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Hail, Caesar! is
the latest film from the Coen Brothers and one that's essentially a
love letter to cinema. In case you're part of today's disgusting youth
then a love letter was an elegant expression of a person's feelings
that you scum have replaced with the ubiquitous 'dick-pic'. Set in the 1950's the
story focuses on a studio 'fixer' by the name of Eddie Mannix whose job
is to ensure that the filmmaking process goes on unhindered.
Sometimes this means liaising with the press, and sometimes it means
finding enough cash to buy back an actor that's been kidnapped by a
cult. This sounds like an easy job to me. If I was a fixer and found
out that somebody like Lindsey Lohan had been kidnapped then I'd
simply leave her where she was and enjoy my retirement with the
ransom money. However Mannix is a much more honourable man than me
and, as such, feels the burden of his responsibilities. This is ironic
because whilst his studio is struggling to incorporate everybody's
favourite zombie overlord Jesus into one of their films, he's
suffering for everybody's sins and resisting temptation from a rival
company. Some critics have wrongly assumed that Hail Caesar
represents the Coen's contempt
for cinema, however with Mannix being Jesus, it's also pretty obvious
that film, being the only thing he answers to, is God. My reading of
it would be that it's actually humanity that doesn't come out of this
movie too well.. although that could just be because I'm a raging
misanthrope.
However,
before we go any further it's worth noting that this is a comedy and
one of the funniest in some time. If you disagree with that then I can
only assume that you've not had some fucking 'young person' drag you to see Ride Along fucking
2. I mean,
even when I wasn't laughing during this film I was still smiling,
which is an expression I rarely make when not simply passing wind or
reading the latest local obituaries. There are several set pieces in Hail, Caesar! such
as an all singing, all dancing, musical segment featuring Channing
Tatum that's so gleefully camp that even the most homophobic of
today's crackhead society couldn't fail to find some enjoyment. However
as brilliant and joyful as these cinematic sequences are, they're all
performed by people pretending to be somebody they're not. One of
Mannix's actresses is more slutty than her public image allows, and
one of his actors might secretly belong to a political party that's
almost as stupid as one headed by Donald Trump. The point being that
cinema is able to shine through as brilliant despite the
discrepancies of the idiots making it. I mean, even on my worst days
of hating humanity I'd never say I approve of a child being drugged
and fucked up the arse, but there's no denying that Chinatown
is
a pretty good movie.
On
top of all this, Hail, Caesar! is also basically the Coen's version of one of
those 'behind the scenes' movies that all auteurs seem to make their
own. Woody Allen's Bullets
Over Broadway is
about a neurotic writer; Linklater's Me
And Orson Welles looks
at who he considers to be one of the first independent filmmakers;
and Inarritu's Birdman
is
essentially an exercise in how to make a film way more fucking
complicated than it needs to be. With Hail,
Caesar! the
Coen's have unsurprisingly made their version of this type of film a
mildly noirish, screw-ball comedy with absurdist overtones... as you
do. However it's also surprisingly meta too in that the entire movie
is about Hollywood trying to hide people's true identities in favour
of something more socially acceptable. Well, you know Eddie Mannix, the
guilt obsessed Jesus-figure of this movie? Well, he was a real guy..
and guess what? Unlike his depiction in this movie, he was a proper
twat. In this movie the character feels guilty that he hasn't quit
smoking, but in reality the actual Mannix was a violent thug who was even
implicated in the murder of the actor George Reeves. I mean, Reeves
played fucking Superman! Josh Brolin plays the character as though
he's carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders but there's a
chance that the actual guy literally succeeded in doing something
that even Lex fucking Luther couldn't get away with.
Also,
as the story to this film progresses, it's discovered that some of
these old studio movies may have been written to include some fairly
subversive messages, and guess what.. so does this one! As Hail,
Caesar! does
a Mannix with Mannix, not only is it referencing his on-screen
activities but he's the fucking Jesus figure of the movie. So
presumably the suggestion must be that if the Mannix on screen never
existed then neither did Jesus.. or at least not in the pure form
we're always told he did. This idea has got to be backed up too by
the fact that we literally never even see Jesus properly on screen,
and that's despite the characters making a fucking film about him.
They go completely out of their way not to show him which is also
something that the film these characters are making is probably going
to do, too. The Coen's have literally made a movie about a man of faith
attempting to make a film about the son of God and yet arguably the
actual message is that old Mr Christ never fucking existed. As a
devout atheist who likes to spend the down-time between masturbating
and crying by overthinking things, that's certainly how I see it
anyway.
Oh
and there's also a thing going on in this movie about the bullshit of
nostalgia. You remember before how I mentioned that all of our stars
now lack the grace and charisma of somebody like Clarke Gable? Well,
this entire movie is set during that period and depicts everybody
with that warm glow of a better time. I mean, the only way that today's
stars are going to develop a warm glow is if Kevin James falls asleep
with melted butter around his mouth. Nowadays people end
relationships by just fucking their partners friend and sending them
a text, which sort of lacks the kiss off line of, “Frankly my dear, I
don't give a damn”. However.. we've already established that Mannix
was a pure cock-womble haven't we? Well you know Clarke Gable? Guess
what he did?! That dapper gent of a time-gone-by raped his co-star
Loretta Young, got her pregnant, and had a Hollywood fixer cover up
the entire fucking incident. I guess he wasn't kidding when he said
he didn't give a damn. I suppose it should also be obvious that the
days of the Hollywood system weren't as glamorous as people pretend
to remember them as being, otherwise they wouldn't have needed fixers
in the first place. At the end of the day we all have toilet roll in
our house and as much as we'd like to pretend it's for decoration, the
reality is that it's only there to clean up our shit.
Oh
and how did Gable get away with his 'special cuddle of illegal love'
I hear nobody asking? Well the fixer forced Young to adopt her own
rapey-consolation prize-child as though it was somebody else's which
is not only beyond insane but it's also a plot-point in this God-damned
movie. A plot point that has also been toned down from the grimness
of reality like Mannix's real life character has been and again like the
actions of his character on screen. So again, to draw my
own conclusions, the Coen's have presented the past as significantly
more charming than things are now but they've knowingly based the
whole thing on a lie. Their
depiction
of the past is literally the cinematic equivalent of what looks like
the most gorgeous chocolate bar of all time, but when bitten into
turns out to be a carefully moulded lump of shit. Except this bar of
chocolate has raisins, which have been replaced in this convoluted
metaphor by Mannix himself. Do you know I said that Clarke Gable had
a fixer sort out his 'problem'. Well if you can guess who it is was
then congratulations for passing the 'of course it fucking was'
test.. that fixer was obviously the real life Eddie fucking Mannix.
So
to conclude, Hail,
Caesar! is
a cinematic love letter about a man of faith and from those golden
olden days that might really be about how existence has always been
crap and Jesus is bollocks. The genius of the Coen's is that not only
have they done this but they've also done it in a film that's
essentially a Best Of The Coen's movie. So you get a musical sequence
like in O Brother,
Where Art Thou?;
a taste of what it's like to make films like Barton
Fink; moments
of screwball comedy like Intolerable
Cruelty; and
occasional hints at a more noirish tone like in No
Country For Old Men. Even
The Big Lebowski
had
a Jesus thing in it, although in that case it wasn't so much a
metaphor as it was a man called Jesus who'd inappropriately rub his
bowling balls and happened to be a nonce.
Oh,
and the story here revolves around a kidnapping and a bag of cash,
like it does in every other fucking Coen Brothers movie ever. Maybe people
will read all of this and assume that I'm a nerd with too much time
on his hands and that this is really just a sketch movie that's just
about held together with a missing person mystery. Perhaps you're
right, but to you confused and silly people I say “would that it
were so simple”. Thanks for reading motherfuckers, and see you next
time.
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