Hail, Caesar!

What Jeff said:

You should check out the cinematic production, Hail, Caeser!. It’s an entertaining comedy/musical and my favourite scene is the dance number with the Navy guys getting ready to ship out in a closing bar.

Mike’s verdict:

I didn’t know this was a Coen Brother’s film until the end when I checked, but I was fairly certain that it had to be one. It has the characteristically pompous cleverness that pervades (sometimes to great effect, often not) through many of the Coens’ more recent offerings.

In this case, the cleverness is a little too clever for its own good – more than once I was left trying to figure out if I had missed something, only to realize that I hadn’t missed anything at all. Somehow the film feels accidentally disjointed, as if it had a traditional flowing plot that was mixed up and pieced back together by an intern who wasn’t supposed to be in the editing room alone. To be fair, the Coens’ are known for attempting to weave stories through interconnected mini-plots – and usually they are able to strike a decent balance between confusion and entertainment. But Hail, Caeser! misses the mark. Much like Burn After Reading, it has a proper story that each act is meant to contribute to (I think), but those acts are so disjointed and patchy that they come across more like the vignettes in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. In fact, it is easy to draw a line of increasing vignette-ification through the three films, but Hail, Caeser! really fails to pull it all together at the end.

I’ll accept this film as a learning exercise on the way the Buster Scruggs, but there’s a reason nobody gets points for “showing the work” once high school math class is finished.

The film isn’t all bad. Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, and Jonah Hill each give convincing and entertaining performances. They are all completely forgettable and feel like pieces of 4 unrelated puzzles, but in the moment they are definitely entertaining. George Clooney was good too, but his portrayal of a confused actor seemed a little too on the nose – like he read the script and knew that none of it made any sense, but the Coens’ were offering enough money. Scarlett Johansson‘s segment is by far the stand-out performance, unfortunately it has no bearing on the plot at all.

To address Jeff’s favourite part, I agree that Channing Tatum‘s musical number is a bit of a highlight – mainly because it’s fun to laugh at Channing Tatum. Unfortunately, it’s way, way, way too long. It’s more than 5 minutes! Even real musicals don’t make the audience listen to the same song for that long. It goes on so long that I actually got tired of laughing at Channing Tatum. I didn’t even think that was possible.

But the biggest disappointment is Josh Brolin‘s lead character. Brolin does a fantastic job of playing the secretly stressed Hollywood ‘fixer’, but the character is really hard to identify with. The film sets up a central tension for Brolin’s character to make a decision on, but the right choice is so clear that it’s hard to understand why he would even need to consider it. And in the end he chooses wrong.

Despite all of the entertaining components, I was ready for the film to be over long before it was. And when we did reach the end too much was left disconnected.

6/10