“Hail, Caesar!” a Universal release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America “for moments of mild language, violence and sensuality”.
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Runtime: 1 hour, 46 minutes. But don’t expect the spell of “Hail, Caesar!” to stick with you beyond the closing credits. “In other words, why is #HailCaesarSoWhite?”
God bless the Coen brothers for the lack of interest in making the same movie twice in a row – even when it doesn’t work out.
The real Mannix worked as general manager for MGM during the studio’s heyday, handling everything from film budgets to maintaining the pristine public images of misbehaving stars. If there’s an issue during a production, be it an unwed mother starlet or a kidnapped leading man, he finds a remedy for the situation.
Not that there are aspects of “Hail, Caesar!” not to like.
“Hail, Caesar!” sounds like a caper, and has been advertised as such, but the Whitlock crisis is only a part of Mannix’s story. After all, the ’50s gave us everything from great films by Alfred Hitchcock and “Ben-Hur” to “Roman Holiday” and “Some Like It Hot”. It’s not that their lesser work is bad, by any means, but it is certainly lesser, and not as great as what we know they’re capable of. The scene is a little slow, but it’s fun, stuff.
When Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the studio’s biggest movie star, is abducted right before he’s supposed to shoot a pivotal scene in an expensive biblical epic, Mannix has to uncover the kidnappers’ motive.
The best of these scenes is the breathtakingly homoerotic musical number “No Dames”, with Tatum making his impressive singing and tap-dancing debut surrounded by enthusiastic chorus boys – all of them camping up a storm in white sailor suits.
Clooney is a joy in “Hail, Caesar!”. They like casting George Clooney as the dope (Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother, Burn After Reading). You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick.
This is one of the Coen brothers’ jolliest and most carefree films – quite a surprise considering its subject matter.
Clooney’s co-stars were asked who they would call to rescue them if they were taken for ransom.
Johansson’s DeeAnna Moran, a star of aquatic films?
Everyone is cheerful. Even the super-bitchy gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (both played by Tilda Swinton) aren’t that vicious really.
In “Hail, Caesar!”, Joel and Ethan Coen extend their career-spanning fascination with humankind’s futility in the face of the larger forces that shape our world to that most beguiling of machines: the Hollywood dream factory.
However, it also feels like a movie that may have suffered delays. And for the Coen brothers, the very best is a high standard.
The Coens and their crack design collaborators – shout out to costume designer Mary Zophres, who comes up with gems in about eight styles/periods – have fun with fake movie titles, taglines and with the conventions of movies from the 1950s: poorly-painted backdrops, phony accents, actors awkwardly sandwiched into the wrong sorts of movies and scandals that need to be covered up. Yet despite a few well-done sequences and some intermittent clever writing.
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The “trainwreck” collision of ideas in it – from Enlightenment philosopher Georg Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to chronicles of the drinking, whoring and juvenile behaviour of movie stars – is what kept me enthralled and thus never bored. But at least the hugely depressing and relatively acclaimed 2013 folk-singer tale “Inside Llewyn Davis” felt like a vision realized, if again, a big downer of a vision.
