All hail the Coens

There’s much to be said for the pure zaniness of a Coen Brothers’ movie. One could talk about the transcendent droll humour of The Big Lebowski or the resplendent revisionist history of O Brother Where Art Thou or the simple wacky plotline of Raising Arizona featuring a spot-on Nicolas Cage in his prime.

Hail Caesar rates somewhere in between all of those, or above them perhaps, with a touch of Barton Fink thrown in for good measure. The brilliant brothers have returned to the land of Hollywood in the 1950s and behind the scenes again where the writers are practically handcrank story machines, the actors are all dimwits, and there’s one guy running the show. Hint: it ain’t the director or the producer.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is Capitol Studios’ Head of Physical Production. Reading between the lines, that means he’s the chief fixer. He keeps things moving in an orderly direction. When things go wrong as they always do, he thinks of the solution and makes sure it happens.

When movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) goes missing from the set of the studio’s next big budget blockbuster, Mannix is there. When director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) needs a bright young male lead for his next society drama, Mannix is the one who sends daft cowboy pic sensation Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) to the set and then later tempers Laurentz’s outrage when the very Southern actor can’t quite master the upper crust effete British effect. When twin Hollywood reporters Thora Thacker and Thessaly Thacker (both the impeccable Tilda Swinton) threaten to publish stories that would ruin some of Capitol’s stars, well, of course, Mannix knows just how to placate the press.

In short, Mannix is the man for all occasions. I wish I had a personal Mannix for when all my affairs went somehow awry. Would that it were so simple…

Hail Caesar is a film about a day in the life of this one incredible individual. It somehow pays homage to all of Hollywood Yesteryear with its Busby Berkeley sequence, the song and dance number with sailors in a bar (thanks to the unbelievably excellent casting of Channing Tatum), the Carmen Miranda character Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), and of course the Western moonlit sing-song by Doyle. Honestly, all that this film needed was a reference to the McCarthyist threat of Communists in our midst back in the post-Second World War, Cold War era.

Oh wait, that’s there too. In fact, this film is simply replete with signs and scenes of the times back in the heyday. The Coens have always proven to be deft writers/directors/producers of period pieces (see Miller’s Crossing, O Brother and Barton Fink for relevant reference points) and they never disappoint. I’ve been sometimes befuddled by their offerings (see The Ladykillers and Burn After Reading) but I’ve still held the films fondly in my head, which is saying something.

That, plus they know how to cast well. Look for standout cameos (another term that sprung out of ’50s cinema) by Jonah Hill and Frances McDormand. Each had scenes lasting probably a minute and offered each of them perhaps two or three lines but they are as memorable as all of the dialogue that Clooney had to chew through in his pseudo-lead role in this quasi-historical semi-political meta-farcical triumph.

You must be wondering why, if I loved this movie so much, I didn’t give it a higher rating. Take a look at the poster. I don’t have a problem that Brolin and Clooney are right up there but Hill had an incredibly minor role, less than McDormand even, and Tatum had maybe as much screen time as Swinton. How come the women don’t get fair representation on the advertisements when they’re doing as much if not more work than the fellas? Tsk-tsk, ye Coens. I expected better.