Hipsters, flipsters, finger-popping' daddies!

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2016)

Before the film started, I was subject to a series of trailers for films such as "The Boss" and "Neighbors 2," which are both R-rated comedies with PG humor. Either the studios are really stupid, making films that contradict themselves, or really smart and understand the limited intellectual capacity of their modern adult audiences (it's the latter). "Hail, Caesar!," rated PG-13, is what an adult comedy looks like, as it spotlights--as all Coen films do--the absurd whipping post of life, with which the cries of pain from every bloody crack of the whip turn steadily to laughter with time.
The heart behind the film's many flailing arms is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin). Mannix is the night watchman in the flamboyant insane asylum of Hollywood, dusting deviance under the couch to maintain the innocent image of the stars. The other two big players are Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), an airheaded household-name, and Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a simple-minded singing cowboy. Whitlock is kidnapped by a group of men of who talk a lot about book a called "Capital," only it's spelled with a "K," and Mannix must fetch him before the tabloids smell story.
The Coens are able to tap into the white noise of comedy, creating laughs from seemingly non-jokes. But at the same time, they don't forsake the classic "set-up, punchline" formula. For example, there's an incredible scene involving a meeting that Mannix has called, which involves a Protestant, a Catholic, an Eastern Orthodox and a Rabbi, all in order to get their blessing for a "Ben-Hur"- esque film. There's a clear joke that the scene ends on--the Jewish guy has an opinion for everything but the thing that matters--but more than that, there's a religious satire, in that nearly every question asked of the clergyman receives a "yes and no" response. The Coens are masters of gags within larger gags within larger gags. And of course, there's no shortage of prolonged awkward silences and dumb faces, trademarks of any Coen film.
Despite the film's marketing, Mannix is the focus and to a lesser extent, Whitlock and Doyle. For the most part, Clooney's restricted to funny faces, though he nails the scene where he's relating everything he's learned from the Communists to Mannix, like a child eagerly telling his father what he's learned at school that day. Ehrenreich stands out as the Roy Rogers-like Doyle, especially in a scene involving a spaghetti lasso, reminiscent of Chaplin's bread roll dance.
Each of the other headliners get a one-joke character, which would be worse if the jokes didn't work, or if more weight were put on them. Ralph Fiennes plays a pretentious, English director, Laurence Laurentz, a man of dual-pronunciations. Scarlett Johansson is DeeAnna Moran, a chain-smoking, man-eater in reality; a naive, angelic blonde on the silver screen. Channing Tatum is Burt Gerney, a player in a homoerotic musical, who just so happens to be--in a delightfully insane reveal--the realization of 'McCarthyism paranoia.
Mannix, however, doesn't seem to be in a zany comedy. He feels more like something out of "Barton Fink," "A Serious Man," or "Inside Llewyn Davis." Like the main characters of those films, Mannix is miserable, but--unlike those characters--he learns to love the misery, seeing it as a side-effect of doing something worthwhile, rather than unjustified punishment.
"Is it wrong to do the easy thing?" Mannix asks a priest. To Mannix, the answer is yes. To the priest, the answer is yes and no. To me, the answer is yes; keep making movies.