There are jokes, there are inside jokes, and then there is the new movie from the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who are without question the most impressive and interesting American filmmakers of our time.
Hail, Caesar! portrays a day in the overcrowded life of a Hollywood studio executive in 1951. This is not just a movie about the movies; it’s a deliberately artificial movie about how deliberately artificial movies are. It’s a put-on of a put-on. At one moment you decide it’s about how awful Hollywood is, and then you change your mind and decide it’s about how wonderful Hollywood is. Which is exactly the point. Hail, Caesar! is a movie about how movies manipulate—which means it’s also manipulating you, and the Coens know it. And then they make fun of that, too. The ironies Hail, Caesar! both exposes and revels in are bottomless.
Hail, Caesar! is one of the most sophisticated satires ever made. And some of what it satirizes—the homoerotic quality of classic MGM sailor-boy dance numbers, the florid words stuffed into the dry mouths of hapless actors playing ancient Roman centurions—will amuse and delight anyone who has ever seen a golden age Hollywood movie. But unless you’re fully conversant with legendary tales of showbiz miscreancy and the weird behavior of Stalinist screenwriters and the theories of the New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, I fear much of what is brilliant about Hail, Caesar! will elude you.
This movie sets a new standard for obscurantist signaling. Your enjoyment of it will be somewhat limited if you don’t know that Loretta Young secretly had Clark Gable’s baby out of wedlock and then adopted that baby as though she had been born of someone else. And that Gable supposedly once had a tryst in silent-movie days with a silent-film actor named Billy Haines, and later had the gay director George Cukor fired from Gone With the Wind because Cukor knew about it.
And the comic qualities of the movie’s key subplot—about the kidnapping of a Gable-like character played by George Clooney—are best appreciated with an awareness of the fact that John Howard Lawson, the third-rate screenwriter who led the Communist cell in Hollywood, was said to have instructed his fellow scribes to stick in a line or two here and there in their scripts to advance the Communist cause subliminally.
What I’m saying is that Hail, Caesar! might be a movie with an ideal audience of one, and I think that ideal audience might be . . . me. It’s no wonder Hail, Caesar! is not doing well at the box office. I’m not exactly John Q. Public.
Hail, Caesar! takes the form of a classic businessman’s tale, the story of a decent man running a wild business full of irrational employees who has 24 hours to decide whether to take that comfortable, well-paying, more suitable, but tragically boring new job. The businessman in question is Eddie Mannix, a good family man and very guilty Catholic whose job is to make sure that the movies get made, the money men in New York are kept happy, the gossip columnists are kept at bay, and the actors behave. He’s played by Josh Brolin, who’s especially terrific in a movie filled with terrific performances. (There’s a starmaking turn by a young actor named Alden Ehrenreich, who plays a Roy Rogers-like figure hilariously miscast in a drawing-room drama directed by an increasingly exasperated Ralph Fiennes—the film’s high point.)
Mannix is the sane center around which the screwball madness of Hail, Caesar! revolves. This is the key Coen in-joke in Hail, Caesar!—because there was a real Eddie Mannix, and he wasn’t a good guy in any way. Mannix was Hollywood’s most notorious go-to guy: a mobbed-up former New Jersey bricklayer whose job it was at MGM to cover up felonious and scandalous activities by celebrities and executives. According to E.J. Fleming’s book The Fixers, Mannix arranged abortions, set up beard marriages, bribed cops and journalists, suborned perjury, rearranged crime scenes, got people to confess falsely to crimes committed by stars, and gathered blackmail evidence against others to use as bargaining chips. Mannix was the opposite of a good family man: He had numerous affairs, beat his wife, and spent 15 years living in sin with a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer.
We see Mannix doing many of these things in the course of Hail, Caesar! but somehow they’re just all in good fun and are excusable because, after all, he just wants to provide entertainment to the fun-starved masses. By using Mannix’s name, Joel and Ethan Coen are playing their greatest ironic trick of all. They are deliberately scrubbing and sanitizing a dark Hollywood legend the way Hollywood, past and present, sanitizes reality to make it conform to the more sugary version we go to the movies to imbibe along with our 32 ounces of endlessly refillable Coca-Cola.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
