Movie Review: 'Hail, Caesar!'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- On paper, the prospect of getting the moviemaking Coen Brothers' take on what we think of as Hollywood's "Golden Age" is close to irresistible.
But movies aren't made on paper.
And their new barrel-of-monkeys period piece, Hail, Caesar!, despite a sprinkling of magical moments, falls well short of expectations, a whole that's less than the sum of its parts.
It's a Hooray for Hollywood musical comedy written, produced, directed, and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen, the latest entry on their extensive resume, which includes Fargo, Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, Barton Fink, Burn After Reading, True Grit, Raising Arizona, and Inside Llewyn Davis.
It centers around a studio executive for Capital Pictures, a Hollywood "fixer" in the 1950s, during the latter stretch of that Golden Age, a guy whose mandate it is to keep the studio's stars in line and short-circuit their seemingly inevitable scandals before the press steps in and publishes.
Josh Brolin plays the damage-control fixer, Eddie Mannix, and the star-studded ensemble cast includes George Clooney as studio star Baird Whitlock; Scarlett Johansson as expecting Esther Williams-like aquatic star DeeAnna Moran; Ralph Fiennes as frustrated director Laurence Laurantz; Jonah Hill as studio investigator Jonah Siverman; Tilda Swinton as twin-sister gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker; Frances MacDormand as chain-smoking film editor C.C. Calhoun; Alden Ehrenreich as dimwitted cowboy star Hobie Doyle; and -- perhaps most delightful of all because he gets to channel Gene Kelly -- Channing Tatum as song-and-dance man Burt Gurney.
The plot in a nutshell: when superstar Baird Whitlock, starring in the studio production that lends the film its title, is kidnapped by a Communist group that call themselves The Future, guilt-ridden Mannix is in charge of getting him back, even while he contemplates the lucrative job offer he just got from an aviation company.
On one side is lower-stress job and financial security; on the other, the realization that, as the song says, there's no business like show business.
It's a farcical, colorful world that the Coens have created here. But, as has happened in a number of their films, the narrative takes a back seat to the collection of highlights and the movie itself doesn't seem all that interested in its own plot.
By focusing on a movie studio, the Coens get to look in on a variety of genre -- Biblical dramas, musicals, western thrillers, drawing-room comedies, and aquatic epics among them. But although the Coens' love of movies shines through, the movie feels anecdotal and arbitrary, as if the Coens were doing a form of large-scale doodling.
Hail, Caesar! doesn't follow through on its build to anywhere. Everything seems a digression. We appreciate the affectionate homages and bursts of witty dialogue, but we wait for the plot strands and character sketches to be tied together in some way and it never quite happens. Then the film stops rather than ends.
Regrettably, that's a recipe for disappointment or dissatisfaction.
So we'll fix 2 stars out of 4 for the Coen Brothers' scattered salute to Hollywood. Hail, Caesar!, we who wish we were about to die laughing want to salute thee but find ourselves complaining instead.
