Three for four: the last of the Coens’ Idiots - “Hail, Caesar!”

The Coen Brothers’ “Idiot Trilogy” or better, tetralogy (although, for my purposes here, it is and shall remain a trilogy omitting “Intolerable Cruelty”), are three shaggy mutt tales that shake the dog as much as the audience. Christ, they’re funny.

I’ve already gone over “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Burn After Reading” and that leaves just one. And for five years, I was very “meh” on that one. Despite protestations from dear friends and family (my sister remains the Coen Whisperer - I detested “The Man Who Wasn’t There” until I saw it in repertory again and something clicked…listen to your older sister, she is very wise, is the lesson here.)

That leaves us with “Hail, Caesar!” My first reaction upon seeing it was semi-enthusiasm which for a Coen Bros.’ movie is a rare thing. It was too cute, too shaggy, too…too unfocused for me. At the time. I don’t know what changed in my perception or my perspective and while, like “Burn After Reading”, I still don’t consider top tier, like that other film, it ain’t far from it.

I think part of it was that I found Clooney’s idiot more annoying than charming this time out. He had less presence than Harry Pfarrer in “Burn” and no particularly interesting motivation like Everett in “O Brother” and I was cool on Brolin’s Eddie Mannix for reasons that escape me, particularly in light of having revisited the flick. Yeah: I don’t know what I was thinking.

The two rehearsal set pieces with Scarlett Johansson doing an Esther Williams number and Channing Tatum in a Gene Kelly type scene only served then and now to convince me that the brothers need to do a real musical. Of course, both scenes served as framing and setups for Johansson’s character’s version of the Loretta Young story about how she was forced to adopt her child after Clark Gable knocked her up and Tatum’s oh-so-not-homoerotic “Footloose and Fancy Free” homage introduces us to the guy who will turn out to be a Soviet agent in movie star disguise. How could I not love this? I don’t know, but it happened and the spell is broken. 

Watching Brolin navigate the disappearance of Clooney’s Baird Whitlock from a sword and sandal Story of the Christ epic, discussions with priests, ministers, and a rabbi about a respectful presentation of the Christian Lord, Tilda Swinton in a dual role as twin gossip columnists, and an offer to switch jobs to go work for Lockheed, is a thing of joy. The man is simply one of the best exemplars of managing gravitas and single mindedness with more than one dimension. We see Mannix at home with his wife and get the feeling that he really is disappointed in himself about missing his son’s game; we see him go to confession so much, that the good father mentions that it’s too much. 

“I slapped a movie star in anger, Father.” “Five Hail Marys, my son.” It doesn’t get any better than this. Well, yeah, it does, but there is a such a generous amount of asides, allusions, film references, and really swell turns (and they all go somewhere) that it’s really difficult to complain about too much. Unlike “Burn After Reading”, there’s such goodwill to the characters that you can’t dismiss them as complete fools. Even Baird Whitlock.

The poor guy gets kidnapped by a Communist sleeper cell of Hollywood writers led by Herbert Marcuse! But holy cow, he gets Marxism and even understands the screenwriters’ plight: low pay, studio abuse, and utter exploitation by the capitalist Hollywood machine. That we see them later in a row boat meeting a Soviet sub off the coast of Southern California with Channing Tatum at the prow and $100,000 in ransom is superb icing on a very spongy, funny cake.

When we see him next talking worker exploitation by Hollywood oligarchs to Eddie Mannix, we catch a glimpse of the superficiality of celebrities who espouse dogmas that they do kind of grasp but should really think twice about before espousing them aloud. Watching Brolin slap Clooney shitless is hilarious. Brolin’s Mannix telling Clooney’s Whitlock “to go out there and be a star” is the Hollywood studio system in a nutshell.

Seeing the tale unfold principally from Eddie Mannix’s point of view would be the corollary to watching “Burn After Reading” from J.K. Simmons’ supervisor viewpoint. It’s a bird’s eye view and you understand why he turned down the Lockheed job; Hollywood is full of idiots - not just Baird Whitlock - but it’s fun! It’s not boring and if he has to go to confession to make it through, Mannix is fine with that.

Regarding Eddie Mannix, yes, he was a real person. Yes, he was responsible for covering up peccadillos and star-made mishaps for the studios and he did so from the twenties until his retirement in 1963. How much of Brolin’s characterization is true to the actual man, I have no idea. Danny Devito played him, probably much closer to what the man was like, in “Hollywoodland” and frankly, given the nature of “Hail, Caesar!”, going gritty would ill serve the movie.

Having said all this, why do I feel this is not quite top-tier Coens? Pacing and the kind of banal side-show of Alden Ehrenreich’s cowboy star Hobie Doyle’s switch to drawing room drama lead when Gable wouldn’t do it (or the studio wouldn’t release him? I forget) as a means to eventually bring Hobie in to save Whitlock. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a fine conceit and for the most part it does work (and Ralph Fiennes’ Laurence Laurentz trying to teach Hobie his lines is one of the finest and funniest slow burns in movies), but I feel like there could have been some tightening of the belt in there. When Hobie meets Carmen Miranda equivalent Veronica Osorio’s Carlotta Valdez, the side-trip is cute (for a Coen film, practically sentimental) but kind of drags on a bit. However, there’s so much goodwill built up, that when Hobie abandons her to track the briefcase with the ransom money, you kind of hope they got together again and had a proper date.

I could go on and someday, maybe I will, about the Coens in greater detail. That might sound like a threat, but they remain as idiosyncratic as filmmakers get. They are not to be pigeonholed and their films are as distinct and masterful as Lynch, Soderbergh’s, or Scorsese. They are never twee but can be nihilistic in the extreme (which doesn’t bother me) but never to the point of pointlessness (Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is a prime example). 

Oh. As for “Intolerable Cruelty” which was to end the Idiot Trilogy and is often included in the tetralogy, it isn’t based on an original script by the brothers, and in some ways, even though it is of a piece with the other three films, it doesn’t have enough of its own personality for me to really consider it part of a trio of films that I think are far stronger. I’d rather have this be the trilogy as solid as it is, than include “Intolerable Cruelty” and weaken a quartet.

Additional reading

Michael Ordoña’s take on the tetralogy before “Hail, Caesar!”’s release is worth a look.

https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Hail-Caesar-Clooney-s-trilogy-of-idiots-6787532.php

And I can’t recommend Heath Killen’s article on the United States of Coen highly enough. It’s a great thematic guide to their work, up to and including “Hail, Caesar!” but oddly, excluding “The Ballad of Lester Scruggs”. https://medium.com/@heathkillen/the-united-states-of-coen-80e0912239fe