Stale Pleaser

Rating: 6/10 (7 February 2016)

"Well, I'm sorry the Coen Brothers don't direct my porn," fumed Jonah Hill in 2007's Superbad. Flash-forward to 2016, and Hill now occupies a coveted star cameo slot in the latest by Hollywood's most illustrious filmmaking brothers (sorry, The Russos). This is the world we live in.
But hey - the pictures are a wacky business, dontcha know? In fact, that's about as close to a moral or theme as we get with Hail, Ceasar. As salivary as the prospect of the Coens putting their oddball spin on the golden age of Hollywood with a bigger budget than Barton Fink was, they've sadly - seemingly unironically - fallen prey to the same vacuous glitz and cavernous superficiality of the ol' dream factory they spend an entire feature poking fun at. The result, while still pleasant and replete with choice Coen tidbits, is easily their laziest and weakest work to date. Maybe they should have added more porn
If anything, the film industry, so replete with the weirdos and sleazeballs that are the Coens' bread and butter, may have been too broad a target for them to make much of an impact. The oddest thing about Hail, Ceasar is how frequently characters make verbal reference to the film industry as a circus full of eccentrics in need of babysitting, as the playback itself feels disconcertingly welldull. We could forgive the rampantly incohesive bevy of subplots, and seemingly unintentional slew of film history inconsistencies and anachronisms (for a film championing classical Hollywood, the Coens sure seemingly didn't do much research) were there a core plot strand, or classic Coen lead, for everything to rally behind, a-la Lebowski. Instead, most of the characters we spend the most time tromping around the backstage lots with with - Brolin's growly Harry Mannix, Clooney's mawkish superstar buffoon, even Tilda Swinton's huffy twin gossip columnists - simply aren't very interesting or engaging; they're pale caricatures of characters done far more interestingly elsewhere - heck, even elsewhere by the Coens.
Instead, the vignettes that buzz with the most life and infectious fun - Channing Tatum's exquisitely bubbly sailor-clad tap dancer, Scarlett Johansson's potty- mouthed starlet doing mermaid aquatic acrobatics on top of a mechanical whale, and Ralph Fiennes' prissy, effete director demurely teaching elocution - are relegated to tiny sideplots, whimsically snipped away, like pre-feature Roadrunner shorts you'd rather stick with rather than the bland melodrama proceeding them. It's a bemusing trend that at least three or four scenes throughout the film close, anticlimatically, with a cutaway shot to a character hesitantly uttering "Huh.", as if manufacturing beats so forcedly even they weren't certain the scene had run its course. It's all so slapdash and clumsily cobbled together that Frances McDormand's cameo as an editor who is nearly throttled to death splicing together dailies in the editing suite feels grimly prescient.
Still, even sleepwalking Coens still have so much to offer, and many of the aforementioned frivolous filming subplots allow them to let loose with some of their trademark bonkers surrealist visual poetry, not unlike The Big Lebowski's now infamous Viking bowling alley dream sequence. Similarly, relative newcomer Alden Ehrenreich is an inspired find as a chipper Roy Rogers-esq cowboy out of his depth dabbling in a period melodrama, and there's a delightful Wayne Knight bit that will make audiences want to dash out and watch Space Jam all over again. Otherwise, there's slim pickings on display here - even the usual Roger Deakins/Carter Burwell power combo is lacking its usual hilariously austere, cheekily operatic Coen ambiance. The Coens have always been content to opt for style over substance (or at least style bolstering playful ambiguity for those willing to dig deeper for elusive meaning), but here, we're disconcertingly short on both, in this shambling, derivative skeleton of potential.
And yet, for a movie so irreconcilably flawed, Hail, Ceasar sure did leave me in a jaunty, cheery mood leaving the theatre, even while drawing up a list of its faults. Perhaps there is a sneaky meta-commentary to be had after all: this film, conflating wide-eyed Judaeo-Christian worship with snarky Communist condescension of the money-grubbing shackles of the system, sure did serve as an opiate for the masses. Hey - if the only takeaway from Hail, Ceasar, apart from some charmingly Coen classical Hollywood dance pastiches, is the urge to go out and indulge in some old- school Hollywood fare (or even old-school Coens fare), I'll take it.
(But seriously - Coens: The Porno. Think about it, Joel and Ethan. It'd really tie the room -err, your careers - together)
-6/10