Review: Hail 'Caesar' and its clueless Clooney
The combination of the Coen brothers’ filmmaking acumen and George Clooney in absolute buffoon mode is again Hollywood magic.
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, the comedy Hail, Caesar! (*** out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday nationwide) is an old-school Tinseltown farce starring Josh Brolin as Capitol Pictures’ resident “fixer” Eddie Mannix, who has a day full of ridiculous crises to curb — including the kidnapping of the studio’s narcissistic, clueless A-lister.
Mannix is the tough-guy straight man of the 1950s-era piece who (for the most part) calmly deals with the shenanigans that come his way. But this is a whopper: Just before his climactic speech is filmed for the Spartacus-y epic Hail, Caesar!, one of several movies-within-a-movie, Baird Whitlock (Clooney) is nabbed and held for $100,000 ransom by a shady bunch calling itself “The Future.”
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If only that were all for the embattled Eddie. There’s also the aquatic-movie starlet (Scarlett Johansson) with a bun in the oven and no lack of potential fathers; a song-and-dance man (Channing Tatum) who’s not quite what he seems; twin rival gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton times two) digging for scoops about Baird going AWOL; and the chaos that ensues when a snooty English director (a deliciously over-the-top Ralph Fiennes) is forced to work with a young cowboy star (Alden Ehrenreich) whose roping skills are better than his dramatic diction.
The film’s episodic nature is akin to the Coens’ brilliant O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their old-timey ode to Homer with Clooney as a pomade-slathered doofus. That cinematic odyssey deftly moved the same characters through a series of situations, while Hail, Caesar! — though it has a common thread in Mannix — gets lost in its own hustle and bustle. The plot meanders as Caesar! bounces from a high-class British affair to an all-male revue in a seafarers' bar, and it’s not until the end when everything’s nicely tidied up that the viewer gets a sense of how well-crafted the film actually is.
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Some bits fall flat, yet when the Coens hit, there’s nothing better, especially with their usual ridiculously sublime banter. When Eddie extols the virtues of a stable family life, Johansson’s swimming thespian tells him in a “New Yawk” accent that "marrying a third louse ain’t gonna do me no good." Often the artistic meets the absurd: In the middle of a water-filled Busby Berkeley-esque number expertly crafted by the Coens' go-to cinematographer Roger Deakins, a bandleader under a gigantic seashell gets blindsided by an expertly thrown tiara.
While the Magic Mike films showed he has a vast array of dance moves, Tatum proves his chops as a Renaissance man, crooning and tapping as a screen sailor and lamenting that “mermaids ain’t got no gams.” Brolin is also game as the brusque eye in the storm of oddballs, though no one’s having more fun in this star-studded romp than Clooney as the milquetoast thespian who gets a little Stockholm syndrome and then gets slapped around for it.
He may be the world’s top celebrity but for the Coens, Clooney is simply their favorite nitwit.
