HAIL, CAESAR!: Das Capitol

Directors: Ethan and Joel Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Veronica Osorio, Heather Goldenhersh, Alison Pill, Max Baker
Runtime: 106 mins.
2016

Hail, Caesar! is a dumb movie about dumb movies. As such, it never reaches the level of profundity of the Coen Bros.' long list of masterpieces, or even the escalating zaniness of their former comedic output like The Big Lebowski. If one were forced to rank their oeuvre, Hail, Caesar! has got to come in pretty low on the list, but the good news is that it doesn't aspire to be at the tippy top. I suspect that if seasoned filmmakers like the Coens tried to make their best-movie-ever every time they set anything to film, they would get burned out fast. Hail, Caeser! is clearly a screw around movie for everyone involved, and it ends up being a passionate and glorious one at that.

If you were to be so inclined to suggest that this movie has a plot, it would surround the activities of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a 1950's Hollywood fixer whose job it is to keep the aptly named Capitol Pictures up and running. He's not a creative, he just keeps the creatives functioning like cogs in a well-oiled machine. He has received an offer for a more stable job with reasonable work hours and far less stress, and this offer occupies his mind during the events of the film, which amount to a particularly trying few days for Mannix. His big movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped by a group of shady communists who call themselves The Future, the media is circling like vultures, and there are a laundry list of other on-and-off-set troubles that Mannix must aggressively manage. In the end, is the creation of Hollywood blockbuster films worth all the trouble?


The narrative bounces around the sets of five or six movies as Mannix goes about his business. Hail, Caesar! is clearly an excuse to assemble an incredibly talented squad of twenty-first century actors for the sake of recreating the Golden Age of Cinema. We have George Clooney playing a Roman centurion in a sprawling period piece, Scarlett Johansson at the center of a musical mermaid spectacular, Channing Tatum headlining a tap dance musical about sailors lusting after dames. The Coens let whole scenes from these movies play out for us, though the framing is different each time. Sometimes we are situated offstage in Mannix's point of view, sometimes the director's, and sometimes the actor's. Sometimes the camera hops into the mise en scene and films bits of it as a 2016 director might. Sometimes we see footage being worked on in the editing bay, and sometimes we see the final product. A great deal of the movie is spent reveling in the classic studio filmmaking process, while also undercutting it with both subtle and obvious commentary. In short, it's delightful.

The fascinating thing is that we keep expecting each new introduction of a character, be they actor or director, to mean something in the long run. The threads, however, are resolute in their refusal to come together into a traditional plot. Hail, Caesar! is best thought of more as a pastiche with a few central events that vaguely give everything an excuse to be in the same movie. The Coens have experimented with anti-narrative flourishes for the entirety of their career (No Country for Old Men represents their ultimate achievement in turning narrative on its head to communicate the uncaring thoughtlessness of the universe), and Hail, Caesar! is a natural extension of that. It's like a less obtuse Inherent Vice. You never stop enjoying what you're watching, but at some point you need to just lean back and stop thinking about it too much.

Not that there isn't plenty to unpack thematically. This might be a screw around movie, but the Coens would never have made it if they didn't have anything to say. Every beat in this film is exploring the way we create meaning through narrative. We get to see how ridiculous and often accidental the process of creation is for studio filmmaking. More specifically, we are constantly confronted with how these creators' visions are dictated by the demands of capitalism and religion. Our distance from the 50's makes all of it seem comically absurd, but our moviemaking apparatus is functionally the same today. Meanwhile, the primary character arc of the movie follows Mannix's quest to spin a meaningful narrative out of his duties. The conflicts in the movie issue from clashes between ideologies: capitalist vs. communist, Christian vs. communist, highbrow vs. lowbrow, liberal vs. conservative. Hail, Caesar! vigorously lampoons our nearest and dearest American values, and it has a great time doing it.

At one point in the movie we witness an onset conversation between a production manager and an extra about exactly what category of extra he is. We never get to see more than the extra's feet because he is nailed to a cross. This is exactly the sort of absurdist scene that Hail, Caesar! excels at, one that slams cultural forces together so hard that we are broken out of our traditional understanding of them. For decades Hollywood films have been some of the strongest and most influential cultural mechanisms to shape our reality. In many ways movies dictate what is possible and what is acceptable. The Coens have been dealing in this trade their whole careers, so this movie is the perfect opportunity for them to remind us not to take it all so seriously. All of our most iconic movies have sustained enormous amounts of idiocy on their way to the silver screen.

4 / 5  BLOBS