Saw a Thursday showing of Hail, Caesar, the new Coen Brothers film about 1950s Hollywood starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Scarlet Johanson, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, and a number of other old timers and up-and-comers. Or, rather, a few of these people are in a lot of this film and others are cameos, not that the marketing would admit that.
To put a simple point on it, this movie is a whole lot of nonsense. This is the Coen Brothers in Burn After Reading mode… where you watch a lot of semi-connected scenes that may or may not be thematically related, some weird stuff happens, and then it ends and you just kind of can’t quite figure out what it all means… if it means anything at all. I enjoyed Burn After Reading because its whole lot of nonsence had a message about surveillance society and dumb people (or something). I’m not so sure this movie adds up to anything quite so semi-coherent.
For example, what appears to be the main plot of George Clooney, the big star of the studio, being kidnapped is almost not at all what this movie is about. This movie is more the day-in-the-life of a studio fixer who is trying to resolve a variety of crises with his stars… except it’s also about five or six movies in production that we get extensive sequences of. It’s possible the whole point of the movie are these asides… but probably not.
Or maybe it’s a movie about faith with one of the characters is a Christ figure taking the sins of the studio system on his shoulders. Or not. I dunno. Channing Tatum’s sailor song and dance number was pretty great. And I laughed, though kind of in a perplexed way sometimes (“WTF? OK…”).
So, there ya go. It’s a movie that unspools in a head-scratching way, manages to entertain in spurts, things happen, and a lot of is is unbridled (and probably intentional) nonsense. I believe there’s a message or theme in between the well done 1950s Hollywood movie goof-ballery. But I’m not sure I can recommend it unless you are a hard-core Coen Brothers fan, love you some old school Hollywood, or are willing to dive deep into what might be some pretty buried themes and meanings.
Score: 76