When I started working through the entire Coen filmography, I immediately regretted it. Not because it’s too many movies, some of which I don’t have strong opinions of (though that is also the case), but because the end was going to coincide with screener season. Every year, I think I’m going to stay on top of the nearly two hundred screeners I get sent for the IFJA Awards, and every year I end up in a fugue state, churning through endless awards fodder, unable to allow myself time to watch anything else, much less write about it. It’s a weakness, and I’ll likely never get over it. This is just to say I’m still going to get through all of these movies, just later than I would like, but what else is new for me?
It’s fitting that the first movie I write about after awards exhaustion is Hail, Caesar!, the Coens’ love letter to old Hollywood. This was their excuse to make a snippet of their favorite genres from childhood; a time when there were simply types of movies. Here’s the new Western, and the costume drama, and the song and dance picture, and the Biblical epic, etc. Whereas now I’m watching documentaries about Hamlet being performed within Grand Theft Auto Online and Timothée Chalamet ping pong movies set in the 1950s with music from the 1980s and co-stars like Mr. Wonderful, Abel Ferrara, and the homeless dude with the great voice from a few years ago (for the record, I liked both movies). These were simpler times.
But I didn’t grow up in those times. My nostalgia is all about Ninja Turtles, Indiana Jones, and Darth Vader, not Fred Astaire and Clark Gable. Because of that, I simply enjoy this one and consider it a lesser Coen film. In fact, it was only one of two of their films I didn’t own on physical media until I bought it in anticipation of this article (the other is Scruggs, which I’ll eventually buy during a Criterion sale). I get why some consider this an underrated masterpiece, but it doesn’t hit the same way for me. For instance, I know that the Channing Tatum scene is amazing, but it doesn’t hold a candle to literally any moment from Miller’s Crossing for me.
Perhaps it’s the same issue I’ve been writing about for the past few movies in their filmography: straight comedy. This is a very silly movie, and I’m particular about Coen silliness. I love all the wacky shit in Raising Arizona, but Scarlett Johansson complaining about a “fish ass” in a New York accent doesn’t do much for me.
This is all sounding too negative. I do like this movie, and I like it more with each rewatch. Clooney is doing great dumbass work. The Kurgan and the Highlander are in this! Dolph Lundgren has a silent cameo. Brolin is perfect, and that scene with him listening to Clooney’s Communist ramblings as he grows increasingly enraged is hilarious. And Alden Ehrenreich steals the show. His catastrophic first scene in the costume drama with Ralph Fiennes is funny on so many levels.