Hail, Caesar!

A hug for 1950's Hollywood

Hail, Caesar! - Released Feb 5, 2016. Directed and written by Ethan and Joel Cohen - 106 minute runtime.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is the very busy Head of Production at Capital Pictures, a man faced with decisions to be be made, one after another, in this Coen Brothers film that looks back happily back at the studio system. Mannix lives in a world where stars and employees are carefully handled (and closely watched) by Hollywood executives that live in daily fear of scandal destroying a star's reputation, damaging the reputation of the company itself, and in a nicely pointed reverence for the America of the 1950's, embarrassing everybody in the process.

Hail, Caesar! takes the time to get us (the audience) into every little room of the studio "factory," that is, offices, sound stages, editing rooms, so that we get a glimpse of the high-production machinery in motion that made that era of Hollywood possible.

The Coens also give us a look at the activity of the town itself. Hollywood is, of course, centered around movie-making, but what goes into making film-after-film in the "dream factories" is the stuff of the human back-stage drama, and this being a comedy, the drama is also rather funny. It's not all "movie-people," though. We see cops who gladly look the other way (with a little donation made to the 'police pension') when a star ("Gloria DeLamour" played by Natasha Bassett) gets involved with a disreputable character, the greasy and sweaty "french postcard" photographer Falco, played by Richard Abraham; or we see domestic help that does not even blink an eye at the unusual costumes and behavior of actors offstage and at each others homes.

Twin-sister gossip writers, both earnestly played by Tilda Swinton, are named Thora and Thessally Thacker, and they're always always hunting for scoops on the personal lives of the stars (mainly the star of Capital's in-production fictitious bible-epic Hail, Caesar!, featuring matinee idol Baird Whitlock, i.e., George Clooney). Mannix runs interference for the actors with the twins, and throughout this film we see him trying to juggle the needs of every personality he is responsible for, from the never-seen head of the studio Mr. Schenk (apparently based on the real M-G-M executive Nicholas Schenck); to his own wife and kids.

The story itself is recognizable Coen Bros. territory. In the midst of making the film-within-this-film Hail, Caesar!, which is about faith (the sand-and-sandals faith of Bible epics), Mannix has his own crisis of faith. We see him praying painfully over a rosary about decisions he must make, especially in regards to a lucrative job offer from an aerospace company, a role that would have absolutely nothing to do with Hollywood. Mannix is regularly pestering a weary Catholic priest with confessions of every detail of personal failure he experiences. A running substory is his failure to break a cigarette habit.

Meanwhile, a group of Hollywood writers (they call their group "the Future") are a dedicated communist cell with plans to obtain a sizeable amount of money to further their cause. Their plan means the must kidnap Whitlock (Clooney) off the set of Hail, Caesar! Clooney plays an actor who is having a lot of trouble getting out lines for his big scene in Hail, Caesar! (mostly he can't remember the word "faith") and the secretive communist writers' group hold him for ransom for $100,000 at a hide-away California coast luxury home.

With Clooney's character missing, another addition to Mannix' trouble are the tantrums of frustrated actress DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) who is in the middle of making an Esther Williams' style water-musical. She is inconveniently pregnant without a husband ("if I could find a reliable man, I'd grab him" she declares. She will get her chance, in an unexpected place, later). She swims and leaps from high diving positions for the cameras as she should, but she is also frustrated and worried about her predicament, as is Mannix.

Another addition to Mannix' already full plate of trouble is the likeable and loyal rising star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) who is being shifted from "oaters" (cowboy pictures) into a sophisticated drawing-room musical-romance (titled Merrily We Dance). Unfortunately, Hobie is driving the patient and soft-spoken veteran director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) to anger and shouting because Doyle can't say his lines correctly, or even, apparently, understand what his lines mean.

In this epic tale of sacrifice, Mannix is our hero, and he not only protects the stars (frequently from themselves); but he ultimately goes up against the headhunter sent by the aerospace company which want Mannix's management skills badly, and while sweetening the deal with money and stock options, takes the trouble to insult the actors for being 'kooks' and mocks Hollywood for being an "unserious" business. The condescending remarks (meant to help move Mannix toward accepting the deal being offered) has the opposite effect: Mannix is a serious man who does serious things. He has no compunction about slapping stars and reminding them of what they owe the company and themselves. Asking him to abandon his wayward charges becomes a challenge to more than the mathematics of salary and the importance of a position, it transforms into a mission.

Historically speaking...

Though visually equipped with antique cars, architecture, beautiful California palms, film gear, and some vintage slang terms, the historical aspects of the movie are not solid. Current 21st era slang shows up ("it's complicated" says Hobie to the camera after his long lines are simplified in a scene from Merrily We Dance), and the cars are all spotless and gleaming, as is the art direction in general for the homes and studio buildings we look at. The scenes from the in-production 'cowboy movie' has villains who are garbed like late-50s or 1960s bad-guys, when 'gritty-realism' was overtaking Westerns. It seems to me, for an early 50's feel we should be seeing the smoothly-dressed outlaws who were dark mirror images of their lighter-costumed heroic foes instead of their more scruffy and more brutal children.

Also, the Coen Bros camera lets us gaze upon every eye-bag sag and facial-line the actors have, whether in the 'real' story or, unrealistically for an "A-Studio" like Capital Pictures, when these movie stars are filmed into one of these fictitious movies. This seems wrong because genuine old movies seem to use special lighting to prevent shadows from forming beneath the sags of the glamorous Hollywood faces we see in old films, a technique that deprived audiences of insight into the actors sleep-deprivations and helped maintain the illusion of physical "perfection".

But these are minor authenticity issues and surely invisible to the majority of folks for whom Hail, Caesar! is meant to amuse with the tale of a frantic few days in the life of a busy movie studio and the hard-working executive who holds it all together.

The film is shot in warm colors (on actual 35mm film) and this fits with the Coen Bros script, a great big warm hug to Old Hollywood. The theme of the movie itself, "faith," is more than the intricacies of commerce, or Christianity, or Communism. The real religion being extolled onscreen is the making of good pictures, and the praise for the relatively unseen personalities who made it happen.

AMAZON STREAMING and DVD: Hail, Caesar!

Original page June 2016 | Updated July 24, 2026