Movie review: 'Hail, Caesar!'

The Coen Brothers aim a big, loving piss-take at Hollywood's heyday in this comedic film starring George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson and Josh Brolin, writes Kavish Chetty

Welcome to the candy-coloured world of 1950s Hollywood, where blonde super-starlets with pillowy lips (Scarlett Johansson) and rugged, old-guard actors with names like Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) rule the scene with all their usual semi-splendid self-absorption. And waiting in the wings is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the "fixer". Mannix's job is to keep long-snouted journalists off the scent of his vice-ridden clients, a quest that takes on the classic contours of a Coen caper as soon as Whitlock drinks from a drugged goblet of wine and ends up abducted with only a ransom note from "the Future" as a clue.

Hail, Caesar! is the Coens' equally nostalgic and absurd tribute to the yesteryear of the film industry. As insiders, their view is every bit as deliciously profane as one could expect from artists who have long breathed in the miasma of Hollywood - the publicists, the producers, the cocaine, the easily splintered egos of the "talent", the whole mania and circus of this convulsing thing with its own, bizarre inner life.

Caesar's loose, sprawling, shaggy-dog plot brings together a great deal of the old masteries that the brothers perfected in films such as The Big Lebowski and Fargo. It's the perfect medium for a movie that keeps drumming up false anxiety, keeping you on the edge, while you anticipate the next triumphantly comic moment.

The film groups together an all-star cast of celebrities, filled up to the edges with people like Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum. As in Burn After Reading, each of the characters is an over-the-top confection, players who concentrate an intense, satiric energy and then simply beam it out to everyone around them. Even as the plot rattles through a hit-list of kidnappings, unwanted pregnancies and secret communist cells, it remains one of the cheerier pictures to come from this pair of fraternal director-producers, and every sag in plot is matched by a corresponding gulp of delight later on.

At the core of the movie is a film within a film, the titular "Hail, Caesar!", a ludicrous, big-budget mid-century historical epic in which Clooney struts around in gladiatorial garb. We get a simultaneously tender and critical take of this strange moment in Hollywood history, when the Golden Age was in its twilight phase and, once again, it's the attention to detail in the movie that makes it so immersive - the lighting, the swarming set of extras, the clash of personalities. Hail, Caesar! is a twisting, shape-shifting jazz piece of a film, and a troubled love letter to a vanished time.

Rating: 4/5