We saw Hail Caesar and maybe I just don't like Coen Brothers films?

[drwex]

I went into this one with high expectations. It looked like fun, and funny, with a great cast. In the end, I found it to be a tedious mash-up of stereotypes that wandered pointlessly and failed to amuse. It wasn't so bad as to make me want my hours back, but it was very "meh" and "that was too long for its content."

Afterward sweetmmeblue commented that I tend not to like Coen Brothers films. I think my expectations were set very high way back in the Raising Arizona days and everything since then has failed to live up to that. There are certainly a lot of Coen works I haven't seen, but I've been pretty consistently disappointed by what I have.

This is a film about films, as produced in the strongarm-studio era of Hollywood 1951. Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, a hard-working, good-hearted head of a studio that's both churning out product and managing its stable of celebrities while fending off nosy press and dealing with its stars' foibles, including drunkenness, infidelity, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. That the movie succeeds at all is due to the cast's stellar performances in their stereotyped roles.

George Clooney's Baird Whitlock is the central acting character, and he's a stereotype. He drinks too much, sleeps around, and tells hoary tales of other actors. He does one unexpected thing the entire movie (which I won't spoil) and in the end it amounts to nothing.

Alden Ehrenreich is Hobie Doyle, the stereotype of a looks-good, sings-well, can't-act cowboy-acrobat performer. He's just genuinely nice, and the funny accent thing is part of the stereotype. He gets paired up by the studio with a Carmen Miranda-alike stereotype, and we get to watch him doing stereotypical rope tricks.

Ralph Fiennes is Laurence Laurentz, and he's the stereotype of the closeted pooftah director, intent on translating Broadway hits into faithful on-screen presentations. He's stereotypically fussy about his clothing and speech - isn't that what closeted homosexuals are all like? Ugh.

Scarlett Johansson is DeeAnna Moran, the stereotype bad-girl starlet. On screen for her looks and wholesome (blonde, buxom) image acting in stereotypical Busby Berkley-esque films. Of course, off screen she's promiscuous and has gone through two stereotypically useless husbands already.

Well, you get the idea. The film seems determined to pile one stereotype on top of another. Even minor characters are presented this way. In the one scene of Mannix at home, his adoring and dutiful wife has kept dinner warm for him and when he starts to discuss his job quandries with her, she tells him, "Well of course you know best, dear." Ugh.

Maybe this is supposed to be funny? Maybe the Coens are trying to get us to see how dumb all these 65-year-old stereotypes are and laugh at it? I didn't think it was particularly funny - in fact I found myself cringing at several points - nor did the audience seem to emit more than a polite chuckle now and then.

The plot, such as it is, kind of winds and meanders, giving us plenty of time to see everyone in their stereotypical performances. And they all smoke. There's a movie, it needs its star (Whitlock) to finish the climactic scene. But he goes missing, because... well, more stereotypes.

I did enjoy Tilda Swinton doubling as the twin sisters Thora and Thessaly Thacker. Swinton plays them both as versions of ridiculous gossip columnists and the wardrobe director clearly had a blast costuming Swinton's tall, thin frame in a variety of awesome Modernist 50s-era fashions. She tries very hard to be comic relief and I can't fault Swinton for the fact that the script just doesn't give her any good material.

Comments

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

Now we just need for the better movies to come out (unless there's something else you want to see besides PP&Z?)

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

Which Coen Brothers films have you seen so far?

[drwex]

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Big Lebowski

Fargo

The Hudsucker Proxy (which I mostly liked, kind of)

I might have seen one or two others, but if so they didn't really stick with me.

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

I'm going to guess that nihilism isn't for you, so avoid "No Country for Old Men".

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The movie was very, very Coen Brothers.

You are complaining about stereotypes, but the things you're picking out aren't stereotypes, they're thinly veiled representations of actual actors. Scarlett Johansen plays Esther Williams (who had the accidental pregnancy, the multiple husbands, etc. etc. etc., although the adopting-the-actual-daughter idea is out of Loretta Young's biography). Channing Tatum's "Burt Gurney" is Gene Kelley (the names are even similar, and Kelley was linked to various Communist organizations in Hollywood, although Kelley didn't climb on a Russian sub...). And Eddie Mannix was a real person. Veronica Osorio is Carmen Miranda. George Clooney is Charlton Heston. Here's a writeup from Nerdist in case you want something else to go on. And this article discusses the historical basis for more of the actors and plot points.

We enjoyed it a lot, but a. we live in the middle of all that Hollywood stuff and b. to us it felt like they were both satirizing the old movies themselves (example: The way Channing Tatum's song and dance number gets progressively more homoerotic) and satirizing the stereotypes that exist in movies ABOUT old movies (like My Favorite Year, LA Confidential, etc.) There was also an underlying commentary about how Hollywood manufactures reality - from running the script for Hail Caesar through every religious representative they could find (love Bob Picardo in that scene) so they wouldn't offend anyone to the way the celebrities' reputations were so manufactured. (That was especially funny because they still are!)

[drwex]

Yeah, I got that the actors in this are representations or pastiches of actual people. But they're the stereotypes of the people, not actual persons in the sense of being 3-D and complex. Moreover, the people picked to be in Hail Caesar and how they're represented are stereotypical because there were other people who could have been shown who were every bit as real in 1951 Hollywood.

In a sense that's beside the point because even if I grant that OK these are those people and those people were like that and did those things, it's still a couple hours of "who the F cares?" Maybe it's great for Hollywood insiders and those really knowledgeable to play "spot the reference" but for me it was just not going anywhere.

[heather mccrillis (from livejournal.com)]

Thanks for the warning. I didn't care for "A Simple Man". The school in that film was my elementary school, btw.