Hail, Caesar! (2016)
Directed by Joel Coen
When a Hollywood star mysteriously disappears in the middle of filming, the studio sends their fixer to get him back.
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What critics compared Hail, Caesar! to
That the Coens already referenced Busby Berkeley in The Big Lebowski risks younger fans thinking they're merely paying homage to themselves — which, on some level, maybe they are.
The Coens have played with some of these threads before — the unlikely kidnap plot recalls Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski ; the cynical view of the Hollywood machine echoes Barton Fink ; the religious imagery on the set of Hail, Caesar! and Mannix’s repeated trips to his church confessional bring back the philosophical questions about God from A Serious Man — but they’re woven together here in a fresh new way.
We meet Johansson’s starlet playing a mermaid surrounded by synchronised swimmers and a spuming whale in a Busby Berkeley-esque musical number that is the match of The Dude’s surreal dream sequence in The Big Lebowski ; Channing Tatum heads up a squad of tap-dancing sailors whose suggestive lyrics will surely test the limits of the Hays Code; Tilda Swinton plays twin-sister gossip columnists whose intense rivalry owes much to that of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons; and an actor being crucified on a cross is asked if he’s a principal player or an extra to establish if he merits a hot breakfast.
Siblings Joel and Ethan Coen -- the brotherly duo behind classic films such as "Fargo," "No Country For Old Men," "The Big Lebowski" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" among many others -- are seemingly try to tap into something similar, minus the toons, in their period comedy, "Hail, Caesar!" Alas, while it has some fun moments and features a star-studded cast, it's a disjointed and disappointing mess that might have seemed liked a slam dunk on paper, but misses the mark in filmed form.
Joel and Ethan Coen make a welcome and long-awaited return to comedy with “Hail, Caesar!,” a slap-happy valentine to the Technicolor heyday of Hollywood that lands somewhere between the trippy brilliance of “The Big Lebowski” and the goofball parable of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”.
The Coen Brothers have endeavored to demonstrate the tension of artistry through Hail, Caesar!, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Barton Fink.
Clooney has experience inhabiting empty suits, and in some ways Jay Kelly is the more serious-minded version of Baird Whitlock, the boobish actor he played in Hail, Caesar!.
Clooney has built a career on his ability to pivot from swaggering dreamboat (Out of Sight, Ocean's Eleven through Thirteen) to rugged action star (From Dusk Till Dawn, The Peacemaker, Three Kings) to arrogant buffoon (O Brother, Burn After Reading, Hail, Caesar!).
Borrowing even more words, this time from Hail, Caesar!, would that it were so simple?