Hail Caesar falls into the same problem that most Coen Brothers comedies do. It’s silly, a little scattershot, and it seems like the Coen Brothers might be the only ones in on the joke. Not that this is a bad movie. Hail Caesar is at first glance still a funny, B- effort from the Brothers, but that’s not all there is to the film. There was a mention of the Coen’s maybe being the only ones in on the joke, and I mean that very much. The Brothers have always made comedies that made you have to think, but not in the conventional way. They want you to think about that characters, and the way that the actors play them. That’s all in good in their dramas (True Grit, and Inside Llewyn Davis seem to be film’s specifically about doing that) because the point of a drama is to use dramatic irony and action to reveal ever more and more about the characters until they finally learn something or change. The comedies however need room for the...comedy. That leaves a lot of the slack to be picked up by the audience as to what the characters are, and to what the Coen’s find them to be. They themselves have probably spent months with these characters shaping them, but we haven’t. They seem to know them, but sometimes we don’t. That’s why only they are in on some the jokes. They want you to be too, and you have to think to truly get what the characters are thinking. That’s actually all well and good to me, but it just makes it so hard to determine whether or not I’ve seen a work of genius or only a pretty good work. For example, and spoilers ( even though all clips and trailers have given this away) Scarlett Johansson plays a woman who is in mermaid movies, and is looked at as America’s innocent sweetheart. She’s an entertaining character on the surface, albeit a little cliched, as the ironic twist is the fact that she’s a smoking women with a tough Brooklyn accent, who is pregnant out of wedlock, and has married (and divorced) two mobsters. Now the joke there is pretty funny irony and all, but then you consider what the Coen’s have built here. She’s a scolding parody of other innocent young women who have become so tired of being the “innocent young women” that she’s become cynical about it. That’s dark, but it’s also much funnier than the caricature that she’s at in face value. However, none of that is really explained to you. You have to look for that part of the character, and assume it. I admire the Coen’s for being so confident in the audience with their characters, but I get the feeling that they shouldn’t be. It’ll take a couple more viewing to appreciate what I saw there for each character, but I’m sure I will. That said there is a lot to appreciate here. The story is light, and fuzzy and works in a lot of ways. It doesn’t amount to anything without the digging that I mentioned earlier, but it’s still a fun time. It simply focuses on Josh Brolin as a Hollywood manager trying to keep everything together after the studio’s main star, Baird Whitlock, disappears. The reason why he’s disappeared does turn out to be a clever and unexpectedly realistic one, and the jabs on the pretentious glorification of “forward thinking” (I’ll say that much) people is hysterical. For that matter a lot of the satirical punches that the film has to offer are pretty funny too, especially one of the biggest middle fingers I have ever seen going straight to Ben Hur. There’s still a thin sloppiness to all of it, but the actors help pick up some of the slack, especially since they all embody the aforementioned character comedy above. Josh Brolin runs the film and his performance makes for a good center to the entire production. Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich makes for one of the most smile inducing and innocent presences on screen. George Clooney is very much the same. Hail Caesar is a film I’ll fondly think of as the film that reveals what truly makes the Coen’s funny, but I’m still a little muddled on it. I just can’t figure out whether or not it’s great. I give Hail Caesar an 8 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |