The Brothers Coen, writer/ directors Joel
and Ethan, are smart guys in love with Hollywood movies, the people who make
them, actors, directors and studio executives and assortment of tradesmen, call
girls, corrupt cops, sycophants, idiots , fools and intellectual flyweights who
inhabit this world of eccentric denizens. These are creatures managing to
create the magic and myth making that has kept American enthralled sitting in
dark theaters for decades, excited and inspired by images and tales that taught
generations how to know right from wrong, how to love, how to be brave, when to
love, when to cry, how to pick yourself up and face the new day with a smile
and humming spry song as they walk with great purpose into an endless series of
serene sunsets and hopeful sunrises. We know this as "The Hollywood
Ending".
Hollywood producers required endings
encouraging audiences to wallow in the fantasy of easy Happiness at the
end of every critical moment , to return again, buy more tickets, eat more
popcorn , and invest further on a collective consciousness embedded by
lights and shadows flashing across a silver -grey screen. Joe and Ethan Coen
are all about Hollywood endings, but what in a turn in a career noted for
quirk, screwball antics, unexpected departures from developed themes and genre
expectations, they've made a splendid new film about Hollywood endings, Hail
Caesar! Eddie Mannix, a studio executive for Capitol
Pictures who heads a department that names him the head of "Physical
Production", a position that essentially makes a him the studio's
"fixer" who keeps the potentially embarrassing details of the lives
of their stars out of the newspapers.
The movies are successful because of the
fantasies they contain, and the actors are part of that concoction as well.
Only the names the studio has given them and the back stories publicists
concocted for them are allowed for public consumption, and it's Mannix's task
to keep quirks, unacceptable politics and sexual preferences, alcoholism , drug
addiction, religious deviation, safely sequestered far from the public view.
You get the idea; in this period, set in the late forties-early fifties in the
waning years of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Movies Are American , and the
Actors Are Americans. One loose thread can make this whole garment fall
apart.Eddie Mannix's job is to keep things stashed where they need to be, to
make problems go away, to keep the production line humming right along.
Sometimes it seems too much even for his broad
shoulders, starting when the star of this religious epic in production
"Hail Caesar! The Story of the Christ" is kidnapped . Mannix gets on
the case of finding the missing star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), whom he
suspects of going off on a bender. Whitlock, still in his Roman soldier
costume, awakes from a drugged stupor , finding himself secreted in a regal
beach house in Malibu perched on a rocky crag on the shore line, where he
shortly meets a room full of chain smoking Marxists, actually screen writers
disillusioned with Hollywood when they didn't get rich from the successful
movies they wrote, seduce the shallow Whitlock with the rudiments of
Dialectical Materialism and how he, a victim of The System no less than the
common man on the street , can participate in his own taking and help turn the
Studio's energies against itself and cause the whole enterprise to collapse.
Whitlock is the not the most critical of thinkers and soaks up the Marxist cant
easily. Would you like to help free the common man on the street he's asked.
Baird pronounces that he's all for the little guy and that he'll ago along.
Moments after he becomes a freshly anointed Communists committed to world
revolution, Whitlock goes for what he knows, asserting that he ought to get a
cut of the ransom from his own kidnapping.
What follows is a kind of shaggy dog story that
only the Coen Brothers seem capable doing consistently well, the tale where one
nettlesome situation is compounded by other pitfalls, booby traps, and
situational snafus having no apparent end. Mannix, a squared jawed, forthright,
dedicated man who wants harmony and and benign order in the manufacture of
images, has more than the Whitlock imbroglio to deal.
The things that go wrong resemble nothing so much
as a chain collision, a bunch of small things that add to an oppressive weight:
a star of Esther Williams aquatic ballet fantasies stops a scene being shot and
off camera has trouble pulling off her mermaid costume because she is pregnant
and unmarried. Mannix 's job is to get her married and legitimize the unborn
child and have a story the public will accept. Elsewhere, a high society movie
under production has no leading man with either acting chops or elegance to
fill the a crucial role. Mannix is ordered to bring in an amiable and earnest
cowboy star to fill the role. The problem, of course, is that the young man
can't act and his drawl, sweet as it sounds, is intractable. The director , a
man of high manners and worldly in ways more than could be openly discussed or
depicted in the Golden Age films, tries to get the suddenly dark suited hick to
enter a party, walk over to a couch when beckoned by a young ingenue and to
reply to her with a simple response. This winds up with the director trying to
give the uncomfortable cowboy acting lessons, face to face, trying to get the
poor man to change the way to become more stylized in facial expression and
vocal cadence. Each time the cowboy actor fails , the frustration increasing ,
the clash of culture and lifestyle providing perfecting comedy tension. The
director comes to Mannix to complain, but Eddie lays down the law saying that
the decision comes from the studio owners and says the director has to make
good with a bad fit for the role. The director acquiesces and leaves, but
Mallick wonders whether this will work at all.
The pile up continues through the film, one thing
after the other, each threatening to bring down the tent. The Coen Brothers
have a sure touch in the way in the way sub plots are introduced, resolved or
handled, and the way they use devices to get to ideas that other wise wouldn't
fit the main story line quite so neatly. This being a film about a movie about
movies being made and the illusions being created, it was an inspiration for
them to have a number of scenes that were a review of bits of film being
edited, a cogent way to lampoon classic Hollywood genres quickly and surely. In
the "Hail Caesar" sequence, there is a glorious shot of clouds
back-lit with Maxfield Parrish-style sunlight, everything celestial and
heavenly, but suddenly there is a card that appears reading 'CREATOR TO BE
SHOT" to single that the image that follows is still pending. It's a
wonderful blending of two themes the movie introduces, the first in Mannix, a
religious who goes to confession , it seems, at least once a day, who prays the
rosary over the problems he has to fix, with that of the apparently atheist
Communist cell of screenwriters who fancy they have discovered the Science of
History and who dedicate themselves to solving the ills of the world through
more drastic means.
Intriguing as well is a preview of a musical
under production, a bar full of sailors who , watching the girls leave at
closing time and who are going to sea for eight months, begin to moan and groan
that they "won't see no dames" where they will be. This turns into a
song and then an athletic dance sequence, male sailors, in full whites, dancing
with other male sailors, vaguely hinting as while singing about about everything
they can do with each other , but that it will be different because there won't
be no dames. It is a fun,well rendered dance number, with barely contained
homophobia at the root of it. It's a nice reference and tribute, I suspect, to
the legacy of closeted gay writers,directors actors and actresses that worked
in Hollywood for decades, adding the brilliantly coded stylistics from the
diverse elements of gay culture, a monumental contribution to the art of the
Hollywood movie.
Hail Caesar! is a shaggy dog story
, of course, quirky , elegant, slap stick, stammering, screwball and acidly
satiric at various turns of plots and subplots. Joel and Ethan Coen thrive on
going against expectation , with an uncanny sense of timing of when to do so.
They are adept of getting you hooked on a notions being played out on the
screen and then interrupting it with zany intrusions that are their subversive
way of telling us that the movie makers are only telling stories that are
supported by an audiences willingness to stop arguing long enough with the
ill-logic of movie's premise and enjoy the brief respite a good yarn avails us
to.
The point of a shaggy dog stories is that there
are not points, that once a story begins and proceeds through related incident
and complication as new locals and characters of all sorts are introduced over
the course of the fictional journey, one expects a great punch line, a profound
moral, illustration of life - affirming platitudes, or some horrible,
inevitable tragedy; shaggy dog stories aren't like that though. The end of them
are usually some small pun for which the build up was more intricate than it
needed to be, but that's the point. Everything winds up where it's supposed to
be by forces subtler and more incidental than we can imagine.
What the subtle forces maybe are unknown at any
given point , and the Coen Brothers don't speak to that. They make movies,
though, that have us laughing and scratching our heads at the same time,
evidence of genius in my view. Hail Caesar! is a funny, busy,
puzzling and literate screwball comedy, compelling in it's engrossing mixture
of sweetness and cynicism. Very fine stuff indeed!
