Hail, Caesar! (PG). Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson. 106 minutes
Like many movie lovers I'm a long-time devotee of the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. One of my favourites is their 1991 comedy Barton Fink, about a narcissistic New York playwright's soul-destroying experiences in 1940s Hollywood. John Turturro's memorably pitiable portrayal of the title character, and the film's loving attention to period detail, exquisite comedic exaggerations, and touches of magical realism, make it one of the all-time great films about making films.
The Coens reiterate their feelings about mid-century Hollywood — apparently, equal measures of love and disdain crammed into the same cinematic bucket — in their latest film, Hail, Caesar!; a fictional story about a day in the life of real-life Hollywood 'fixer' Eddie Mannix (Brolin). The film fast-forwards a decade from Fink to weave commentary on Cold War era politics and the Hollywood blacklist around its various pastiches of films of that time, from westerns to musicals.
We meet Mannix on a day when he has plenty to 'fix'. The star of the studio's latest, Ben-Hur style biblical epic (also called Hail, Caesar!), Baird Whitlock (Clooney), has been kidnapped by a rabble of blacklisted screenwriters. A pair of rival, twin entertainment journalists (Swinton) are bugging him for a sensational headline. Meanwhile Mannix is trying to kick the career of slow-witted western film star Hobie Doyle (Ehrenreich) to a new level by having him cast in a period drama.
This is a skilfully made film (the work of veteran cinematographer and longtime Coens collaborator Roger Deakins is characteristically excellent) that is alternately as baffling and as hilarious as anything the Coens have made. A scene in which Mannix surveys a roomful of religious leaders about the theological acceptability of Hail, Caesar! (of the nature of the Trinity they reply: 'There is unity in division!' 'And division in unity!') is Coen Brothers gold — sharp and sardonic.
It doesn't take long either to realise that the treatment of religion is about something more than laughs. Mannix works for a studio called Capitol Pictures, and thus is aligned by the Coens with the most facile aspects of capitalism, in their probing of Cold War dynamics. Yet there is a running joke in which Mannix, seemingly unconcerned by the ethical dimensions of his work, goes to confession merely to tell his priest that he has been sneaking cigarettes when