Hailing

Rating: Null/10 (28 February 2016)

Offered a cushy desk job with an aerospace company, a 1950s Hollywood producer wrestles with whether or not to switch career while experiencing the most chaotic day of his life in this lively Coen Brothers comedy. The film is divided into three main problems that the producer, played by Josh Brolin, has to solve. In one, his studio's biggest star, played by George Clooney, is kidnapped by a Communist cell on the set of a biblical epic a la 'The Robe'. In another, a young western star (Alden Ehrenreich) has trouble transitioning to melodrama. In the third, an Esther Williams-like musical icon (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant but unmarried and cannot tarnish her image. The Clooney and Ehrenreich subplots work best, nicely intertwining near the end and Tilda Swinton is delightful as not one but two (!) reporters looking to write about both actors. Ralph Fiennes is also a lot of fun as the melodrama director. The Johansson subplot does not work quite as well though (despite a magnificently choreographed mermaid-suit number), while an even smaller subplot with Channing Tatum doing a superb Gene Kelly impersonation feels like it should have received more focus. Whatever the case, the film captures the chaos that comes with running a studio, and while the film could have benefited from expanding on how much Brolin loves to fix problems in his producer job, the film certainly shows a level of excitement with filmmaking that simply would not come from an ordinary desk job - and the film could well be interpreted as the Coens' ode to why they keep going in show business.