Hail, Caesar!

**Spoiler Alert**

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen/Starring: George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Alden Ehrenreich, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill

Joel and Ethan Coen have made exceptional films in their careers and some irredeemable time-wasters. One can count a fair number of comedies in their oeuvre but for me, I've always preferred their dramas, which sometimes contain their brand of dark humor. I realize my low opinion of their comedies is in the minority. People insist Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou and Burn After Reading are hilarious but they only leave me cold. (I've heard some movie lovers even suggest that The Hudsucker Proxy and The Ladykillers are funny... not to me.) I'm still not wild about The Big Lebowski but I think Jeff Lebowski is a comic master creation. The Coen Brothers' comedies are too self-aware to be truly funny.
That being said, I found their new film; Hail, Caesar to be unfunny, unfocused and unfailingly tedious. I heard one woman laugh through the entire film but there is always that one person in the audience who can be counted on to find every gag and comic situation funny even when they aren't. In spite of the woman's compulsive laughter, the patrons in my immediate vicinity--and in most of the theater--were mostly silent. So it goes; everyone is entitled to laugh; it certainly isn't a crime, but maybe it's a case of sour grapes on my part, who knows?.

The Coen Brothers celebrate/skewer old Hollywood; the characters and genres that ruled the screen and the dramas that raged off of it.

Capitol Pictures' production manager Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) broad job description makes it necessary for him to also manage scandals that threaten to ruin actor's lives and derail movie projects. When the film begins, we see him visit a home where an intoxicated, high-profile actress is being photographed pornographically. Mannix, who seems accustomed to damage control of this ilk, manages to keep the situation from becoming headline fodder by pulling the starlet from the scene and paying off a couple of cops who arrive on the scene. When not defusing near-disasters, Mannix tends to studio production business. One film over which he presides is a big-budget, Ben-Hur-like epic called Hail, Caesar, which stars Hollywood mega-star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney).

During production, Whitlock is kidnapped; leaving Mannix to contend not only with a crime, but a situation that could conceivably become a media typhoon. Compounding his woes are the cost overruns Whitlock's absence creates for the the film. And yet another of Mannix's vexations are the Hedda Hopper-like, twin gossip columnists; Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton, sporting great alliterative names); who skulk about the studio lot, sniffing for scandal and gossip.

But we also meet the film's other dramatis personae, like Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), the singing cowboy of the big screen, who Mannix eventually recruits in his effort to find Whitlock and DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson); an Esther Williams-like star whose personal troubles become studio troubles. We also meet Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum); a song and dance star who later plays a part in the kidnapping drama.

Whitlock awakes in a posh, seaside home and after wandering around, he finds his kidnappers, who turn out to be a disgruntled group of screenwriters who are fed up with the industry's obeisance to the bottom line. The audience learns what it may have suspected all along; the group's agenda is strictly communist.
Meanwhile, Mannix assembles a cash payment after receiving the group's $100,000 ransom note while trying desperately to keep the kidnapping from leaking to the studio, the public and the press.

The film reaches for laughs when Hobie becomes a substitute cast member for director Laurence Laurentz's (Ralph Fiennes) tux and gown drama; a movie for which his Texan accent and cowboy persona are hopelessly ill-suited. The film's most inspired comedic scene is Mannix's meeting with local religious figures to ensure the movie's subject matter offends neither Christians nor Jews. The exchanges between the rabbi and catholic priest are peppered with a few barbed, comments about scripture.

As the mystery behind the kidnapper's intent comes to light, Whitlock becomes an ardent believer in their cause before eventually returning to the set of his movie.

The various secondary character's stories never add up to much, particularly DeeAna Moran's and Hobie Doyle's, who are more representations of old Hollywood types than people.

The Coen Brothers' film seems like an opportunity to poke fun at the anti-communist hysteria of the time. We see a boat containing Whitlock's captors and Burt Gurney approach a Russian submarine, which surfaces near the California shore, awaiting the bag containing the $100,000, which is being offered up as a gift. The absurdity of the scene seems to reflect the outrageous, right-wing, Cold War paranoia that held America in its grip during that period.

I suppose the film will seem funny to those who are attuned to the Coen Brothers' sense of screwball. I went into the movie expecting to laugh but unfortunately, their film fell flat. It isn't the first time I've had that reaction to one of their comedies and it may not be the last.
I'll move on now and hope their next movie will be more fun than this slog.