Katie Cameron
A&E Editor
For the last 15 years, George Clooney has been telling interviewers that his next project is Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! The only problem was they hadn’t written it yet. Last weekend, all that waiting paid off. The new comedy, in theaters now, features everything from musical numbers to synchronized swimming to (you guessed it) communism.
Hail, Caesar! follows a very long day in the life of Capital Pictures studio fixer Eddie Mannix (played by Josh Brolin in an emotionally resonant performance that rivals the rest of the film’s wackiness) after idiot movie star Baird Whitlock (a hilarious George Clooney) is kidnapped on set. It’s 1950s Hollywood and Mannix has his hands full trying to keep the reputations of his actors in good graces and out of the gossip columns written by Thora and Thesslay Thacker, twin rival reporters each delightfully played by Tilda Swinton. Scarlett Johansson plays a knocked up mermaid, Channing Tatum a homoerotic dancing and singing sailor with a political agenda and newbie Alden Ehrenreich (aka, your new crush; Google him and thank me later) is a cowboy stuffed in a tuxedo. Keep an eye out for Ralph Fiennes, Frances McDormand and Jonah Hill, who all manage to steal scenes, too.
The Coen brothers — the writers/directors/producers behind The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Fargo — feature their usual stylized filmmaking in the movie, with snappy, off-the-wall dialogue and big left turns in plot throughout. Like many of their movies before, a major theme of Hail, Caesar! is trying to find any sort of meaning in this world.
This pursuit becomes playfully blasphemous; in one scene, someone on the movie set asks the extra playing Christ on the cross if he’s “a principal character,” and even Eddie Mannix (who’s driving his priest crazy by harassing him with confession every day) wrestles with whether to put his faith in God or in the movie business.
More than anything, Hail, Caesar! is a visual treat for anyone who loves movies. Given the movie-inside-a-movie setting, scenes from the film are free to sprawl across genres, and the Coen brothers pack in everything from Westerns, musicals and drama. The movie is beautifully shot in a way that never takes itself too seriously. It’s a comedy that pays not-so-serious reverence to the Golden Age of Hollywood, an era, it jokes, where studios cranked out movies and sometimes accidentally made art.
Hail, Caesar! is a pleasant surprise at the box office for February, a month typically barren of any decent movies after the deadlines for awards season. Eddie Mannix may be surrounded by idiots, but don’t be fooled. There’s more substance to Hail, Caesar! than meets the eye underneath all that goofiness, even in a movie where George Clooney spends a full two hours in a gladiator costume.