The lost empires of Hollywood and Rome form a quaint backdrop to the Coen brothers’ very enjoyable new movie. It’s a crazy, if lugubrious, caper about the golden, postwar age of Tinseltown, like a Hollywood tale that PG Wodehouse might have written, but with that ominous deadpan, quirky-Coeny quality where the cheeriness would otherwise go. There are some stunningly realised pastiche set-pieces.
Woody Allen would have made this with exactly the same cast, but picked up the pace by 20% and made Scarlett Johansson’s grumpy Esther Williams-style diva his leading lady. As it is, the Coens give a recurring central-cameo role to George Clooney, playing Baird Whitlock, a pampered middle-aged movie star and none-too-bright alcohol enthusiast, who is drugged and kidnapped by a mysterious group calling themselves the Future. He is nabbed when he is on set, playing the lantern-jawed Roman centurion – humbled and awed by Jesus’s moral authority – in a cheesy biblical epic entitled Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ. Perhaps, just as the Coens made O Brother, Where Art Thou? in homage to the imaginary solemn film project in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, they will be tempted to make this same film with the camp footage they have collected here. Or maybe Mel Gibson already got there with The Passion of the Christ.
It’s a period comedy, of course, comparable to the Coens’ Hollywood fantasy Barton Fink, and is delivered with their signature tendency towards ruminative adagio, letting us savour distinctive period detail and production design. And with much goggling of eyes and arching of brows, and the occasional convulsive head waggle, Clooney shows that comedy is a taste he may have yet fully to acquire as a performer, however commanding a screen presence he always is. Clooney puts it over bigger and broader and zanier than he ever did in O Brother or the Coens’ Intolerable Cruelty. But his self-deprecating charm always wins the day.
The starring role technically belongs to Josh Brolin, playing a fictionalised version of Eddie Mannix, the MGM studio press fixer from that era, who is the one real-life figure in the film. Bob Hoskins played a much more grimly realistic version of Mannix in the 2006 movie Hollywoodland.
Eddie is a troubled, hassled man, pondering a change of career and much given to going to confession. He has to pacify DeeAnna Moran (Johansson), the sexy, mermaid tail-wearing star of a thousand aqua fantasies; Moran is pregnant and this is becoming hard to conceal. Mannix must moreover manage the career of Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a drawling Texan cowpoke, whom the studio bosses have capriciously decided must now be transferred to elegant, swellegant drawing room comedies. This is to the horror of the fastidious Brit who must direct him: Laurence Laurentz, a funny turn from Ralph Fiennes. Mannix must also fend off the intrusions of the twin gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (presumably inspired by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons), both played by Tilda Swinton. Above all, he must keep the Baird Whitlock kidnap out of the papers.
There are some terrific homage sequences, particularly a glorious dance routine with sailors on shore leave in a bar, featuring Channing Tatum doing some very serious hoofing, which raises the ghost of Donald O’Connor.
The Coens’ farce is not exactly hellzapoppin’, more hellzagloomin’ or hellzapregnantwithpossiblemeanin’. And where is it leading us? Well, nowhere very important, and there is only one moment when the comedy gives way to something different. Brolin asks editor CC Calhoun (Frances McDormand) to show him some footage on a Moviola machine: the images freeze, the film ignites and there is a strangulated cry. Something scary is happening, something connected with the choking unreality, hypocrisy and pretence that the Hollywood studios are churning out every day. It is a brilliant, hallucinatory episode.
As for the rest, it bowls very watchably along. There are tongue-in-cheek references to communist infiltration of Hollywood – satirically equivalent to McCarthy-ite paranoia – and also to the bomb. You find yourself waiting for some single killer punch of deadly seriousness to make sense of that slow, tonal twirl of menace. This never really arrives, but that’s a relief in a way. It’s not encumbered with significance, but richly affectionate and very entertaining. Hail, Caesar! is something to be greeted as a gorgeous exercise in style.
