Hail, Caesar!: The means of production
The Coen brothers take on Christ and Communists in the rare Cold War comedy that works. PLUS: Every film by the Coens ranked.
It’s hard to believe we don’t have movies by the Coen brothers to look forward to any longer. For 30 years, Joel and Ethan Coen delivered quality work after quality work. Not all their pictures were successful, but they all bore the mark of craftsmanship. And some of them, such as Fargo, Miller’s Crossing and No Country for Old Men, belong in the highest tier of American film.
The brothers have since gone on to separate projects. Their unique voice is missed at a time when a good movie made with care has become a rarer and rarer achievement.
Born in the fifties, the Coens were Cold War babies. Maybe that accounts for the streak of fatalism that cuts through much of their work in movies such A Serious Man and No Country. But they haven’t made a lot of films that directly reference the arms race. The closest would be 2016’s Hail, Caesar!, the second-to-last film the brothers would release.
The Coens’ comedies tend to broad and dark and filled with few redeeming characters, dating all the way back to 1987’s Raising Arizona. The frequent critical complaint is that just about everyone is some kind of exaggerated idiot or fool and the tone leans toward the cartoonish. The brothers haven’t always drawn the line between funny and grating in the right place. Their best comedies: Barton Fink and, of course, The Big Lebowski, find the groove. Others such as Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading have their moments but don’t land quite as well as they should. (All of them are entertaining and endlessly quotable, I should add.)
Hail, Caesar! is somewhere in the middle. It’s a bit of a soft touch, starting with its leading man Eddie Mannix, as played by Josh Brolin. Mannix (think “manic”) is a “fixer” at a leading Hollywood studio in the early 1950s. His job is to keep the stars out of trouble, out of the sanitariums, the maternity wards, the jails, and most important, the gossip columns. It’s a 24/7 assignment that Mannix punctuates with bouts of confession at his local church. (The priest has had it with him.)
Mannix is the rarest of Coen creations: A straight man. He has no obvious tics besides his fervent Catholicism. The chaos circles about him, but he stays calm. There’s a lot to worry about: Television is making inroads into every American home. People don’t go out like they used to. The studios have responded by making more and more lavish productions, Biblical epics and musicals and “aquatic” pictures featuring synchronized mermaids.
Mannix’s studio is midst of making a widescreen Technicolor bonanza called “Hail, Caesar!” about a Roman soldier who comes upon Christ before his crucifixion. The Roman soldier is played by George Clooney in dimwit mode and part of the joke is that as an actor, Clooney has always tried to avoid pictures like this that would remove him from a modern context and place him in some ridiculous costume. From the moment he enters the film as sturdy leading man Baird Whitlock, his dignity is surrendered. And every time he tries to sit down for the rest of the film, his scabbard will get in the way.
It being the conservative fifties, the studio must ensure that the film meets proper standards and not offend audiences as a picture about, you know, the Son of God quite possibly might. Mannix convenes a board of religious officials to seek their approval that right away deteriorates into a discussion of the divine. The Jews, says the rabbi at the table, they’re not big on Jesus (God is “a bachelor” and kind of an unhappy one) while the Catholic priest thinks the script doesn’t entirely capture the essence of the Holy Trinity.
Mannix just wants their sign-off: “We don’t need to agree on the nature of the deity here,” he tells them.
Meanwhile, a shortage of bankable stars has Mannix assign singing cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) to the latest cocktails-and-tuxes drama directed by the indominable Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), who is forced to teach the Okie some high-class diction on an emergency basis in what is probably the film’s best known scene. “Would that it were so simple.”
Mannix’s day grows appreciably worse when Whitlock is kidnapped by a group that calls itself “The Future.” Taken to a Malibu beach house, Whitlock discovers they’re a band of disaffected screenwriters who have taken to Communism – the very thing that lay at the heart of the blacklist scandals of the early 1950s.
That the Coens chose to place a real Communist conspiracy at the heart of their story (the writers admit trying to slip propaganda into their films) after so many in the business were falsely accused of being Soviet sympathizers was certainly a cheeky choice. But these writers have a cause more central than international brotherhood; they’re tired of not getting a cut of studio profits on the films they write.
The movie’s ties to the Cold War become explicit when Mannix is courted for a job by an executive at defense contractor Lockheed, who is eager to show him a photo of the government’s successful H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. A God-fearing man, Mannix understands immediately. “Armageddon,” he whispers.
It all sounds like rather heady stuff: the nature of the divine, the economics of Capitalism, thermonuclear bombs. But this is a Coen comedy, so all of it is just part of the brew. At its most basic level, the movie is both a celebration and send-up of Old Hollywood when it was churning out a ton of material, both good and not so good.
That’s why we, as viewers, are treated to a swimming extravaganza featuring Scarlett Johansson as an actress with a body by Esther Williams and a voice straight outta Brooklyn, as well as an extended and increasingly homoerotic dance number starring Channing Tatum as a sailor heading out to sea where there will be “no dames.”
Tatum’s character ends up figuring in the plot in an unexpected way — when he really does go out to sea. He ends up in a better place than the screenwriters do. But isn’t that always the way when it comes to writers?
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Hail, Caesar! is rentable on all major platforms.
HEY ISN’T THAT: Yes, the Roman extra in the toga who is told to “recline with the lyre!” is none other than Wayne Knight, who played Newman on “Seinfeld.” Fisher Stevens, who would go on to play the squirrely PR guy on HBO’s “Succession,” plays one of the Communists. (He was also in the 1986 robot comedy Short Circuit, which I promise to never cover here.)
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 0/10: A picture of a bomb is all we get.
DUST CLOUDS: Eddie Mannix was a real Hollywood figure, a fixer for MGM in the 1940s and 50s. and apparently a devout Catholic. Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) was already one of America’s biggest defense contractors by the early 1950s. Southern California became the epicenter of the newly burgeoning military-industrial complex. By the end of the decade, one of every four Pentagon dollars was going to California, which helped finance its massive growth in the last half of the 20th century.
WHAT ELSE I AM WATCHING: TV: “Bad Monkey” (S1, Apple), “Homicide: Life on the Streets” (S1, Peacock). Movies: Inherent Vice (2014, Anderson).
LAST ENTRY: Fail-Safe (1964)
NEXT ENTRY: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
RANKING THE COEN BROTHERS’ FILMS:
Here is my personal ranking of the Coens’ films:
n/a The Ladykillers (2004) Tom Hanks and the Coens? What could go wrong? Apparently everything. In retrospect, Hanks straight-arrow persona (which has gained even more steam in recent years) seems at odds with the Coens’ skewed worldview. Although Hitchcock did great things with Jimmy Stewart. I’ve seen the English original, which is wonderful, but haven’t made time for this .
17) The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) A dour film that seemed to exist only as a technical exercise. The Coens wanted to ape Double Indemnity, but missed both the sex and the soul. The worst thing you can say about it is that it’s kind of dull.
16) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Largely forgettable despite moments of brilliance (particularly the wagon train short “The Gal Who Got Rattled”) but this Western anthology about the vagaries of fate on the frontier never quite gets there. More to be admired than loved.
15) Burn After Reading (2008) A farce, but the problem is that Washington has long been its own farce and almost teflon-resistent to parody. Deserves credit for pushing Brad Pitt to ridiculous places. Weirdly reminiscence of the forgotten Hanks film, The Man With One Red Shoe. The cast, however, is killer: Clooney, Pitt, Malkovich, McDormand, Swinton, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons.
14) Blood Simple (1984) This film still draws a lot of praise. It marked a tremendous debut, one that showed the Coens firmly in command of their genre-bending vision. But the brothers soon moved beyond it, and it now seems overly simple and mannered in retrospect.
13) Raising Arizona (1987) Tremendously quotable. Nic Cage playing a Looney Tunes character. But everyone in the film (except for Holly Hunter) is a caricature. And the dialogue is the Coens at their most arch. They’re trying to be Faulkner here. Although I will love Sam McMurray’s Glen until I die. (“on account something went a-wrong with my semen!”)
12) A Serious Man (2009) The Coens at their most inscrutable. But that might be because I’m not someone who grew up Jewish in St. Paul in the 1970s. (I did grow up Catholic in the Midwest in the 70s and 80s, so I get the attempt at puncturing piety.) The recreation of the time is pitch perfect. It’s a complex film about sincerity and hypocrisy running along the same tracks. It didn’t land with me the first time, as I found it remote. But demands a rewatch.
11) Hail, Caesar! (2016) Reviewed above.
10) Intolerable Cruelty (2003) This movie lands uniformly at the bottom of the ranking of the brothers’ films, but I have a soft spot for it, as I love the source material, the Screwball Comedy, and admire the attempt to pit two beautiful humans, Clooney and Zeta-Jones, against each other in pure, elegant, affluent, dizzy 30s fashion. Like those films, the dialogue moves at hyperspeed. It’s their His Girl Friday/The Lady Eve. I want to watch it again right now.
9) The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) This tribute to Preston Sturges and early 40s films makes me just as forgiving. It has Jennifer Jason Leigh doing Hepburn and Paul Newman staying relevant in his later years. No surprise that the Coens’ broadest comedies on this list are bunched together, as many of them share the same rhythms and exaggerated tone.
8) Barton Fink (1991) This is a tough one. The Coens first real attempt at subversive art film, with Turturro’s bravura performance keeping it all together. But it’s a frustrating movie that seems to be mocking its protagonist—a consistent Coen issue. It’s closest cousin in the oeuvre is A Serious Man, but at least this seems to have more of an inner life. It’s possible this is a “me” problem.
Here we can say we are entering the pantheon:
7) Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) A treatise on how artists sabotage themselves by their own innate feeling of destiny combined with their refusal to compromise. And a statement on how everyone compromises, including Dylan (the secret hero of the story) and the Coens, who, not coincidentally, were coming off a mainstream success with True Grit. This is a great film and one of my personal favorites.
6) Miller’s Crossing (1990) It’s almost 35 years old, and it holds up better than ever, with its lustrous scenery and tough-guy patter. Gabriel Byrne turns in an incredibly charismatic performance as man who keeps secrets–- even from himself. It might be the best-looking film from a production design standpoint the Coens have ever made. Endlessly watchable.
5) True Grit (2010) A personal favorite and a deeply touching film about a girl who grows up too fast, filled with gorgeous western imagery and a work that toggles between reality and folklore. Tremendously underrated.
4) O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) One of three Coen films, along with Fargo and Lebowski, that can be said to have shifted the greater cultural dynamic. Its full-throated embrace of Appalachian folk generated a phenomenon.
3) The Big Lebowski (1998) The cultural heir to Altman’s The Long Goodbye, but even more loose-limbed and discursive. It doesn’t take a hammer to Chandler as much as it updates it. The film gains power every year, largely because of Jeff Bridges’ what-he-fuck performance, not the story. Like Fargo, it ends up being a story about community prevailing over evil. No Country, on the other hand, shows evil to be uncontainable.
2) No Country for Old Men (2007) The Coens best movie of the 21st century and perhaps the best so far of the century. A film that saw them surrender nearly all of their tropes to offer a signature statement on the nature of evil. Meditative and terrifying, it’s the brother’s most mature work and one that may best stand the test of time. It will always be compared to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, but it’s superior largely because it avoided the showy histrionics.
1) Fargo (1996) What else could it be? There have never been better performances in Coen brothers film than the ones turned in by Frances McDormand and William Macy. They broke out of the brothers’ hermetic world to become breathing beings with backstories, acting out their lives in a place with stunning geographic specificity. No wonder this is their most iconic work. And no wonder it lives on in a TV series.