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If Alan Partridge’s favourite Beatles album is “The best of the Beatles”, then his favourite Coen Brothers film would probably be Hail, Caesar!. This combines oodles of Coen tropes, like a ridiculous role for George Clooney, an absurd discussion of the meaning of life and a refusal to feed the audience any clear message about anything. Its fizzy, meandering, ultimately plotless-plot will frustrate many, but if you just go with it this is one of the most joyous films you will ever see.
The plot, such as it matters, concerns Josh Brolin’s Eddie Mannix. He’s a studio fixer in Fifties Hollywood, tasked with keeping his stars' peccadillos private and ensuring that gossip columnists like Thora Thacker (Tilda Swinton) and Thessaly Thacker (also Tilda Swinton) get no damaging material. Mannix has his work cut out for him, with the supposedly virginal but actually pregnant DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) completing her new watery musical, the irredeemably cowpoke Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) thrust into a high society role for which he is hilariously ill-prepared, and the thorny question of a new Biblical epic starring the suddenly-kidnapped Baird Whitlock (George Clooney).
While Mannix pinballs between studio crises, the confessional booth and a lucrative job offer from the aerospace industry, some of the funniest scenes in years play out around him. An advisory panel of religious leaders try to offer educated comment on the script for Whitlock’s Biblical epic, hilariously laying out centuries of conflict in religious thinking. Western star Hobie tries gamely to follow direction from genteel director Lawrence Lorentz (Ralph Fiennes) in an expertly crafted bit of farce, and Channing Tatum’s Burt Gurney tap-dances beautifully throughout at the head of a troop of dancing sailors.
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There is more, much more, in a convoluted mess that Mannix doesn’t so much manage as endure. But it’s increasingly obvious that the Coens don’t have any time for heroes as such; their protagonists are more often borne along by events outside their control than truly effectual in their own right. Even Marge Gunderson couldn’t prevent a grisly end to her case. And – as is increasingly normal for the pair – this doesn’t come to any sort of climax.
It’s more a series of questions than a discussion, a tangle of contradictions. It reads like a love letter to movie making while at the same time it condemns its foolishness and compromise; there’s an acknowledgement of the power of religious faith even while it is ridiculed. It’s not, in other words, a sensible or straightforward film, but it’s one that is genuinely delightful in its ambiguity, in its recognition of human absurdity and its immense affection for our capacity to behave ridiculously. Eddie Mannix’ quest for control is ultimately futile, of course, but things still muddle along and tend to work out for the best. Life isn’t easy (to quote the film’s funniest scene, “Would that it were so simple”) but there is magic along the way.
