Joel and Ethan Coen have made movies that people didn’t like before. Even their greatest films are far enough afield from normal sensibilities to keep them from being loved by everyone. Then there are the movies they’ve made that most people agree just aren’t very good—things like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. The Coen brothers making movies that people don’t like is nothing new. I never imagined that they’d make a movie that I didn’t like though. I’m the guy who thinks Intolerable Cruelty is oozing with way too much charm to be bad, the guy who thinks that few movies are as consistently hysterical as The Ladykillers. Unfortunately, however, the day that I didn’t like a Coen brothers movie has finally come, and the movie that made it happen is Hail, Caesar!
The film stars Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a fixer of sorts for a prominent film studio in the 1950s. His job is to keep the studio’s unruly movie stars in line and to cover things up when their decadent Hollywood behavior threatens to generate bad enough publicity to hurt the company’s bottom line. Though he’s tasked with taking care of several unique problems over the course of the film, his primary concern is that one of the studio’s biggest leading men, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), has been kidnapped by Communists. You see, given his position, it’s his responsibility to negotiate Whitlock’s release. People in the know will tell you that Mannix is based on a real-life figure of the same name, a man who worked for MGM rather than the fictional Capital Pictures that exists in this film.
Therein lies the source of the pleasures that Hail, Caesar! has to offer. This film exists as a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s enamored with the era’s aesthetics, its archetypes, its gossip, and its sense of Manifest Destiny dream production. If you’ve watched a healthy dose of classic movies—the musicals, the Westerns, the screwball comedies, the historical epics, and everything in between—or if you’ve read books on the dark side of stardom that existed back in the Golden Age, then there are going to be a million nods, winks, and references to all of the actors and scandals of the era hidden in here that you’ll appreciate. You’ll be able to keep a checklist, noting every reference to something from the past that you understand, all while patting yourself on the back for being so smart. The problem with Hail, Caesar! is that all of the inside baseball Easter egg-laying in the world still doesn’t add up to a satisfying feature film if it doesn’t get buoyed by things like character and story.
Hail, Caesar! isn’t shaggy in its construction, but it still manages to be full of useless asides. Scarlett Johansson is introduced to us as a starlet who’s been impregnated out of wedlock, and whose single-mom status could hurt her position as a box-office draw. Alden Ehrenreich is introduced to us as a ridin’ and ropin’ star of cowboy pictures who’s having trouble handling the more acting-heavy tasks put in front of him now that the studio is trying to transition him into being a more mainstream leading man. Tilda Swinton is introduced to us as a pair of twin gossip columnists who are always hounding Mannix while trying to get the latest scoops regarding his out of control stable of actors. All of these situations seem to be ripe with potential for drama, tension, or character growth, but none of them add up to anything. They’re all easily solved, with so little struggle on the part of Mannix that their stakes are never even made clear to the audience. Even worse, each subplot is introduced and resolved in the span of about five minutes, and none have any connection to the main plot of Whitlock’s kidnapping whatsoever. For a while there you watch Hail, Caesar! assuming that everything being introduced to you is going to come together in some sort of chaotic climax, and then it just doesn’t. What a waste of a supremely talented cast.
Of course, the Coens have made films where the plot wasn’t the point in the past, but the difference there is that those film were so fueled on humor and personality that it didn’t matter in the end whether or not the story told had any real substance to it—they were still madcap entertainment. Hail, Caesar! has one scene that takes place in a dark film editing bay that is stolen by Frances McDormand that gets laughs, and one impressive song and dance sequence that features Channing Tatum that’s fun to watch, but they’re not nearly entertaining enough to support an entire feature film. The truth of the matter is, 90% of the run time of this movie is just boring, and that’s not an accusation I ever imagined myself making of any movie made by these two geniuses.
Even with something like No Country For Old Men, where the Coens eschewed the generally accepted rules of storytelling and purposefully avoided building to and paying off climaxes, it was clear that they did so for thematic reasons that deepened your understanding of the story they were telling and that felt appropriate to the characters they were working with. Here there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why Johansson’s character exists, to why we’re made privy to the career struggles of Ehrenreich’s, or to why Ralph Fiennes shows up playing a director of a troubled comedy of manners picture who then disappears completely. Even a potential storyline where Whitlock looks like he might enter into collusion with his kidnappers gets unceremoniously interrupted and then tossed aside in favor of the next D-plot that gets introduced only to go nowhere. If the dialogue here was more quotable, if the characters were more charming, then Hail, Caesar! might have been able to have its storytelling sins forgiven, but they weren’t, so they aren’t. Honestly, the only reason to see this movie is to witness how effortlessly charming Ehrenreich is and how much the camera loves him. Once somebody gives this guy the right feature role, he’s got the potential to become the sort of giant star we haven’t seen since the Golden Age of Hollywood.
