HAIL, CAESAR!: Not Top Tier Coen Brothers, But At Times It Comes Close

Opening today at both multiplexes and art houses (but mainly multiplexes):

HAIL, CAESAR! (Dirs. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2016)

“This motion picture contains no visual depiction
of the godhead.” – End Credits Disclaimer

After the bleak, gray-toned terrain of their last few pictures, 2010’s TRUE GRIT and 2013’s INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, the Coen brothers mix it up with this colorful, star-studded satire of ‘50s Hollywood.

In his third film for the master filmmaking siblings, Josh Brolin heads the cast as Eddie Mannix, the head production chief for the fictional Capital Studios, who mainly works as a “fixer” (somebody who keeps actors’ scandals out of the press). We first meet Mannix in a confessional, where the man cries over the sin of sneaking cigarettes and lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about it.

From there, we learn about the troubled production of a big expensive Roman-Biblical epic (a film-within-the-film also titled “Hail, Caesar”), which stars Baird Whitlock, an idiot of a matinee idol played by another Coen bros. veteran, George Clooney. On the set, Clooney gets drugged and kidnapped by a couple of extras (Wayne Knight and Jeff Lewis), and gets taken to a Malibu beach mansion where he is held for ransom by an organization of communist screenwriters who call themselves “The Future.” That’s right, it’s another Coen brothers’ kidnap caper!

Intertwined are the tales of a few of Mannix’s other clients: Hobie Doyle (stand-out newcomer Alden Ehrenreich), a B-movie cowboy star actor who, while working on a western, is told that the studio wants to change his image, and DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson in her second Coen brothers film after THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE), obviously modeled on MGM’s swimming superstar Esther Williams, whose pregnancy threatens to ruin another production (another film-within-the-film). Johansson, who speaks in a New Yawk accent that will be familiar to SNL fans, has a juicy albeit brief part, involving an even briefer Jonah Hill cameo.

Then there’s Tilda Swinton, also making her second appearance in the Coen canon, hamming it up in a dual role as Thora and Thessaly Thacker, twin sister gossip columnists who confront Mannix (separately, but one right after the other) for a scoop every time he leaves his office.

In a extremely well choreographed production number from yet another film-within-this-film, Coen brothers first-timer Channing Tatum steals the movie in a sailor suit in a helplessly homoerotic song and dance routine to a tune called “No Dames.” Tatum, and his fellow seamen, athletically tap dance up a storm around a saloon set on top of the bar, stools, and tables, while Tatum puts in some surprisingly smooth singing on top of it. It’s a smile-inducing highlight.

The more I think about it, the more I like HAIL, CAESAR! It’s not top tier Coen brothers, but at times it comes awfully close. Such times include an early scene in which Brolin’s Mannix assembles a group of religious leaders from different faiths to make sure that the “theological elements are up to snuff” in “Hail, Caesar!,” humorously recalls the spirituality spoofing of A SERIOUS MAN.

The sitting room scenes involving “The Future,” with its wonderfully cast members including Max Baker, David Krumholtz, Patrick Fischler, Fisher Stevens, and Fred Melamed, who happened to be in A SERIOUS MAN, also share that period piece’s vibe, as well as more of a palpable sense of McCarthy-era paranoia than TRUMBO could muster.

Also up there, or at least one that I laughed out loud at, is a bit where Ralph Fiennes as a stuffy director (named Laurence Laurentz, because of course he is) of stuffy drawing room dramas is saddled with Ehrenreich’s Doyle and can’t get him to satisfactorily deliver one particular line (“Would that it were true” being the line that gets repeatedly massacred).

With its A-list ensemble running around in silly scenarios, I expected something more screwball, a lark a la BURN AFTER READING, but the lighter, restrained wackiness of HAIL, CAESAR masks layers of meaning underneath that I predict us critic folk will be trying to decipher for ages.

After saying that BURN was the last time he’d play an idiot for the Coens, I’m glad Clooney reconsidered and came back for what Joel Coen has jokingly referred to as “the fourth installment of the George Clooney numbskull trilogy.” 

But as apt as Clooney is as a movie star dolt, it’s Brolin’s show, and it’s his best work for the Coen brothers - his jaded stoicism is the film’s rock. The character is the only one in the film that’s directly based on a real person of the same name (the real Eddie Mannix was a studio fixer for MGM), and Brolin puts in a weighty performance that would’ve fit right into serious-minded movies set in the same era like L.A. CONFIDENTIAL.

It doesn’t all flow seamlessly – there’s some HUDSUCKER PROXY-ish clunkiness, and some bits that flatline - but the film achieves BARTON FINK-style brilliancy more than a few times (it’s no coincidence that Capital Pictures is the studio in both films).

It’s too early to see how HAIL, CAESAR! ranks among the rest of the Coen brothers’ filmography, but I can already say that its miles above their lesser efforts (THE LADYKILLERS and INTOLERABLE CRUELTY). 

The fun of its fake movie production numbers, its authentic Technicolor look (shot on film by longtime Coen brothers collaborator, cinematographer Roger Deakins), and, of course, its more than capable cast, make it a film that you don’t have to be a film buff to appreciate. But it sure does help.

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SICARIO: A Superbly Dark Cartel Counterinsurgency Thriller

Now playing at multiplexes from here to the borderline:

SICARIO (Dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2015)

Emily Blunt proves her action star turn in last year’s terrific Tom Cruise vehicle EDGE OF TOMORROW was no fluke in this superbly dark cartel counterinsurgency thriller in which she plays a tough as nails F.B.I. agent named Kate Macer.

After a gripping opening that has she and her partner Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluyya) storming a Mexican drug lord's safe house in Arizona, Kate gets recruited by Department of Defense advisers Matt Graver (a typically brash Josh Brolin) and Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro) for a high-risk CIA-led drug operation across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Kate increasingly senses that the system behind the mission is incredibly corrupt, partly because she can’t figure out who the task force actually works for (particularly De Toro’s ultra shady Alejandro), and if their tactics are doing more harm than good, especially in the chaos of a traffic jam shootout on the outside of Juarez, Mexico.

The team is following a bloody trail that leads to drug kingpin Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cedillo), who it is revealed brutally murdered Alejandro’s wife and daughter. Kate learns this following a raid of the cartel's secret cocaine-smuggling tunnel that runs beneath the border - one of several stunning, standout set pieces on hand.

SICARIO, which is Spanish for “hitman,” is Villeneuve’s most fully realized work. The director’s previous films, including INCENDIES, PRISONERS, and ENEMY were intriguing and fairly solid, but this intensely driven treatise has really seared itself into my psyche in a much more profound way.

Working from a well crafted screenplay by Taylor Sheridan (Sons of Anarchy), Villeneuve keeps us up close with the characters, but knows when to give us distance via striking long shots impeccably filmed by legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins. Incidentally, Villeneuve and Deakins have been both tapped to do the long awaited sequel to BLADE RUNNER. Their riveting work here makes me think they could seriously do that project justice.

Justice is what Blunt’s Kate desperately wants here in the murky, immoral terrain that makes up SICARIO, and the actress puts forth a lot of power in both the pulse pounding action moments, and in the edgy confrontations with those she doesn’t trust. People who don’t know the British actress (her American accent here is spot on) by now are really missing out – the woman has mad range.

However, as good as Blunt is, Del Toro steals every scene he’s in, and he does it by barely speaking. His cold yet fascinating presence has us questioning his motives as much as Blunt does, and when he does speak – every word has disturbing weight.

SICARIO may stir memories of such like-minded thrillers such as Steven Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC and Kathryn Bigelow’s ZERO DARK THIRTY, but it has something those otherwise fine films were strongly lacking: a real conscience.

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INHERENT VICE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at an indie art house near me:

INHERENT VICE

(Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

In a recent interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson claimed he wasn’t a stoner, that he really didn’t get stoned. 

Well, INHERENT VICE, Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 comic-noir novel of the same name, coulda fooled me.

It’s such a rambling, sprawling, shaggy dog story with a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous as The Dude would say, all filtered through hazy clouds of pot smoke that it feels like it could’ve only been made by a filmmaker who’s stoned out of his mind.

Of course, my mention of The Dude doesn’t come from out of the blue. The film’s depiction of a countercultural underdog unraveling connections throughout the seedy underworld of Los Angeles heavily recalls the Coen brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), as well as Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973).

Pynchon’s novel seemed to have those references embedded in it as well, and Anderson puts forth a largely faithful take on the original source material, right down to the exact wording of large chunks of the book’s dialogue.

In his second film for Anderson following 2012’s THE MASTER, Joaquin Phoenix plays pothead protagonist Larry “Doc” Sportello, a long-haired, unkempt sideburns-sporting private investigator living in Gordita Beach, California in 1970. Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta (the pretty and appropriately flighty Katherine Waterson) shows up after an absence of over a year, and asks him for his help concerning her current boyfriend, a real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts).

Mickey’s wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover, are working on what Shasta calls “a creepy little scheme” to have her rich husband committed to a mental institution so that they can make off with his fortune.

From there, Phoenix’s Doc gets hired by The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams as a member of the “Black Guerilla Family” gang to find a white supremacist, named Glenn Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who happens to be one of Mickey’s bodyguards.

After following a lead that ends up with our extremely high hero getting knocked unconscious at a Massage parlor named Chick Planet, Doc is questioned by his long-time cop nemesis, Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin, going big and succeeding), a thick-necked, flat-topped, hippie-hating hardass member of the LAPD.

Luckily, Benicio Del Toro as slick marine lawyer Sauncho Smilax swoops in to get Doc released, but, unluckily, Shasta and Mickey have completely disappeared into thin air.

As if things weren’t complicated enough, Doc takes on another case that’s possibly related, involving the death of surf-rock saxophonist Coy Harlingen (a whispering Owen Wilson) as his widow Hope (Jena Malone) thinks he’s still alive.

From there, Doc visits with his special lady friend, Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball, played by Phoenix’s WALK THE LINE co-star Reese Witherspoon, gets interrogated by FBI agents (Parenthood’s Sam Jaeger and Veep’s Timothy Simons), and, most amusingly, does cocaine with Martin Short as an coked-up dentist. Doc’s trail keeps leading to some sinister entity called “Golden Fang,” which is either a mysterious ship for running drugs, an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel, and/or a syndicate of dentists. I’m still not sure which.

Making her film debut, indie singer/songwriter Joanna Newsom serve as the film’s onscreen narrator Sortilège, a minor character in the book but here the custodian to descriptions of Doc’s inner thoughts, somewhat surreally I might add.

Which means that one minute, Doc is driving with Sortilège riding shotgun telling us about “the long, sad history of LA land use,” and the next minute she’s gone. The freshness of Newsom's delivery of Pynchon's prose enhances the dry sections of the film considerably.

The fading of the sunny idealistic ‘60s into the scary, smacked out ‘70s is conveyed strikingly through Robert Elswit’s always stunning cinematography (Elswit has shot 6 of Anderson’s 7 movies), which gives both dark, dank interiors and sun-bleached exteriors a great burnt-out look, and the score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood mixed with well chosen songs by Neil Young, Can, Lex Baxter, and the Chuck Jackson Motown classic “Any Day Now,” perfectly evokes the era as well.

Unfortunately INHERENT VICE is no masterpiece. It’s frustratingly low energy at times with scenes that linger on and on. Many critics are calling it “incoherent vice” (there’s a joke I bet will be made at the Oscars) for understandable reasons, but while I sometimes stared at the screen and thought that it was a meandering mess, I was more often struck by the brilliance of many of its moments.

I’ve seen it twice now, and I enjoyed and “got it” a lot more the second time. Phoenix's performance, which initially bothered me as being half-assed, seemed more nuanced (I could see that he was really using his full ass), and I felt more of a poetry to its slow pace than before.

Being the first ever adaptation of a Pynchon novel – books that many have said are unfilmable - is no small feat, and I can’t imagine anybody doing a better job with this particular material than Anderson.

Folks who aren’t Anderson or Pynchon fans going in aren’t likely to be won over, especially at its long-ass length of 2 and a half hours, but those who are hip to its vibe and can get into a groove with its stoned tone are likely to think it’s a gas, man. Sorry, to lay that outdated lingo on you, but I bet deep down you dig it.

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