It’s an all-star cast (Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, and Channing Tatum) in a comedy that’s written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Lisa has her take on “Hail, Caesar!”
HAIL, CAESAR!
(Universal)
Release date: February 5, 2016 (WIDE)
Written, Produced and Directed by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum
Studio Synopsis:
Four-time Oscar®-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, True Grit, Fargo) write and direct Hail, Caesar!, an all-star comedy set during the latter years of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum, Hail, Caesar! follows a single day in the life of a studio fixer who is presented with plenty of problems to fix. The comedy is produced by the Coen brothers under their Mike Zoss Productions banner alongside Working Title Films’ Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
Lisa’s Take:
“Hail, Caesar!” is the Coen Brothers’ funniest, funnest, campiest and most entertaining film yet.
George Clooney portrays an easily influenced, mediocre-to-great actor who never gets to change out of his Roman costume and is drugged and kidnapped. Channing Tatum has a small part as a sailor / Communist, but really impressed me with his old-style Hollywood singing, tap-dancing and barroom acrobatics. The homoerotic undertones of his “No Dames” dance number got a lot of laughs from the audience. Scarlett Johansson is a swimming beauty with a caustic mouth and Alden Ehrenreich is Hobie Doyle, a gun-toting, drawling cowboy actor who can’t follow Ralph Fiennes’ upscale direction or vocabulary (Fiennes is really perfect as director Lawrence Lorentz).
As actors playing actors, “Hail, Caesar!” has a movie-within-a-movie quality that is really fun. Behind the scenes of the various 1940s-50s era movie productions are more serious references to the H-bomb, Lockheed Martin, and “the future.” Because the movie industry isn’t really going anywhere, is it? “How about when everyone gets TVs and stops going to movies?” one character says.
And Josh Brolin – well, I could watch him forever. He plays the lead, Eddie Mannix, whose job it is to keep all these actors in line. Brolin has that steely eye quality that keeps you guessing about his character. He confesses his sins daily, including lying to his wife about smoking cigarettes, and promptly gets to work bitch-slapping his actors and organizing ransom for the gullible Clooney.
There are some other small roles (based on real people of the era) that leave you wanting more – Frances McDormand as a chain-smoking, near-sighted film editor and Tilda Swinton as twin gossip columnist sisters.
The movie is fun for its juxtaposition of Hollywood “problems” – hiding an unwed actress’s pregnancy, fixing marriages and creating images ¬– and the full glamour and superficiality of the movies of that era. You can add another layer to the story with behind the scenes conversations about communism, religion and gender roles that are sometimes stereotypical, sometimes funny and surprising.