MOVIE REVIEW: Hail, Coens!

The prolific brothers’ latest arrives amid debate over their greatest. This isn’t it.

Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is a rather dim-witted leading man who falls under the spell of some Communist screenwriters in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, a period pastiche that spoofs religion, Old Hollywood and the counterculture.
Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is a rather dim-witted leading man who falls under the spell of some Communist screenwriters in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, a period pastiche that spoofs religion, Old Hollywood and the counterculture.

Earlier this week, GQ put out an admittedly meaningless list of all the Coen brothers' movies, ranked in order of excellence (if you care about such things, they have Raising Arizona at no. 1). The hashtag #filmtwitter immediately went into uproar about the list and its rankings, as critics and film lovers all over the country (and free world) weighed in on their personal favorite. (For the record, with Anton Chigurh's air gun to my head, I'd probably go with Barton Fink, but instantly feel bad for Miller's Crossing, A Serious Man and The Big Lebowski, to say nothing of Inside Llewyn Davis.)

It's that kind of passion that the mild-mannered brothers, now 17 films into their career, inspire in their fans. Part of this veneration comes from the manner in which the brothers create their films -- unabashedly film-lovers, they tend to approach their genre and quasi-genre films with the kind of loving adoration fans bestow upon them. Another significant part, however, comes from a simple, elegant approach Ethan and Joel have toward their screenplays: No character is ever a throwaway, and no line is ever wasted.

Hail, Caesar!

87 Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum, Veronica Osorio, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill

Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Rating: PG-13, for some suggestive content and smoking

Running time: 106 minutes

Take, for example, a brief moment from their latest film, Hail, Caesar!, a kind of screwball homage to the studio factory pictures of the early '50s (much the same sort of tableau, and at the same fictional "Capitol Pictures" studio, that launches the aforementioned Fink). The studio is making an epic Romans-meet-Jesus film, with their biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), in the starring role as a Roman officer who becomes enlightened by the glowing young man from Jerusalem. During a Roman feast scene, Whitlock is drugged and kidnapped by a group of disaffected Hollywood screenwriters who have turned to Communism and wish to get ransom money to send back to mother Russia to help the cause.

When Whitlock wakes up in their Malibu hideaway, he stumbles out of the garage and into the house where an elderly, heavy-set cleaning woman is obliviously vacuuming the rug. Seeing him in his full Roman officer regalia, she takes an extra beat to assess just whom she's dealing with. "You one of the Hollywood people?" she asks flatly, and sends him on his way. So enraptured of characters are the Coens that they don't hesitate to populate their films with as many noteworthy oddballs as possible (Chet from Fink is another good example), even if they're onscreen for only a moment.

This film mostly revolves around Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the hard-driving executive who has to simultaneously put out multiple brush fires on an endless slog of genre films.

He's got the brewing Whitlock situation with his swords-and-sandals epic (which has, as a subtitle, A Tale of the Christ). DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), his lead ingenue and dancer in a Busby Berkeley-style water dance picture, has a child out of wedlock that threatens to derail her sweet, innocent image. His witty, Noel Coward-esque chamber drama, helmed by the estimable Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), in desperate need of a lead, grabs the sweet-faced young western heartthrob Hobie Doyle (Aldren Ehrenreich), who can't even begin to play the character. And his dancing sailors musical, starring smooth sensation Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), is, unbeknownst to him, being led by a Communist infiltrator. As if that weren't enough, he's also contending with a massive job offer from Lockheed, which is demanding an answer, and dealing with a guilty conscience over lying to his wife about his continued smoking.

It's a perfect set-up for the Coens' high-minded style of playful genre busting, allowing them to show scenes and snippets from all these pictures (titles include Merrily We Dance and Lazy Ol' Moon), from both the front end and the back, as Mannix studiously watches the dailies come in from the various studio lots. As such, it's filled with hilarious scenes that somehow poke gentle fun at these films' silly contrivances, while reveling in their expert craftsmanship (No Dames, a Guys and Dolls-type musical number with sailors, is actually as carefully and artfully choreographed as the real thing, even though it's using the scene to play off Gurney's political duplicity).

Still, though many scenes are laugh out-loud funny -- including a classic round-table between religious leaders arguing the merits of the Hail, Caesar! script, while also poking holes in each other's religious beliefs ("God is a bachelor, and very angry!" yells the rabbi) -- the film scoots almost too merrily on its way, the Coens content with Caesar being little more than a goofy lark with an outstanding cast. With such a giant spread of characters, various bits are introduced and more or less dropped, with notable actors (including Jonah Hill, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton) playing brief cameos before the film breathlessly moves past them.

In this way, everything feels a little too goosed together, as if falling prey to Capitol Pictures' own ferocious production schedule. Or maybe they wanted one last wink at the audience. As such, while it's certainly fun, its lightness of being will keep it unlikely to crack anyone's top-five list.

The plot, such as it is, sort of disentangles itself, and we close on a shot of Mannix striding through the lot, problems all around him, basking in the glow of Hollywood production, the camera swooping up in a lofty crane shot that suggests movie myth-making is alive and enduring. Perhaps that's precisely what the brothers were after: If not all the films Capitol churns out are winners, at least they'll help keep the Commies from taking over.

MovieStyle on 02/05/2016

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