After the intense sadness that they wove throughout their last film, 2013’s great Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen switch gears into pure light-hearted silliness with their latest, Hail, Caesar! This isn’t the first time that the auteur brothers have made a broad all-star comedy to cleanse their palate after a heavy drama — see also Burn After Reading coming right on the heels of No Country for Old Men. And while their dramas are thoughtful and profound, no one makes silly comedies better than the Coens either. So if they’re looking to take a detour into meaningless fun after the dramatic weight and thematic heft of Inside Llewyn Davis, who are we to deny them the pleasure?
Hail, Caesar! follows a day in the life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a Hollywood fixer whose main goal is to make sure that his movie-star clients’ scandalous behaviour doesn’t become tabloid gossip. The year is 1951. Golden Age Hollywood is the embodiment of glamour and spectacle, and the threat of Communism weighs on the nation’s minds. Eddie’s problems, however, are far more immediate. For one, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant. DeeAnna is the star of wholesome water musicals (à la Esther Williams), and she thinks her boyfriend is the father — but they’re not really serious enough yet to think of marriage. Then there’s Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), the earnest but dim-witted cowboy star of Western shoot-’em-ups whom the studio is pushing into a high society drama, and whose image needs work. But neither of these problems seem to matter when Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped right from the set of the historical Ben-Hur-style epic he’s starring in.
But that’s not even the main focus of the film — plot is never the Coens’ priority here. The filmmakers are not in a hurry to resolve any of their narrative threads. Instead, they take the time to luxuriate in their loving recreations of Old Hollywood movie styles, introducing each of the actor characters through extended scenes from the films they star in. The Coens’ attention to detail in these scenes is staggering — production designer Jess Gonchor and costume designer Mary Zophres (both Coen regulars who were each Oscar-nominated for True Grit) really bring them to life masterfully, jumping between genres and tones with ease.
The Coens also find the time for their signature digressions, some gonzo (such as the scene in which a group of clerics from various sects debate the nature of Jesus) and some hilarious (the scene where Ralph Fiennes plays a harried film director desperately trying to help Hobie Doyle wrap his country-drawl accent around the posh dialogue he’s struggling to deliver). They also fill the film with typically eccentric cameos — Frances McDormand as a scarf-loving film editor, Channing Tatum as a Gene Kelly-like song-and-dance man making a musical about amorous sailors, Tilda Swinton as a pair of twin (!) gossip columnists.
Though every actor in the cast is a delight, the true revelation here is Ehrenreich, who gives such an instant star-is-born performance in a very tricky and specific role. The young actor has shown promise before, in films such as Beautiful Creatures and Stoker, but now he’s a full-fledged movie star. Ehrenreich truly gets this character — the goodness, the unironic sincerity, the intellectual limitations — and the fact that he’s so much less famous than the rest of the cast (though that won’t be the case for long) really makes him stand out. The Coens task Ehrenreich with doing everything imaginable — he chases bad guys on horseback, he sings and strums, he has lasso skills that are a sight to behold. He so completely channels this particular character and setting and era that it’s as if the Coens beamed him in from the past just to be in this movie.
When, years from now, we look back at the Coens’ filmography, no one will rank Hail, Caesar! among their top-tier work. This is no Inside Llewyn Davis or No Country for Old Men or Fargo. It’s actually as light as air, totally frivolous. The Coens don’t have anything deep or powerful to say here. The film is really just an excuse for them to use Old Hollywood as a giant sandbox, an opportunity to play big-budget games with their memories of the kinds of movies they loved as children and an outlet for their nostalgia. Hail, Caesar! is very clearly a film made by people with a deep love for movies; it’s a grandly entertaining appreciation of the film industry and film history. And, at a time when Hollywood is focusing more and more exclusively on mega-budget sequels and soulless franchise properties, that has great value indeed.
