The Coen brothers have almost certainly never made a film quite so typical of their own work as this energetic, only partially successful slice of Hollywood screwball.
Josh Brolin plays yet another of the Coens' sat-upon heroes who – like the protagonists of The Big Lebowski and A Serious Man – strives for peace in a world of comic chaos. There is yet another baffling kidnapping. Yet more religion seeps in at the philosophical corners. You could see it as a sampling menu for Chez Coen.
Like most sampling menus, however, Hail, Caesar! leaves you craving a proper main course. Most of it works, but not much works very well. Many of the best bits could be inserted randomly into half-a- dozen other Coen films. No enthusiast will want to miss it.
Brolin plays a weary Hollywood fixer named Eddie Mannix. In the course of the film, Mannix runs up against various brewing scandals, but most of his efforts are focused on tracing missing movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney).
Marxist cadre
Fairly early on, we learn that a cadre of Marxist screenwriters has dragged the lunkhead to a mansion in Malibu. Stockholm Syndrome sets in and Whitlock begins to question the ethics of his employers at (hem, hem!) Capitol Pictures.
There is a subplot involving DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), an aquatic movie star who has found herself in the family way. We also encounter semi-attached problems concerning hopeless efforts to restyle singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) as a light dramatic actor of the Noel Coward school.
You could see Hail, Caesar! as a translation of James Ellroy's pestilent noir into ramshackle farce. With his broad frame, his rough efficiency and his willingness to slap sense into both guys and broads, Mannix might have stepped straight from one of that author's Hollywood yarns.
Like Ellroy, the Coens weave movie history into their fiction. DeeAnna's act is clearly based on that of Esther Williams, while the scheme to handle her pregnancy echoes a famous story concerning Loretta Young. Whitlock is currently starring in a film – the Hail, Caesar! of our title – that shouts out relationships with Ben Hur.
In one of the cleverest conceits, Tilda Swinton plays twin gossip columnists, who, though they both resemble Hedda Hopper, point towards the rivalry between that harpy and Louella Parsons.
Most everybody has fun and most everybody passes some of that fun onto viewers. Clooney doesn’t come across much like a Burt Lancaster or a Charlton Heston (too soft at the edges?), but the notion of a stupider George Clooney being abducted by Communists is funny enough to be going on with. The frustrated interchanges between suave director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) and the useless Hobie allow both the veteran and the younger actor to exploit top-flight comic timing.
Sadly, the various units don't fit together into a satisfactory mechanism. DeeAnna's story in particular appears to be bolted on and Johansson, though she is always good as a brassy dame, is more than a little underused. The final solution to the various interlocking mysteries is blurted out like the solution to a bad Christmas-cracker riddle. The carefully honed structure of the Coens' Blood Simple is nowhere to be found here.
What we end up with is a sequence of beautifully shot comic vignettes and high-end pastiches. Johansson’s swimming number is superb. A song-and-dance bit with Channing Tatum feels uncomfortably stranded between Stanley Donen and something more arch and off-Broadway (though Tatum himself is excellent).
Mind you, relatively few people got The Big Lebowski first time round. There may well be complex patterns hidden within the apparent randomness of Hail, Caesar! Many will be prepared to give it a second chance.
