Sickle and Sandal in “Hail, Caesar!”

Cinema | February 18th, 2016

By Greg Carlson

In the days leading up to the nationwide release of Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s “Hail, Caesar!,” clickbait slideshows far and wide competed to sort the oeuvre of the siblings. This week, “Slate” culture blogger Gabriel Roth filed a short article laying out a six-point theory to answer his title question, “What Is It About the Coen Brothers’ Movies That Makes Everyone Want to Rank Them?” And now that the film has been met with the kind of public indifference and critical adulation guaranteed to at least keep the saga of Eddie Mannix out of last place in future installments of the game, Coen devotees can start to ponder the details.

“Hail, Caesar!” is entertaining enough and occasionally hilarious (“Divine presence to be shot”), but its breezy tone and deviation from the Coen films that more soberly ponder the life of the mind place it much closer to “The Ladykillers” (which I like) than to “Barton Fink” (which I love).

“Hail, Caesar!” already has its champions. Asher Gelzer-Govatos lays out a moonshot of a dialectical schematic that pairs Coen films in a wild comedy/drama variation on Herodotus’ “one sober/one drunk” account of Persian lawmaking. For the record, Gelzer-Govatos has “Hail, Caesar!” as the supposed yin to the yang of “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

The noisiest “Hail, Caesar!” supporter so far is Richard Brody, who notes that the film is “a comedy, and a scintillating, uproarious one, filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz.” Brody is not wrong about the “relaxed precision,” but individual scenes, no matter how entertaining, do not a complete and wholly satisfying experience make – even if one could watch Ralph Fiennes’ Laurence Laurentz enunciate line readings all day long.

Gorgeously staged homages to Old Hollywood dazzle and delight. Alden Ehrenreich’s pretty and vacant singing cowboy Hobie Doyle could have been the central protagonist in his own vehicle, instead of a Montgomery Clift doppelganger adrift in a crowded sea of cameo appearances by big performers one expects to factor in ways that never materialize. Given that the roll call features so prominently in the marketing, one can blame the trailer for intensifying some of that expectation, but why bother to stage Scarlett Johansson’s incredible Busby Berkeley/Esther Williams water ballet kaleidoscope if you’re only going to stick her with a one-note Jean Hagen/Lina Lamont joke and send her packing?

Along with Johansson, the other women of “Hail, Caesar!” also get the fuzzy end of the lollypop. The movie fails the Bechdel Test despite featuring Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio, Alison Pill, and Heather Goldenhersh. It is something of an understatement to say that all of these actors are cheated in the male-centric universe of Capitol Pictures, where Josh Brolin’s Mannix operates. The Future, the movie’s organization of communists responsible for star Baird Whitlock’s abduction and indoctrination, is a heavy boys club. And the delicious homoerotic sailor number hoofed by Channing Tatum’s Burt Gurney in one of the many movies-within-the-movie is appropriately titled “No Dames.”

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