TheCoen Brothers have always been fascinated and amused by Hollywood’s golden age.Hail, Caesar! is set in a lavishly recreated movie studio just before that ageended. George Clooney gets top billing as Baird Whitlock, an alcoholic leadingman cast as a Roman centurion in one of those 1950s Technicolor sword andsandal biblical spectacles. However, the hapless Whitlock is merely the springmechanism for the plot. The protagonist, studio boss Eddie Mannix (JoshBrolin), is a fixer whose 20-hour day includes paying off cops, slapping aroundscumbags, hustling starlets out of harm’s way, arranging dates for A-List actorsand placating gossip columnists.
Mannixis slapped with a bigger than usual headache when Whitlock disappears,kidnapped by a Communist cell ensconced in a luxurious beach house with acleaning lady and a dog named Engels. Their heated squabbles over dialecticalmaterialism mirror the arguments among the theologians gathered by Mannix todiscuss the depiction of Christ in his biblical epic. Ethan and Joel Coen findphilosophy funny and love playing games with ideas.
HailCaesar! is a movie crowded with characters, goings-on and movies within movies.At least four productions at Mannix’s studio are glimpsed in part: the biblicalepic, an Esther Williams-style swimsuit spectacle (Scarlett Johansson inmermaid suit), a singing cowboy flick (with slow-talking Alden Ehrenreich) anda society picture (directed by Ralph Fiennes in ascot and blazer). If thatisn’t enough to fill Mannix’s schedule, he must fend off snooping by a pair ofrival gossip columnists—identical twins (both played with haughty mien by TildaSwinton).
Asis often the case with the Coen brothers, Hail Caesar! has a serious reflectionhidden in plain view. Throughout the film, Mannix meets with a representativefrom Lockheed offering him more money and better hours. The Lockheed man scoffsat the fantasy and debauchery of Hollywood, proclaiming, “This is the realworld,” when he shows Mannix a photo of the Bikini atoll vaporized by the giantmushroom cloud of a hydrogen-bomb test. “Lockheed was there,” he says proudly.Whether from force of habit or the vague stirring of conscience (Mannix is a guilt-riddenRoman Catholic), the studio boss resists temptation. Hollywood may have beenbad, the Coens seem to imply, but it wasn’t evil.
