Hail, Coens!

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2016)

Hail, Caesar! is one of those big, luscious, gorgeous odes to the Golden Age of Hollywood - a certain kind of Hollywood, at any rate - and it's a work that is both great and minor at the same time. It's probably so because of the central plot, the sort of spine of it, is just alright, while everything else around it - all of the moving parts and scenes of 'dreams' being created at Capital Pictures - is so wonderful and hysterically funny and perfectly timed (time and how to have to always check it, the inserts of Eddie Mannix's watch, being a running theme here by the way). It's the Coens making a movie that only they can make, and if the parts are greater than the whole, still, such awe-inspiring parts! Of course a lot is taken tongue-in-cheek, but there are some things underlying the story that are serious enough to get invested in the characters.
Or, I should say, the "Christ" hero of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) who runs the Physical Production arm of the shooting of films at Capital, with multiple shoots going on a particular day. On the 24 hours that Hail, Caesar takes place in, there's of course the "prestige" picture of the movie's own title (with the subtitle "A Tale of the Christ", an obvious wink and nod to Ben-Hur) where George Clooney as Baird Whitlock is hamming it up as a Roman in the face of this "Christ" figure. While Whitlock gets drugged and taken away to an underground group (that operates in a nice house in Malibu by the sea), other pictures go on like a mermaid/swimming-dance piece (with Scarlett Johansson), a cowboy picture - at first - but then in almost the blink of an eye the star of that, Hobie Doyle (Ehrenreich) gets put on a fashionable costume drama directed by Laurence Larentz (Fiennes). And of course there's a musical being shot with singing and dancing sailors led by Channing Tatum... because, how could you NOT have him doing that here?
I'm sure I've left out other shoots that may be taking place on the lot over the course of the day (and lets not forget, oh it's impossible to do so, Tilda Swinton as *twin* gossip columnists with only slightly varying agendas when talking separately to Mannix, and Frances McDormand in a brilliant one-scene bit as a chain-smoking editor), but those are the ones to really take in. Probably the one with Johannson comes close to being too long, but it's still a gorgeous, over-the-top spectacle that revels in how cheesy we look at works like that today if they pop up on Turner Classic Movies - same with the sailor musical or the costume drama (we also, very thankfully, get to see some dailies from these shoots that are so authentic and yet with that little sly wink the Coens do). In fact the whole movie, when it's at its best, is like condensing a week's worth of programming - both the "B" movie level and the prestige "A" stuff - into an hour and 45 minutes, with Tatum's dance number a mini-masterpiece that blends together being a rich satire of such goofy and dopey numbers and being a legitimately fantastic and spectacular number.
I enjoyed those parts so much that it pains me to not find the movie one of the directors' best on the whole. It may be seeing it a first time and having certain expectations (the trailer, one of the best in recent memory, does a number on any viewer), such as what "The Future" kidnapping group entails. Perhaps I expected it to have much darker, weirder, more absurdist/surrealist dimensions based on how they appeared. As it turns out, they're only Communists who try (and sort of succeed, in a way) to indoctrinate Whitlock into their world. Indeed the movie sort of functions as two stories, one with Whitlock and the old blacklisted writers and the other being Mannix having to go around from one place to another as the Man In Charge spinning a dozen different plates (and also his own conflicts at work, which is a nice bit of writing to make him have the most dimension, and Brolin plays it with total conviction and never slipping into caricature, which is easy enough to do here).
I can see this probably being a work that I will like even more a second time, or, equally, as with a film tonally this reminded me of from them, Burn After Reading, I find more to pick apart, but it's all the same a movie that you have to see in the theater to get the full experience of it. Even when it gets very, very strange (the climax involving "The Future" is that for me, among the strangest things the Coens have ever written and shot in their careers) it's still highly entertaining, and the actors are having a blast in all of their roles, including those who just appear in a scene or two (looking at you Jonah Hill, Clancy Brown or, yes, oh my God, that's Christopher Lambert!) The filmmakers lovingly recreate the period to every small detail, from the art design to Deakins' cinematography (a contrast to last year's Sicario by light years) and it's one of those grand old times where they just fill up the frames with sunny, light comedy with the occasional dark-noirish undertone. It's the Coens saying 'yeah, this was all pretty goofy... but wasn't it SOMETHING to behold?'