Joel and Ethan Coen are subversive filmmakers. Even when their gaze seems wide-eyed, there is always a gimlet chaser. The movies have a tangy bite. So their abiding affection for Hollywood, as depicted in their newest film, “Hail, Caesar,” is both surprising and endearing.
The first of those attributes is expected of any Coen brothers’ work. The other, not so much. But their image of the dream factory in the 1950s is a candy-colored ice-cream cone of a picture. You want to gobble it down. The intellectual iciness that is a key component of their charm is here made creamy and delicious.
“Hail, Caesar” swirls together real people and Coen creations. There was indeed an Eddie Mannix, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio executive, all sharp elbows and thuggish deal-making. But the Eddie Mannix around whom “Oh, Caesar” pinwheels (embodied by Josh Brolin in a delightfully deadpan performance) is sincerely devoted to his studio and his family—in that order. When his boss, Nick Schenck, phones from New York, Mannix stands up to take the call. He goes to confession every day, though his major sin is usually sneaking a cigarette, since he promised his wife he’d quit. His worst transgression over the course of the movie is when he feels required to slap some sense into a movie star. The sound of that slap reverberates in your ears.
Mannix is facing a crisis of confidence—and so is Hollywood. Technological advances are sending a shiver down the spine of the movie industry. Movie moguls are increasingly fearful that television will destroy their audience.
He is also suddenly full of doubt that his work isn’t serious, just child’s play in a grown-up world. Wooing him with this argument is an executive from Lockheed Martin—the real future of Southern California. The aerospace industry fueled the region’s prosperous middle class, which paved the orange and lemon groves to build endlessly sprawling suburbs.
Yet Mannix, whose daily grind is depicted as a continual effort to keep his dream factory humming, has no taste for this coming America. He gets more pleasure from manufacturing fantasies than producing machines of death and destruction. (In case we don’t get it, the Lockheed man tries to entice Mannix with a photo of H-bomb tests on the Bikini Islands.)
In addition of ignoring the real future, Mannix has no truck with the cadre who dub themselves the “The Future”—a nest of Hollywood communists. No one in “Hail, Caesar” can foresee that they are the opposite of the future. Because in this Hollywood they loom large: They have kidnapped the studio’s biggest star, Baird Whitlock (a pitch-perfect George Clooney).
This version of a communist cell, ensconced in a sleekly modern beach house on the bluffs above Malibu, is a far cry from the grindingly banal existence of the world-weary Soviet agent in the Coens’ smart scenario for “Bridge of Spies.” That sad-eyed true believer, as played by Mark Rylance, could easily fit into an early John le Carré thriller.
These Hollywood communists, however, are more like the eccentric band of professors concocted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett for “Ball of Fire.” (A screwball update of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, with Barbara Stanwyck as Snow White . . . er, Sugerpuss O’Shea.) The Coens’ communist cadre might seem ominous, but they happily spend hours arguing economic dialectic, as laid out by political philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The Coens have even placed Marcuse in the bohemian chic beach house with them—ever ready to explain himself between bites of tea sandwiches (crusts removed, of course).
Even when the communist threat is most manifest, “Hail, Caesar” views the Soviet menace as more loopy than destructive to the American way of life. In the real world, by the 1950s the movie industry had already established the blacklist, to appease the fiercely anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee. But in this alternate reality, no one’s career is destroyed by the Cold War—except if he wants it to be.
Meanwhile, no cog in the dream factory escapes Mannix’s attention—or the Coens’. The studio’s Esther Williams manqué (a tough-talking Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant but unwed, so Mannix concocts a plan for her to adopt her own child. (Actress Loretta Young beat him to it in the 1930s, though.) He reshapes the celebrity profile of a sweet singing cowboy (an adorable Alden Ehrenreich) into an urbane sophisticate, after Schenck demands that he play the lead in a snappy society comedy. (Ehrenreich’s rope tricks with spaghetti recall Charlie Chaplin making dinner rolls dance.)
All the mechanics of moviemaking are stunningly captured, down to Frances McDormand’s sly cameo as C.C. Calhoun, a tough-as-nails film editor whom Mannix checks in on as she works. She personifies that cadre of brilliant women film editors who spliced millions of hours of celluloid together. These expert film cutters knew the flaws of even the best actors—and, most important, how to edit footage so that no moviegoer ever saw them. From Margaret Booth (“Camille,” “Mutiny on Bounty”) to Dorothy Spencer (“Stagecoach,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”) to Dede Allen (“Bonnie and Clyde,” Reds,” “The Breakfast Club”) to Thelma Shoonmaker (“Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas”) these women have been essential to the movie industry.
Not that Baird Whitlock has to worry. He may be a king-sized dope (cue Clark Gable)—but like any real star, he knows how to deliver the goods once the cameras roll.
And so do Joel and Ethan Coen.