February 6th in Chicago, IL. This viewing is the first film of 2016. I'm getting an early start this year, I didn't see my first 2015 film until May. February has some interesting titles in 2016 and it didn't seem the case last year.
Despite getting an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes I didn't think the latest feature from the Coen Brothers (Ethan and Joel) was all that great. Make no mistake, I am a Coen Brothers fan and feel that when they release a film, it should be seen but this output was kind of meh! I've come to expect a lot of the the Coen Brothers over the years and this is not their best effort. It doesn't quite make it. That's not to say it's a bad film, it's just a mediocre Coen Brothers film. Sometimes the Coens hit it out of the ballpark (Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Fargo, Big Lebowski to name a few and I could go on) and sometimes they don't (Intolerable Cruelty, Ladykillers and Hudsucker Proxy). The Coen's make consistently good films. Hail, Caesar! is mediocre at best and not memorable.
The film centers on Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the fictional head of Capitol Pictures in early 50's Hollywood. Capitol is currently filming their biggest release, Hail, Caesar!, with their biggest star Baird Whitlock (Clooney). While this is going on, Mannix is trying to hold the studio together amidst potential scandals; the pregnancy of popular synchronized swimming star (swimming sequences in films were big in the 50's) DeeAna Moran (ScarJo) and dealing with gossip columnists Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton) all while being courted by Lockheed for a big executive position. While filming a scene in Hail, Caesar!, Baird is drugged and eventually kidnapped by some extras. Mannix gets a ransom note from "The Future" demanding $100,000 for Whitlock's release. Whitlock comes to in a beach house and finds his way to a meeting of "The Future," a communist cell consisting of mostly disgruntled Hollywood writers.
Mannix enlists the aid of Western star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), who cannot act outside of the Western genre, with the kidnapping. Doyle proves to be an adept investigator and follows the briefcase full of money from a trendy club to the beach house. There, he picks up Whitlock and gets out of there as the police arrive. While Doyle is "rescuing" Whitlock, "The Future" rows a boat out to rendezvous with a Russian submarine so that their leader, Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), star of a sailor comedy/dance film, to go to Russia. Back at the studio, Mannix knocks some sense into Whitlock, he sympathized with the communist writers, thwarts an effort of Thacker to publish a story and turns the Lockheed job down. Moran even decides to marry studio surety agent Joseph Silverman (Jonah Hill in what amounts as a cameo) so her pregnancy is taken care of. All is right again at Capitol.
The film has an all-star cast but since it's mostly cameos, it seems a little wasted (all Jonah Hill does is sit behind a desk in his scenes). There are good cameos (Ralph Fiennes) and ones that leave your scratching your head....
Like Tatum's dance scene.
The dance scene is a lot of laughs (mostly because of the homosexual overtones in an age where homosexuality was definitely frowned upon) and it features a cameo from Connor Macleod. But it doesn't really do much to advance the plot and just shows off Tatum's stellar dancing skills. Perhaps it's another homage to Hollywood of the past (like Johansson's swimming scene but it at least establishes her character). Apparently there is some historical context in the film but it's lighthearted (which historically was not lighthearted). It's very possible that I'm wrong about some of my criticisms but that's what I came away with. There were solid performances and witty dialogue but the story didn't grab me like other Coen Brothers efforts. When you have a track record of excellence like Joel and Ethan have, it's difficult to be excellent all the time. This film is a good example of just that.
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