that none of his actions directly solved any of the studio's problems.
It's a refreshing return to comedy for the Coen brothers, who had huge misses with The Ladykillers and Burn After Reading.