Hail, Cae­sar!

The new film by the Coen broth­ers opens with Catholic con­fes­sion, so I’d like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer one of my own. Since see­ing Hail, Cae­sar!, I haven’t been able to process exact­ly what it is I loved about it. Maybe I didn’t love it, but was hard­wired to reject the like­li­hood that the Coens would/​could make a bad movie. In the moment, my plea­sure recep­tors were rever­ber­at­ing off the scale. Every new scene is a sur­pris­ing delight in what, at the time, appear­ing as a sun­ny, screw­ball satire pin­point­ing the moment where the Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tion line was start­ing to clank and creak. Would that it were so simple…

As the Coens have pro­gressed as artists, they seem less inter­est­ed in shap­ing movies in con­ven­tion­al ways. Just as a clas­si­cal­ly-inclined sculp­tor might focus our atten­tion on a human tor­so with­out a head, or limbs, while using the neg­a­tive space to empha­sise what is and isn’t vis­i­ble, the Coens make movies that con­found expec­ta­tion in sim­i­lar ways. And they’re not doing so to pun­ish and nee­dle their audi­ence, but to chal­lenge them, play­ful­ly. Take, for exam­ple, a film like No Coun­try for Old Men, which in its final third flut­ters away from its cen­tral chase dynam­ic to wax philo­soph­i­cal (and bib­li­cal) on the inti­ma­tions of all that’s gone before. Else­where, 2014’s Inside Llewyn Davis is, nar­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, more of a loop than a straight line.

Hail, Cae­sar! resem­bles a clus­ter of occa­sion­al­ly con­flict­ing res­o­lu­tions that have been pre­sent­ed as a the­sis on which there is no dis­cernible out­come. A set of pro­pos­als more than a finite state­ment. Its cen­tral char­ac­ter is a Hol­ly­wood stu­dio fix­er (his job title is head of ​“phys­i­cal pro­duc­tion”) whose ded­i­ca­tion to help­ing his employ­ees manœu­vre around per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al fol­lies verges on obses­sion. It also sug­gests the Coens believe that mak­ing art is not a case of an untram­melled cre­ative out­pour­ing sanc­tioned by peo­ple with mon­ey. It’s usu­al­ly the result of peo­ple who are able to solve a diverse array of small prob­lems with­out muss or fuss. The art that drops off the con­vey­er belt at the end of a shift is almost a hap­py by-prod­uct of cold process.

This fix­er is Eddie Man­nix, played by Josh Brolin and based on a real fig­ure from Tinseltown’s back pages. For much of the film, his sole char­ac­ter trait is mild anx­i­ety, born from a non-com­mit­tal reli­gious fer­vour and the belief that he’s not car­ry­ing out his duties to the best of his abil­i­ties. He’s also a char­ac­ter who craves affec­tion from all around him: his wife, his col­leagues and the press.

The film offers an extreme­ly rare por­trait of the movie indus­try in which the tal­ent as well as the man­age­ment are, if not sym­pa­thet­ic, then at least prin­ci­pled. The film takes place most­ly on the lot of the fic­tion­al Capi­tol Pic­tures, which eagle-eyed Coens fans will recall was the stu­dio that employed pinko whinge­bag Bar­ton Fink to write a lit­tle Wal­lace Beery wrestling pic­ture. But that was 1941, a time of bare­ly con­cealed fury and depres­sion. Per Hail, Cae­sar!, the stu­dio has lurched in to an era of jovi­al­i­ty and pos­si­bly even a soft­en­ing of ambi­tion. The good times are rolling.

We soon dis­cov­er that Man­nix has prob­lems to deal with, but they’re not actu­al­ly that press­ing or impor­tant. An Esther Williams-like aquat­ic star­let (played by Scar­lett Johans­son) has been knocked up, so a team of back-room legal stooges are brought in to com­plete the nec­es­sary fid­dles. A fresh faced, Audie Mur­phy-like gun­slinger (Alden Ehren­re­ich) is find­ing it tough tran­si­tion­ing to a svelte, puck­ered romance à la Noël Cow­ard. Also, Baird Whit­lock (George Clooney), the twin­kle-toothed lead­ing man of the studio’s cen­tre­piece Bib­li­cal epic, enti­tled Hail, Cae­sar!, is kid­napped by irate left-lean­ing screen­writ­ers. They attempt to con­vince him to see the con­tent­ment he would expe­ri­ence from help­ing them to reclaim the means of pro­duc­tion while also attempt­ing to secure funds for their com­rades back in Moscow. And they almost do.

The beau­ty of Hail, Cae­sar! is in its cen­tral para­dox: the broth­ers tell us that mak­ing movies on an indus­tri­al scale comes with untold logis­ti­cal hor­rors. Peo­ple lose con­cen­tra­tion on what they’re sup­posed to be doing, their minds wan­der and they for­get their agreed goals. This blur­ring of ideals results in the film’s only scene of vio­lence, and even though it’s rel­a­tive­ly soft com­pared to the blood-lust­ing broth­ers’ past form, it’s strange­ly shock­ing con­sid­er­ing the light­heart­ed context.

Polit­i­cal and roman­tic quan­daries grind between the gears and slow things down. Mar­riages dis­solve, and even the prospect of pack­ing it all in and tak­ing anoth­er job has its temp­ta­tions. A sub-plot in which Man­nix is being poached by an emis­sary from friend­ly weapons man­u­fac­tur­er Lock­heed Mar­tin can be read as rep­re­sent­ing all the times the Coens have per­haps been asked to make pop­ulist projects as direc­tors for hire.

On the flip side, the Coens give us scene after scene of tran­scen­dent screen craft, whether it’s Chan­ning Tatum exe­cut­ing an era-per­fect sailor-themed dance num­ber in the apoc­ryphal MGM-like musi­cal, Swingin’ Dinghy, Ehrenreich’s Hobie Doyle prac­tic­ing his las­so skills in the street, or Clooney inton­ing a floor­board-rat­tling speech for the cli­mac­tic reel of Hail, Cae­sar! The Coens offer no guid­ance as to whether all the toil was worth it. Instead, they have Michael Gam­bon deliv­er­ing a fruiti­ly iron­ic voiceover about how the stu­dio is a mere­ly a venue for the pro­duc­tion of tac­tile dreams. Though their sub­ject is art and movies, they could be talk­ing about any phys­i­cal endeav­our, or act of cre­ation. What is the real val­ue in work­ing towards some­thing beautiful?

One sequence in Hail, Cae­sar! (the film-with­in-the-film) sees Baird Whit­lock expe­ri­ence an epiphany while look­ing into the face of Jesus nailed to the cross – a face that is not revealed to the audi­ence. Con­verse­ly, Man­nix opts for the spir­i­tu­al life out of social neces­si­ty rather than fer­vent desire. Like that sculp­ture, his Catholi­cism defines what he’s not as much as what he is. With the movies he’s had a hand in pro­duc­ing, he gets to look into the face of Christ (or local equiv­a­lent) on an almost dai­ly basis. The Coens even make a joke of this when, dur­ing a screen­ing of Hail, Caesar!’s rush­es, a tem­po­rary title card pops up with the words, ​‘Divine Pres­ence to Be Shot’. More so than in their past work, the Coens have cast them­selves as God, but a con­fused God with a wicked sense of humour.

Though it takes place with­in the same world as Bar­ton Fink, Hail, Cae­sar! makes for a more poet­ic dou­ble bill with the Coens’ rue­ful pre­vi­ous, Inside Llewyn Davis. That film was about how great art – like rev­o­lu­tion – requires a host of pre-con­di­tions to con­nect with an audi­ence. This one looks at that same ques­tion, but from a reverse angle. When that bond has been forged and the deliv­ery per­fect­ed, how then do you retain the atten­tion of your audi­ence? With Hail, Cae­sar! the Coens are ask­ing the ques­tion, what is God doing to retain an audi­ence? Their answer is sim­ple: mak­ing movies.