I once tried to write
one of these about what the Coen brothers' 1998 masterpiece The
Big Lebowski was all about. All
I managed to do was try. A detective movie where the detective is so
inept he barricades his door from the wrong side, and a bowling movie
containing almost no bowling; it had to be about something,
didn't it? I might get round to finishing it some day. In the
meantime, the Joel and Ethan Coen continue to be brilliant and
frustrating in a ratio of about 80% to 20%.
Whatever
you think of them, they generally don't make objectively bad films.
With the possible exception of a mid 2000s blip which saw them try to
apply their trademark screwball comedy
slant to screwball comedies Intolerable Cruelty
and The Ladykillers
which yielded mixed results, they have been a uniquely odd and
addictive proposition. Their idiosyncratic tendencies towards
repeated dialogue, bizarre character names, plots involving botched
ransoms, and the vague notion that they are deliberately undermining
everything they do mark them out as both pioneering auteurs and
almost reliably safe at the same time.
From
2004s The Ladykillers,
they have (almost) alternated between fun capers and intellectual
dramas, with the lines blurred between the two. They have followed
classy New York folk scene snapshot Inside Llewyn Davis
with another light caper, Hail, Caesar! and
this follows a vague trend. 2007's brutal and sparse Cormac McCarthy
adaptation No Country For Old Men was
followed by the underrated Burn After Reading.
Too silly to be anything other than a caper, albeit a creepy and
violent one, they made a film about the complex workings of the CIA
with a plot so complex that trying to follow it was a redundant
exercise; a screwball meta-comedy? It then ended with the brilliant
J K Simmons' CIA chief stating “I guess we learned not to do it
again... I'm fucked if I know what we did.” At this point I was
doubled over with laughter in the cinema, having realised that the
Coens, as well as mocking the workings of the intelligence services,
had been laughing at us, the audience, all along.
Had
they been doing this all along? Is trying to unravel their mysteries
another redundant exercise? Weird plot tics like the cat from Inside
Llewyn Davis, the siren/frog
sequence from O Brother Where Art Thou,
or the the actual detective popping up in The Big Lebowski;
have these all been jokes at our expense? If so, I applaud them for
it.
More
so than the audience, they appear to have been poking fun at aspects
of American culture and cinema genres from very early on: gangsters,
divorce lawyers, folk musicians, cowboys, the CIA, detective noir,
the Deep South and the birth of the blues, various geographical
oddities (Arizona, Santa Rosa, Minnesota, Texas) and Hollywood
itself. Their films can simultaneously have both a strong sense of
time and place, and be strangely otherworldly and detached.
Hail, Caesar!
while in no way a classic, is a thoroughly enjoyable caper through
the glorious studio system era of Hollywood. Josh Brolin's studio
'fixer' (think Malcolm Tucker without the mobile phone or the
swearing) attempts to arrange the release of George Clooney's
kidnapped leading man so the titular biblical epic can be finished.
This effectively sums up the plot, however the Coens embellish it
with a series of loosely woven vignettes, the point of which... well
I'm really not sure. Perhaps they're just poking fun at another
aspect of Americana: the film industry.
The
subjects covered are well known aspects of 1950s Hollywood lore,
shown through the prism of Brolin's Eddie Mannix whose job is to
protect the studio's finances and public image by ensuring that
actors don't 'misbehave', and that films are completed. We get to
see Mannix at work: he prevents an up-and-coming actress damaging her
image (and that of the studio) with sleazy nude photos (he knows the
police officers who show up by name); arranges potential marriage
partners for Scarlett Johannsen's stroppy pregnant-out-of-wedlock
star; finds a last minute replacement for an actor in a expensive
period picture (resulting in Alden Ehrenreich's popular singing
cowboy hilariously miscast in the role); and keep embarrassing
stories out of the gossip columns with promises of exclusives.
Hail, Caesar!
shines a spotlight on things that were major issues at the time but
are now the stuff of comedy: Communist writers secretly influencing
the content of films (the Senator McCarthy witch hunts were a huge
issue in the day, with several people blacklisted as Communists); the
moral outrage at an actress being pregnant but not married; the idea
that an actor could be homosexual could cause reputational damage
(Clooney's character is an amalgam of several actors, including Rock
Husdon); the bloated Biblical epic, and the requirement for the
studio to seek approval from religious groups. There is also a
brilliantly inappropriate moment where a man trying to headhunt
Mannix for munitions company Lockheed discusses nuclear testing in a
Japanese restaurant.
Bearing
all that in mind, you would think that Hail,Caesar!, too
comic in tone to be a drama, is a satire of the period. But the
Coens, as they frequently do, keep the tone too detached to do
anything approaching making a point. This is where they can be
frustrating. They stage brilliant parodies of Hollywood staples in
Johannsen's aquatic musical number, Ehrenreich's cowboy ditty 'Lonely
Old Moon' and Channing Tatum's pitch perfect Gene Kelly musical
parody 'No Dames', but don't do so with any real degree of affection.
They seemingly refuse to condemn, condone, or even really comment on
any of the content. Granted, the Communist writers' cell is largely
comprised of idiots who are unable to agree on their own ethos
(brilliantly, Alfred Molia's character is told to shut up every time
he speaks), but so is the entire film studio. None more so than
Clooney whose A-list star is easily converted to Communism without
understanding it, and then back from it via a slap from Mannix.
Nobody is presented as right or wrong, good or bad and the only real
emotional payoff is Mannix' decision to remain with the studio
instead of moving to Lockheed, ending the film with a smile. All
they're really doing throughout the film is showing you stuff and
saying “this happened”. The most satirical thing they do is cast
some of the biggest stars in the world and then barely use them.
The
Coen brothers off-form are comfortably better than most directors on
top form, and they're not even really off form here. Hail,
Caesar! could be a warm and
affectionate love letter to their industry at a time of strife; it
could be a satire of an absurd industry at a particularly absurd
time. It manages to be neither. It's thoroughly enjoyable but, like
Burn After Reading or
Lebowski, don't bother
trying to work out what they're getting at; it's probably nothing.
In my opinion, the joke is again on the viewer for trying to work it
out: you find yourself looking for subtext throughout the film and
then two thirds of the way through, an actual submarine turns up...
*applauds
the Coens.
