plug: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

A secret comic masterpiece from the Coen Brothers

Coen Brothers Clooney is the best Clooney

If you’re sitting around this weekend looking for some light, escapist entertainment that also has something to say, look no further than Hail, Caesar! I had originally planned to plug something else for today, but I rewatched this one last night and it was probably the best time I’ve had watching a movie all quarantine.

I reckon there are 4 or 5 hidden gems in the Coen Brothers’ filmography that easily rival the more widely recognized masterworks. Hail, Caesar! is the most recent — a lean, mean, ensemble laugh machine about Hollywood’s Golden Age and the warped reality of cinematic myth-making. It came out 4 years ago and already it feels it’s been forgotten, so I was stoked to see it show up on Netflix as of late.

Hail, Caesar! is a satirical, delightfully cartoonish day in the life of 1950s Hollywood-studio fixer Eddie Mannix (honestly one of Josh Brolin’s all-time best roles), interwoven with a series of connecting vignettes featuring the studio’s dopey stars, old-hat directors, communist writers, and a pair of twin gossip columnists both played by Tilda Swinton. Pretty much the entire cast is made up of modern stars or up-and-comers who only make snapshot appearances, and they all fuckin crush it with the time they’re given.

You probably know Alden Ehrenreich as star of the unsuccessful Solo: A Star Wars Story (even tho he’s great in it don’t @ me), but his breakout role was in Hail Caesar! as airhead singing-cowboy and proto-Rick Dalton, Hobie Doyle. His comic timing is impeccable and he’s got charm to spare here.

Channing Tatum is also an absolute joy as song-and-dance man Burt Gurney, as are Scarlett Johansson as a fast-talking synchronized swimming star DeeAnna Moran and Ralph Fiennes as stuffy British director Laurence Laurentz (god, even the character names are all tremendous).

Then there’s George Clooney, once again killing it with the Coens as a handsome-numbskull, Baird Whitlock. He’s the star of the studio’s latest bloated religious epic a la Ben-Hur or The Ten Commandments, which means he’s in a Roman centurion costume for the whole movie and it’s never not hilarious.

Hail, Caesar! is honestly kind of a flawless movie. The Coen’s seamlessly mock while paying loving homage to Hollywood filmmaking — comically re-rendering every corner of the classic studio system with the aid of Roger Deakins’ pitch-perfect cinematography. Check out this fire dance sequence with Channing Tatum and you’ll see what I mean.

The pandemic seems to have accelerated the inevitable death of Hollywood as we know it. Sucks. But the future of film is also moving to a decentralized and hopefully democratized place where gatekeepers are obsolete because filmmaking technology is in everyone’s hands. In any case, cinema will never again be the all-consuming cultural force that it was under Hollywood’s control, and Hail, Caesar! seems to understand this. And I think it’s saying that, warts and all, the Hollywood system put on one helluva show while it lasted.