Hail Caesar

The Coen brothers of 2016 had already cemented their status as Hollywood titans. They'd had their share of success and tasted enough box office failures to know what it's made of. They'd earned the right to make whatever kind of movie they wanted to. Name-brand cast wanted to work with them, none of their commercial failures had ever happened for lack of effort, and even their bombs end up being cult classics. The worst potential outcome of a Coen brothers venture is that it's under-appreciated. No matter what, it will be good.

The brothers 2016 effort Hail Caesar! is about the golden age of Hollywood, the factory that was the post-war studio system, and the people who worked the various parts of its machinery. It's a charming and inviting flick with every bit of the character and appeal that we've come to expect from these master comic auteurs.

Josh Brolin leads the cast as gruff, square-jawed studio fixer Eddie Maddix: a hyper-consistent company-man operator who is used to unforeseen and unimagined catastrophes. He's made a career out of making problems go away by folding them into the background, playing them off one another, or just making them disappear in a way that isn't worth asking too many questions about. He does whatever it takes to get the picture in the cans and keep the machine running.

Among the problems slowing the machine's output is the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the star of the in-production Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ, the unplanned pregnancy of unmarried leading lady DeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), and various creative and staffing conflicts that are preventing director Lawrence Laurence (Ralph Fiennes) and up-and-coming start Hobey Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) from giving the people what they want, and what the studio needs them to have: movies!

Post-war Hollywood's business model is remarkably similar to the model of the modern streaming services that have subsumed them or taken their place: feed them. The pigs must have their slop, whether it tastes good or not. Today we remember and romanticise the great classics of that era like Sunset Boulevard, Rear Window, Casablanca, and Ben Hur, because they're great. They're timeless and iconic and by now they've become as much a part of the cultural fabric as they are a part of the film-making foundation that modern movies are based on.

But there are many more movies of the same era that have been forgotten because they were forgettable. Maddix' studio is in production on an aquatic escapade, some kind of naval song and dance musical that features a tap-dancing Channing Tatum, a snooty (and surely boring) socialite drama, and an untold number of out-of-the-box westerns, all there to make sure there's something on the screens at all times. Because the only thing the audiences for sure won't show up to see is nothing.

The movies of the Hail Caesar! universe are way more fun to watch being made than they would be to watch.The costumes and sets are as grand and over the top as they had to be to make movies of that era worth watching in an era before modern graphics and post production. It got an Oscar nod for Best Production design, but was unjustly snubbed for Best Costumes.

It's a movie set behind the sets of other movies. Actors are walking around in wardrobe and out of character, set pieces are being wheeled about; everyone is supremely busy or trying to look like they are, and Eddie Maddix STILL can't find Baird Whitlock! Is he on another bender? Or could this be something more sinister…

America's post WWII red scare, which threaded the needle for the cold war, would be fought in and through Hollywood in a big way in the years that follow the day fictionalized in Hail Caesar!. In the movie's universe, the writers soon to be accused of (and punished for) subverting American minds with a bunch of commie claptrap are just getting started with their covert propaganda campaign. As the most cerebral machine on the studio's assembly line, the writers room has come to some realizations about the money being made off of their work, and how little of it is making its way back down to them. The Coens mine the comedy of the writers' disaffected ire and flat out rage in a vein that they last tapped to make Walter Sobchak of The Big Lebowski, though there's also some of this energy in A Serious Man.

It's hard to tell if Hail Caesar! is trying to say anything in particular about the movie industry, capitalism in general, or religion, and I think it's supposed to be. It's a bit of a rorschach test in that way. But all of those are certainly present and exerting gravitational pull on the characters.

To make a film is to create an alternate reality where scripted events are interesting and compelling enough that the right to watch them happen can be packaged and sold. It's absurd. And the fact that it works so consistently that huge businesses are built around doing it over and over again is even more absurd. So a movie about a guy whose professional job is to hold all of that absurdity together by sheer force of will has to be funny, and Hail Caesar! delivers.