Movie review – Hail Caesar

Tweet

2016 – Spoiler alerts A movie with lots of great scenes, brilliant casting and scenery, a wonderful air of nostalgia for the Golden Age of Hollywood, and an utterly inconclusive anti-climatic plot. There are several stories being told. Though George Clooney is promoted as the leading star, it is really Josh Brolin who is the main focus as a studio ‘fixer’ trying to keep a lid on scandals affecting his studio’s A-list stars. An Esther Williams based swim-star, played by Scarlet Johanson has become pregnant in mid-filming, to an unknown lover, so Brolin arranges for her to effectively adopt her own child. This is worsened by Tilda Swinton playing two twin gossip columnists from rival magazines seeking the truth about the various problems affecting the studio. A Roy Rogers cowboy-singer is offered a role in a serious Olivier style society drama and proves incapable of serious acting much to the aggravation of its everything just right director. The fixer struggles to stop the director firing the actor. Worse, Clooney, playing a Victor Mature sword & Sandals epics star, has been kidnapped by a Communist cell who are blackmailing the studio for a sizable ransom. Clooney is funny as he caves in to Stockholm Syndrome acceptance of Marxist ideology almost immediately, but the rather pro-McCarthyist attitude to a genuine Red-Conspiracy among Hollywood script-writers in the late 40's and early 1950’s, right down to a submarine waiting to take the cell leader to Russia, seems rather jarring. There are great set pieces, including Johanson’s aqua-ballet, a fantastic sailor song-dance routine parody of South Pacific, with some incredible choreography, and Alden Erenreich’s cowboy scenes are outstanding, but there is no real dramatic tension. Clooney seems totally unfazed by his abduction and never even remotely endangered. His rescue is bizarrely undramatic, and his conversion to Communist ideology is simply slapped out of him the moment he starts off with it back in studio. Lots of great cameos from the likes of Robert Trebor (Salmonius in Hercules & Xena) and Robert Picardo (The Doctor in Star Trek Voyager) but for all its great moments this just doesn’t knit together into a single movie. Arthur Chappell