Hail, Caesar! review: Coen brothers' new movie

Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum

The glamour and prestige of Golden-era Hollywood may be a thing of the past, but its mythology lives on in the Coen Brothers’ riotous new comedy Hail, Caesar!

After the lukewarm reception of Burn After Reading, The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, it felt as though the Coens’ had given up on out-and-out comedies, choosing instead to return to the sorrowful pessimism that made their earlier dramadies such enduring classics. If A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis were the filmmaking duo rediscovering their voice, Hail, Caesar! sees them relocate their funny bone. An idiosyncratic riff on the film industry, the Coens’ latest combines their reliably offbeat humor with a 50s nostalgia and some good old-fashioned McCarthyism.

A film about the artifice of filmmaking, and the conflict between the make-believe world of movies and the drabness of real life, Hail, Caesar! is deeply and refreshingly self-referential. The protagonists of Coen Brothers’ films are often tormented by earlier bad choices, and desperately trying to avoid the inevitability of their downfall. By contrast, our main man here is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a studio ‘fixer’ whose job it is to make these types of problems disappear. So when Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the star of the studio’s major prestige picture, is kidnapped by a group of communist screenwriters (complete with a dog named Engels), production grinds to a halt and it falls to Eddie to keep the film from going under.

The rest of the movie consists of a highly entertaining tapestry of interlocking vignettes, each a loving parody of popular 50s cinema styles, littered with big-name cameos. There’s rodeo sensation Hobie Doyle (Ehrenreich), the earnest poster-boy of westerns such as Lazy Ol’ Moon, who, due to a series of contractual complications, finds his southern drawl the focus of intense elocution lessons by the flamboyant British director Laurence Laurentz (Fiennes) for his forthcoming role in the studio’s high-society drama Merrily We Dance. Then there’s Burt Gurney (Tatum), the studio’s chiseled-jawed answer to Gene Kelly, whose delightful song-and-dance number in a shore-leave musical titled No Dames became a viral sensation long before Hail, Caesar!’s Berlinale premiere was even announced.

Channing Tatum playing a chiseled-jawed Gene Kelly-type in Hail, Caesar!

This is by far the Coens’ funniest film in over a decade, and although the tone is light and breezy, there remains a sinister undercurrent behind the film’s glamorous artifice. Belief systems, be it religious, political or simply the idea that cinema can become more than mere entertainment, form the spine of this homage to the classical Hollywood. Enjoying the hospitality of his kidnappers, Whitlock finds himself engaging in a series of amusing discussions about economics, the redistribution of wealth and the use of film as an ideological weapon – an enjoyable tête-à-tête that climaxes beautifully with the dropping of the expression “naming names.”

Although commendable for introducing the basics of dialectic materialism to a broader audience of cinemagoers, this deconstruction of the Hollywood dream lacks the punch required to lead viewers to question the intentions of their own era's cinema. Instead, Hail, Caesar! works best as a quasi-biblical fable for a generation brought up on the teachings of cinema. A rip-roaring comedy with a moral conscience, Hail, Caesar! may fail to expose the veiled intentions of the major studios, but it does a damn good job of showing its potential for high-minded entertainment.

Hail, Caesar!

The glamour and prestige of Golden-era Hollywood may be a thing of the past, but its mythology lives on in the Coen Brothers’ riotous new comedy Hail, Caesar!