I recently finished watching the IMDB Top 250
list and for that exercise I watched every film, regardless of whether I
expected to love or hate them. I’m now
working through the BBC’s 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films list
and, well, I’m being slightly less rigorous.
There are certain directors (Tarantino, Scorsese, Nolan and Jackson for
example) that I’ve simply had a bellyful of on the Top 250 list. To put it bluntly, I won’t be watching any
more of their fucking films. Steven
Spielberg is a different case. There are
quite a few of his films on the 250 list.
Some of the earlier ones (Jaws,
Jurassic Park) I enjoyed. Others I really hated (Schindler's List). Generally
the sentimentality and artistic misjudgement of the later films outweigh the positive
elements for me – there’s no denying Spielberg’s talent, but the rage these
later films generate in me can’t be good for the heart, so I’ve decided to add
Spielberg to the Cunt List along with Tarantino etc. (Sorry I’ve got a bit sweary in this
introduction, by the way.)
All of this is a longwinded way of saying
that I haven’t watched the film at Number 83 on the BBC list, A.I. Artifical Intelligence, by Steven
Spielberg, and I’ve replaced it with Hail,
Caesar!, by the Coen Brothers.
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Hail,
Caesar! isn’t a well-loved film among the Coen Brothers’ output. People complain that it hasn’t got a plot, or
they walked out of it, or fell asleep during it or whatever. Personally, I loved it and chuckled my way
through the whole thing.
The set pieces – George Clooney’s epic Roman
scenes, Channing Tatum’s tap-dancing routine, Scarlett Johansson’s synchronized
swimming extravaganza, Alden Ehrenreich’s adventures with his horse, Whitey –
are all magnificent, and serve both as a homage to the entertainment value of
1950s Hollywood big-budget movies and a knowing nod to the artifice and non-reality
of these glitzy entertainments.
Alden Ehrenreich’s cowboy character, Hobie Doyle, is
pushed into a mannered drawing-room drama directed by a British director Laurence
Laurentz, played by Ralph Fiennes. Hobie
is horribly miscast due to the unavailability of any other actor and doesn’t
make a success of the role. It’s a sign
of the genius of this film, however, that the Coens don’t mock poor Hobie from
one end of the film to the other. On a
date contrived for publicity purposes by the studio between Hobie and a young
starlet, Hobie is allowed to be charming as he demonstrates his lassoing skills
with spaghetti strands at the dinner table.
This is the kind of artistic judgement that comes with the long
experience of the Coens.
Review continues below...
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Of course, without the problems in production
(Hobie’s miscasting, Scarlett’s character’s pregnancy, Clooney’s character’s
kidnapping), there would be no need for Eddie Mannix (played by Josh Brolin) as
the Hollywood fixer, who has to keep the expensive productions running
smoothly. Mannix is a Catholic and he is
often tempted in the film – to lie, to smoke cigarettes after he’s told his
wife he’s quit, and to change industries to a well-paid position being offered
by the engineering firm Lockheed. But
while the crazy, frivolous world of Hollywood is held up against the sober,
cushy world of Lockheed, Mannix is never in any doubt about where his heart
lies. When the Lockheed recruiter shows
Mannix a photo of a hydrogen bomb detonation that his company has been involved
with, the relative evils of the two industries are put into focus.
A nicely understated aspect of this film is
that Mannix is such a brilliant manager.
He walks the line between satisfying political pressures and
compromising quality. He promises to follow
up on the results of his decisions (such as watching the rushes) and always
does what he says he’ll do. He deals
with the creatives in exactly the right way to keep them happy and to extract
their best performances. It’s not often
that the mundane techniques of proper work are convincingly shown in
art, but this is a great example.
George Clooney has worked with the Coen Brothers on a
number of films now and I think he gives good value. I liked him in another much hated Coen
Brothers film, Intolerable Cruelty. The DVD extras of that film showed him doing
a dozen takes of spitting out a mouthful of tea in surprise, and I don’t doubt
that his jowl-shaking response to being slapped by Mannix towards the end of
this film took just as much effort to get perfect. Clooney’s character is kidnapped by a group
of Marxist writers, who are furious at being cut out of the profits of the
films that rely on their scripts, and who get their revenge by slipping in sly
Marxist references wherever they can to the studio’s film scripts. There are some long scenes of Clooney with
the Marxists and I suspect it is these that cause much of the negative
reactions to Hail, Caesar!. I loved them though – they are full of little
gags, not least of which is the sight of these Marxists having their earnest
discussions in a luxury ocean-side building, complete with servants, eating
crustless cucumber sandwiches.
Personal Score: 9/10
This is part of a series of film reviews where I give my comments on the BBC's Top 21st Century films as a writer. The idea is that over time these posts will build into a wide-ranging writing resource.
For more details about the approach I've taken, including some important points about its strengths and weaknesses (I make no claims about my abilities as a film critic or even the accuracy of my comments... but I do stand by the value of a writer's notes on interesting films), see my introductory post here.
