Life At The Top.

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2017)

In its subdued way this is a hilarious movie.
Brolin is the manager of a movie studio in the post-war years who must keep things rolling. He's a devout Catholic. His last confession was 27 minutes ago Brolin likes his current job despite the tension but he's been offered a higher-paying position. He hesitatingly asks the priest during confession about the conundrum. Should he keep his current job, which he feels is "right", or take the newly offered one? The priest thinks for a moment and replies, "God always wants us to do what's right, my son. You see, God has given us this inner light --" "Yeah, yeah, I got it," says Brolin and bolts impatiently out of the confessional.
The narrative has Brolin making a movie called "Hail Caesar" starring Clooney. But Cloony is drugged, kidnapped, and brainwashed by a handful of egghead communists, including one mastermind with an absurd foreign accent.
It works. Clooney is released. He returns to the studio and explains dialectical materialism to Brolin in his office. Brolin fumes. When Clooney says something like, "It's all a game by the vested interests to deprive us of our dignity," the scowling manager says, "It is, huh?", barely able to stifle his fury, and finally leaps around the desk and slaps Clooney out of it. The actor meekly obeys.
I won't go on about the plot. It's filled with the Coens' usual irony. At the end, Clooney gives a truly transformative speech as the foot of the cross. The entire crew is enthralled by his passion. Then he forgets the last word of the speech and ruins the shot.
It's scored by Carter Burwell whom I admire for his compositional talent and his sense of humor. Brolin's main conflict has been between religion and a coarser conformity. And under the end credits -- while the theater is emptying -- Burwell plays a beautiful rendition of a traditional Russian song, along the lines of "Kalinka," performed by the superlative Red Army Chorus. When they're finished, we hear what sounds like a hymnal from Mitteleuropa. In between there are discreet peeps of a sonar apparatus, presumably looking for an ideological submarine, and when everything else is finished there is the cry of a distant siren.