Hail, Caesar!

seen on 4 March 2016

The film is directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and features George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Alden Ehrenreich and Ralph Fiennes, with Michael Gambon as the narrator.

Ed Mannix (Brolin), based on the real character, is a 'fixer' for Capitol Pictures, the man whose job it is to keep studio stars out of the glare of unwelcome publicity - and perhaps to help them gain desirable publicity as well. He faces several concurrent problems: Baird Whitlock (Clooney), the lead actor in the Roman epic which gives the film its name, is kidnapped while in costume as a centurion; DeeAnna Morgan the singing swimming star (Johansson) is pregnant out of wedlock; Hobey Doyle the young singer in Westerns (Ehrenreich) is hopelessly miscast in a screwball comedy (or is it a 'women's picture' melodrama?) directed by the temperamental Laurence Lorentz (Fiennes); and in all this he has to fend off two gossip columnists, twin sisters played by Swinton, who are eager to pry into any story that might be in the air. The kidnappers turn out to be a Communist cell of disaffected screenplay writers, and the studio is also making a musical somewhat like 'On the Town' in which the lead is taken by Channing Tatum.

These storylines are merely the hooks on which to hang a gloriously affectionate pastiche of studio Hollywood scenarios and productions. The Busby Berkeley style synchronised swimming, the exuberant tap-dancing routines of the sailors, the corny home truths of the Western, the glitter of the drawing room, and the banal stodginess of a biblical epic, are all on display as the film takes in various shooting schedules on the studio lot. In the meantime, the kidnap plot allows for the absurd spectacle of a Roman centurion learning about the evils of capitalism in a luxurious Malibu house.

It is all a delightful entertainment, with the cast acting in all seriousness with no knowing winks to the audience (which would have been fatal to the whole enterprise). The lightly ironic tone of the narrator is the only signal that we need not take matters too seriously, even though in the years immediately after the supposed time of the action (1951) Hollywood nearly destroyed itself in the unedifying spectacle of the HUAC interrogations.