2 1/2 Stars Out of 5 Stars
The Hollywood Golden Age produced not only stories for the big screen but legends and myths for the stars that populate them. From the story of the relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to the sad descent of Judy Garland, these stars’ stories seem even bigger than life than the characters they portrayed in the movies.
“Hail, Caesar!” is the latest Coen Brothers film and revels in Hollywood mythmaking, playing, and fictionalizing the stories of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The Coen Brothers’ love for old Hollywood is evident in their filmography. Whether it's stylistic spoofing, like in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” or a brief flourish like their ode to Busby Berkley in the dance sequence in “The Big Lebowski.”
But, they have never made an outright love letter to the Hollywood of old like they have done with “Hail, Caesar!” The last time they had set a film in '50s Hollywood, it was the cynical masterpiece, “Barton Fink.”
Here, they are much more enthusiastic and joyous in their lampooning.
Set in the fictional Capitol Pictures, a nod to “Barton Fink,” the main character is the real life Eddie Mannix, a Hollywood fixer played by Josh Brolin. A fixer is the person that makes sure everything goes smoothly for the movie studio.
If a star is in trouble with the law, the fixer pays the cops to forget what they saw. If a starlet is pregnant due to wedlock, then a fixer arranges a way for someone to take ownership of the baby just for the starlet to adopt later on. The real life Mannix is a legend in Hollywood lore and the Coens uses this character as a cypher into the world.
The world is what the Coens are more interested in with “Hail, Caesar!” Sure, there is some farcical plot revolving around the kidnapping of George Clooney’s Brad Whitlock, a composite of Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas, by a mysterious group called The Future. But, the Coens do not care about that. Rather this is as close to a sketch film the Coens have ever made.
We go from movie shoot to movie shoot finding fictional versions of real Hollywood stars. Scarlett Johansson plays an Esther Williams type, as a starlet who has to hide her pregnancy. Channing Tatum is a version of Gene Kelly, which makes the recent announcement of a musical starring Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt very exciting. Each section features prominently the Coens signature off-kilter humor and their first out-and-out comedy since “Burn After Reading.”
But, the thread tying everything together is so thin. The Coens is trying to pull back the curtains of a time in which everything is perfectly orchestrated for the viewer. The studios would not allow the existence of paparazzi to photograph one of their stars doing wrong. And if there was a Hedda Hopper-type gossip columnist, she was as much in the studio’s pockets as the stars themselves. Roger Deakins shoots the film with a retro hue that looks so digitally artificial to represent the artificiality of Hollywood. But, everything is so disjointed that nothing felt truly whole.
For the Coen’s they are recreating legends of Old Hollywood, the stories that have been forgotten due to time. And it is fun to see the Coens working in a straight comedy again. That’s because their form of idiocy does not equate to incompetency. Rather, their source of humor is how much we as people are all a cog in this great big farcical machine. And even if “Hail Caesar!” is going to go down as minor Coen Brothers, it's refreshing to see a film with ideas in February.
