Review: Hail, Caesar!
Not quite the hooray for Hollywood it must have been on paper, the latest feature from the Coen Brothers, Hail, Caesar!, may be both catnip and anathema for the filmmakers' fans and those who are more than a touch familiar with the Old Hollywood the film gently and sardonically mocks.
The Coen Brothers have been paying tribute to films churned out by the Hollywood Dream Factory since their first film, Blood Simple, an exemplary noir that would have comfortably sat alongside such classic noirs like Out of the Past and The Postman Always Rings Twice. If the DNA of their influences was too subtle to be imprinted on viewers who saw Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, or The Big Lebowski, then something like The Hudsucker Proxy , with its frenzied pace, rat-a-tat dialogue, and the ghost of Rosalind Russell channeling itself through Jennifer Jason Leigh, was an out-and-out unabashed resurrection of the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks (some of the most important and influential filmmakers to remain criminally underrated today).
It must have delighted the Coen Brothers to no end to happen upon a clever way to bring together not only so many disparate genres but also such a number of back stories and call-outs to the people both in front of and behind the camera. Hail, Caesar! unfolds over the course of one very long day in the life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a production executive who is also an all-around fixer for 1950s Capitol Pictures. Mannix, whose name is taken from a real MGM fixer, is first seen in a confessional, his face sliced by a shard of light. It's part of his daily routine to unburden himself of minor infractions - sneaking cigarettes, lying to his wife about quitting smoking - before moving on to do damage control for many of the studio's biggest stars.
Back in the day, performers signed seven-year contracts with the studios, who exerted an extraordinary amount of control over their stars' professional and personal lives. Stars were investments and they were to be protected at all costs. Studios were powerful enough to get the cops and gossip columnists on their side, and so Mannix interrupting a late-night photo shoot featuring one of the studio's stars in a compromising position ends with the cops colluding with Mannix on the cover-up. On the professional front, studios were wont to shuffle their stars from one genre to another (stars had no say as suspension awaited if they refused), and so singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) gives an aw-shucks shrug when told he's to be in a sophisticated drawing-room drama.
Part of the fun to be had with the film is matching the parade of characters with their real-life inspirations. Take DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), the bathing beauty whose aquatic musicals have made her one of the studio's most popular stars. On the surface, she's modeled after Esther Williams (whose talents were truly unrivaled - sure, you had tons of stars who could either sing, dance, or act their hearts out, but no one could perform underwater choreography and still look glamourous), but the character's previous marriages to a gangster and a bandleader align more with Lana Turner's romantic history, and the solution to DeeAnna's pregnancy is straight out of the Loretta Young playbook.
Yet that same match game can be a dispiriting one. Doyle seems an amalgam of Kirby Grant, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, but the attempts to make an urbane lead out of someone with so limited a range may call to mind the few times when John Wayne traded in his dusty rags for a tuxedo. However, pairing Doyle with the Carmen Miranda-like Carlotta Valdez (Verónica Osorio) also recalls Gary Cooper's tempestuous romance with Lupe Velez. Cooper himself started out in the westerns before transitioning into one of the most popular leading men of his time. Doyle's treatment verges just this side of mean, and the depiction of him as a simpleton is a bit disrespectful of both Wayne and Cooper.
There's no doubt that the Coen Brothers have lavished heaps of love on their recreations of Hollywood's musical extravaganzas, and indeed DeeAnna's spectacular mermaid musical and Burt Gurney's (Channing Tatum) sailors-on-leave song-and-dance (shades of Gene Kelly in both On the Town and Anchors Aweigh) are pure, frothy highlights. However, let's be realistic. DeeAnna's honking voice would have never passed muster in the sound era, and Gurney's obviously homoeroticised number would never have been released as is. Yes, the filmmakers pay homage in order to point out the artifice, but they don't necessarily stay faithful to the demands of that artifice. Considering that the filmmakers and cinematographer extraordinaire Roger Deakins take such meticulous care in replicating each genre, it's a bit disappointing when they frame certain scenes like Gurney's dance number in ways that were not standard for musicals of the era. Overhead shots and slanted angles compromise the fluidity of the number and, interestingly, Gurney's musical is at its best during a moment when Gurney and two of the other dancers are seated on the bar stools and performing a soft shoe. The camera doesn't move - why should it when all the movement necessary is being done within the frame?
The Coen Brothers blur the line between reality and manufactured reality. The audience is always aware of the fabrications, and even the scenes that take place within the so-called reality seem like outtakes from other films being produced by Capitol Pictures: Mannix is the star of his own existential noir; the plot involving matinee idol Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) kidnapped by a group of Communist screenwriters is a skewed variation on Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels; and even the entire film itself can be regarded as a subversive religious epic (Mannix's faith in the movies wavers and even the point of movies themselves are called into question).
The essential problem with Hail, Caesar! is that whilst individual scenes and performers delight (Ralph Fiennes' exasperated director playing Henry Higgins to Ehrenreich's Eliza Doolittle, Tilda Swinton in every scene she's in, Frances McDormand doing her best Thelma Ritter, the moonlit submarine scene), the film itself is utterly disjointed. Mannix is meant to be the ostensible glue holding together this miscellany of cartoonish characters, but this is just too much of a circus for one ringleader to handle. The film flits from genre to genre, tone to tone, character to character, and it becomes both too much and not enough. The filmmakers' passion for their material actually ends up suffocating the life out of it.
Hail, Caesar!
Directed by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum, Michael Gambon, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill, Verónica Osorio, Wayne Knight, Max Baker, Christopher Lambert, Clancy Brown, David Krumholtz, Fisher Stevens, Robert Picardo, Alex Karpovsky, Jack Huston, Agyness Deyn
