This is the final installment of my bi-monthly 2018 series in which I reconsider certain Coen brothers movies I didn’t love (and one I did).
If I’d made a list ranking Coen brothers movies from first
to worst before starting this series, the second-to-last spot on that list
might have been reserved for the one that was, until November of this year,
their most recent.
That’s right, I really didn’t care for Hail, Caesar! when I
saw it back in February of 2016.
And sleepiness victimizes yet another movie.
As written about here, I saw it with a friend, which kept me
from smuggling in the snacks that are meant to keep me awake during a movie.
(The dubious value of which were discussed only yesterday on this blog.) And
the result was one of my most epic struggles to stay awake in recent memory.
I had no such trouble for my second viewing of Hail, Caesar!
this past Tuesday night. As a result, I have now upgraded it from a non-plussed
two-star rating in 2016 to ... “a hoot.”
So I still don’t love this movie, not by a long shot, but
now I do think of it as “a hoot.”
I always had an appreciation for the big set pieces in this
movie, particularly the “No Dames!” sequence led by Channing Tatum. But that’s
just what this movie felt like to me on the whole: a series of disjointed and
disconnected set pieces. Neither of the movie’s two real narrative throughlines
– the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) by communists and the
makeover of the image of movie star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) – held much
value for me. They were both fatally slight.
Of course, the major narrative throughline is supposed to be
the day-to-day struggle of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as he keeps the lid on
any scandals that may threaten the studio and its stars. He’s also trying to
decide if he should jump ship for a cushy job at Lockheed. But his arc didn’t
interest me much -- he is, paradoxically, a supporting player in multiple
storylines, giving him enough screen time to function as the main character. He
doesn’t feel developed enough to be a traditional main character. He’s more
like a fast-talking prop, played for humor even though the Coens think he isn’t
being played that way. Then again, I can’t tell what the Coens actually think
for a lot of the parts of this movie.
I do, however, now find this movie a hoot. Certain
individual moments exist as isolated delights, like everything Hobie Doyle does
with a lasso, like he and Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) duelling in their
deliveries of “Would that it were so simple,” like some of the dialogue between
the communists. They just don’t add up to more than the sum of individual
hoots.
Given what the Coens have given us in 2018 – the anthology
film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I watched a few weeks ago – I now have
a bit more context for where they were headed creatively. When they made Hail,
Caesar!, they didn’t essentially want to make a single coherent narrative. They
wanted to give us flavors of a world through the eyes of different characters.
They erred, I think, by not just breaking it up into an anthology as they did
with Buster Scruggs. There’s strain in the effort to make the connections
between characters in Caesar. Like, what sense does it make that Hobie Doyle
goes off in search of Baird Whitlock? I loved what they did in The Ballad of
Buster Scruggs, and think Caesar could have benefitted from turning their creative impulses more explicitly into that kind of finished product.
During this series I’ve come to recognize that I tend to
like melancholy Coens (Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis) more than bug-eyed Coens (O
Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading), except when I don’t – Raising
Arizona and No Country for Old Men being the exceptions in each category. But
Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time, is actually bug-eyed Coens
undercut by a genuinely moving ending that brings home the film’s underlying
sentiment. I suppose that’s my favorite version of the Coens, when they pull it
off.
I think they try to pull that off here, but it doesn’t work.
The sentiment doesn’t carry much emotional weight, and the jokes in the
bug-eyed parts don’t land for me. I’ve noted the exceptions to that latter
part. But for example, the scene where Mannix sits at a table full of religious
leaders and asks them about the studio’s proposed depiction of Jesus Christ? I
can tell that scene is designed to be hilarious, and that the Coens think it
is. It just doesn’t land for me.
Still, though, the upgrade in my overall impression of the
movie is reasonably significant. My two-star rating is more properly a three,
I’d say, which makes this probably the most successful re-coen-sideration of
the whole series.
And that finishes the series. In summation, there wasn’t a
single film I watched that I actually liked less the second time I saw it. I
wonder if that’s a Coens thing, as I just listened to the Filmspotting episode
on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and they talked about how Coen movies benefit
from repeat viewings, to a greater extent than your average movie. Of course, the results of my series are a bit skewed, as
I only watched one movie I already liked. If I had watched exclusively movies I
liked instead of mostly movies I didn’t like, I might have seen some of those
drop in my estimation.
Still, positive result for the series, though possibly not a
profound enough result to really reach any conclusions. The Coens are still
some of my favorite filmmakers and I still have issues with some of their
films. Two of the most beloved Coen films, The Big Lebowski and No Country for
Old Men, are movies I didn’t rewatch for this series because I’d already done
that on my own time. I still can’t reach others’ level of affection on them.
Most creative talents are going to hit with you sometimes
and miss sometimes. That’s just the way it goes. But when the Coens do hit,
they hit better than almost anyone else.
I’ve got a bi-monthly series lined up for 2019, and it also
concentrates on the work of a well-known director(s). I’ll tell you about that
another time.
