"Hail, Caesar!": The Coen brothers' faith in movies

My two cents on the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar!, even though so many smart things have been written about it since its release in early February. It is not only a witty picture that will help film professors make history come alive beyond lectures and power points, but also a sharp comedy on 1950s Hollywood politics, that minces no words about genre staples, the behind-the-scenes of a studio, the private lives of stars, and communists cells.  Like so many other films about Hollywood – A Star Is Born, Singin’ in the Rain, The Player - the pleasure of this one is to get the references, as they play out for laughs in the plot, and work ironically or reflexively in 2016.

Unexpectedly, the film opens with a close-up of a crucifix in a Catholic Church and then cuts to a confessional, where a troubled studio executive is confessing his sin of the last 24 hours: lying to his wife about smoking.  In the next 27 hours, borrowing the name and function from the real MGM producer and ‘fixer’, Eddie Mannix will play puppeteer to oddballs and misfits so that Capitol studio (an explicit counterpoint to the communist study group that pores over Das Kapital) can weave the gossamer the public craves - “people don't want the facts, they want to believe”, asserts Mannix.  (The rest of the studio hierarchy does not exist in the film, only Mr. Schenck managing the business from New York.)

Among the most enjoyable sequences of Hail, Caesar! are the loving recreations of classic Hollywood genres: musicals, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley and Gene Kelly; westerns with singing cowboys and horse stunts; sophisticated drawing room comedies directed by effete European filmmakers (a fun three-part sequence to teach mise-en-scène and editing); and wide-screen biblical epic like The Robe and Quo Vadis?  All these sharply crafted parodies work the same way: they embellish established genre conventions but deflate them with a final touch of excess, irony or referentiality that defuse any sentimentality.  (Incidentally, in the press conference after the film opened the Berlin Film festival on February 11, Joel Coen noted that he and his brother were not in the nostalgia business; not only because they did not live in 1950s Hollywood, but also because they would not have been able to work there if they had.) 

The ultimate deflating moment takes place during the overlapping climax of the film and the film-within-the film, the impassioned speech of George Clooney as the Roman military undergoing a spiritual conversion at the foot of the cross.  Together with the rousing sacred music of the soundtrack, his performance affects the characters in the crucifixion scene but also the crew filming it.  The emotional crescendo is comically destroyed when Clooney gropes for the key word of his conversion speech. Unable to recall it, the emotional spell is absurdly broken.

As it turns out, the missing noun in Clooney’s speech is ‘faith’.  The choice of word is not by chance, since it should be connected to the crucifix and the confessional of the opening sequence. But the twist here is that faith – a strong unshakeable belief – is not attached to Catholicism, and religion in general, in a denotative manner, as its primary meaning. In Hail, Caesar! faith has been made a connotation of Christianity, a second meaning, acquired by analogy. What faith  - a suspension of disbelief - really connects to is … movies.  It explains our thirst for films, the power of moving pictures to pull us out of the ordinary, to make us forget the here and now of this material and messy world. In the film, faith ends up trumping even the ‘futures’, that promise of liberation the communist screenwriters believe in but fail to deliver.

 At the end of Hail, Caesar! we are back at the confessional. Mannix acknowledges that he is still smoking; but most importantly he asks the priest how to distinguish right from wrong. In a piece of solid moral advice, he tells Mannix to follow the voice of his conscience, through which God speaks to him.

We are really back where we began– in a dark place, with a man who knows he’s running a circus instead of a business, but who understands the magic of movies and the good they can do. By other means, Hail, Caesar! is a Sullivan’s Travels for our times.  A very serious movie indeed.