The Coen brothers have, alas, reached Woody Allen stature in the film industry. By that I mean a) they can get any actor they want for any role, no matter how small; b) since they get great actors at a discount, their films don’t cost much meaning it is easier for them to get their films financed; and c) because of a) and b) they can get films produced on an assembly line basis, even if their idea isn’t terribly inspired.
Hail, Caesar comes off of their last film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which I felt was their most disappointing movie. My favorite one-line review for that film was by someone who said, “I kept waiting for something to happen; it never did.” Hail Caesar is more enjoyable than Davis, but that’s not a high mountain to climb. My reaction to Hail Caesar is that I much preferred the trailers to the actual movie.
Caesar is about a 1950’s studio “fixer” named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) who works for Capitol Pictures (the same outfit in the much better Barton Fink), where he takes care of starlets who find themselves pregnant, locations that are shut down by rain, and missing movie stars. That last is the case of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who is drugged on the set of his latest blockbuster and kidnapped by a group of communist writers.
The setting of a studio in the 1950’s allows the Coens to poke fun at several film genres, notably Esther Williams musicals and highbrow dramas (where dialog includes words like valise, foyer, and divan). There is a knocked-up bathing beauty Deanna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) who needs a husband pronto, and a cowboy star named Hobie Doyle (little-known Alden Ehrenreich, who steals the picture) whom the studio brass want to put in a drawing room drama with dialog that includes lines such as “Would that it t’were so simple.”
Mannix has to raise a $100,000 ransom, find a husband for Moran, and tap dance around twin gossip columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton) who smell something fishy going on. This never reaches the critical mass necessary for an out-and-out farce. I was wishing the Coens had run the screenplay through a word processor a few more times to sort out what sub-plots work and which don’t. A sub-plot about a musical star (Channing Tatum) with uncertain allegiances falls flat (despite Tatum’s wonderful performance in an oddly homo-erotic song and dance number in a sailor musical called, “No Dames”). On the other hand, Hobie’s studio-compelled date with starlet Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio) is given short shrift, given the chemistry that develops between both the characters in the movie and the actors making the movie.
The resolution of all these various plots feels perfunctory and lacking the brilliance of how the Coens fit previous jigsaw puzzles together. It’s almost as if they had the all-star cast lined up (I haven’t mentioned glorified cameos by multiple Oscar nominees Jonah Hill and Ralph Finnes) and had to start filming before they finished the script. With such a cast the acting is of course superb, but no character is given enough time to build a realistic character except for Brolin and Ehrenreich.
It is too much to expect Joel and Ethan Coen to produce a masterpiece like Blood Simple, Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou, and No Country for Old Men on a regular basis, but given the resources available to them, they should be able to do better than Burn After Reading, Inside Llewyn Davis and Hail Caesar. Less splashy films like A Serious Man and The Man Who Wasn’t There would be a step up from working with stars like Clooney and Johansson in not-very-well defined roles.
The Coen Brothers will always be two of my favorite filmmakers, so maybe I hold them to a higher standard. It’s been three years since their last film, and after that long one wishes for more of a meal than a morsel such as Hail Caesar. Their average output is way above that of Woody Allen, who has become mired in mediocrity, but their output since winning the Best Picture Oscar has been ( to my mind) three clunkers (Caesar, Davis, and Reading), an interesting small film (A Serious Man) and remake of a mediocre original film (True Grit). The TV adaptation of Fargo has been the best burnishing of their reputation in the past few years, and they didn’t have that much to do with it.
Hail Caesar isn’t bad, but the Coens should be able to do better.
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