If all this weren’t enough, Mannix also has to contend with twin gossip columnists (played by Tilda Swinton) who are circling the studio in search of scandal; a near-fatal accident involving a film editor (Frances McDormand); an accountant (Jonah Hill) enlisted to see whether the pregnant ingénue can legally adopt her own child; and a song-and-dance star (Channing Tatum) harboring more than one Big Secret. Fred Melamed, Patrick Fischler, David Krumholtz, Fisher Stevens, and Alex Karpovsky also make appearances as a support group of disgruntled screenwriters—where were they in your hour of need, Barton?—who have decided to take matters into their own hands. 
 
 So Mannix pinballs from crisis to crisis, tamping down gossip here and inventing it there. Along the way, the movie’s loose, likable structure is able to accommodate parodies of a variety of movie genres, from historical epic to cowpoke cornball to drawing-room sizzler. Scene by scene, the movie is a bit uneven, but it’s never long before it presents a moment of genuine glee, whether it be Mannix’s presentation of the Hail, Caesar script to a group of religious luminaries for review (“The Bible, of course, is terrific,” Mannix allows, sounding for an instant like Donald Trump); a marvelous exchange in which Fiennes’s director tries to get through to his out-of-his-depth new star (respond to her “importuning,” he advises, with a “mirthless chuckle”); or an extended, gloriously homoerotic Tatum tap-dance number entitled “No Dames.” 
 
 Clooney is once again sublimely self-mocking in this, his fourth outing with the Coens: He has the rare ability to simultaneously be a star and parody one. As the addled cowboy, Ehrenreich enlivens every scene in which he appears, in particular with his rendition of the cheesily marvelous ballad “Lazy Ol’ Moon.” Following minor roles in Blue Jasmine and Stoker, the young actor shows he’s more than ready for center stage. And Fiennes again proves that, his other talents notwithstanding, he’s one of the most gifted comic actors alive. If the rest of the stars studding the cast are not quite so indelible—a few of the roles are scarcely more than cameos—each one fulfills his or her duties with aplomb. In the center of it all, of course, is Brolin, harried yet stoic, a reef of sanity amid a sea of chaos. And no one, no one, has more fun with a voiceover than the movie’s narrator, Michael Gambon. 
 
 Is Hail, Caesar! among the Coens best works? Of course not. But as I noted a while back, that is an extraordinarily high bar to clear. Apart from one late misstep—a too-broad comic bit set on the ocean—this latest is an unexpectedly sweet and utterly satisfying confection, a loving sendup of the Hollywood of yesteryear. As Mannix frantically juggles the needs of his studio, he is simultaneously being courted for an executive position at Lockheed. Dismissing the “circus” of Hollywood, his recruiter explains to him that “aviation is serious,” a point he emphasizes by displaying a photo of the H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll. One could hardly ask for a better rebuke to that kind of “seriousness” than the glitzy, ditzy splendor of Hail, Caesar! 
 
 We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. ||||| Published on Oct 9, 2015 
 
 Hail, Caesar! 
 
 In Theaters February 5. 
 
 http://www.hailcaesarmovie.com 
 
 
 
 Four-time Oscar®-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, True Grit, Fargo) write and direct Hail, Caesar!, an all-star comedy set during the latter years of Hollywood's Golden Age. Starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum, Hail, Caesar! follows a single day in the life of a studio fixer who is presented with plenty of problems to fix. 
 
 
 
 The comedy is produced by the Coen brothers under their Mike Zoss Productions banner alongside Working Title Films’ Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. ||||| Hail, Caesar! is perhaps the most jagged, disjointed, and ramshackle of all the Coen brothers’ movies, and almost certainly the one your friends and family who are not movie nerds will be most baffled by. It is also, from start to finish, one of the funniest films the Coens have ever made. If you have even the slightest interest in Hollywood history and the studio system of the 1950s, you will have such a blast you won’t care that none of it particularly holds together. It’s simultaneously the Coens’ most accessible movie in years and their most impenetrable. You’ll either feel like it was made specifically for you, or for some alien race you will never meet or understand. Hail Caesar! is pure Coenism, for better or worse. 
 
 The film follows Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a Hollywood “fixer” in charge of making sure all the films of Capitol Studios, a Paramount-esque old-time movie studio, run smoothly and without scandal. He mollifies the egos of his megastars, covers up their scandals, fends off nosy newspaper gossip reporters who are also twins (played confusingly and amusingly, by Tilda Swinton), and generally makes sure the trains run on time. He’s tortured by some unnamed guilt, but is otherwise unflappable, even when his biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, in crazy-eye-popping mug mode—not always my favorite channel on the Clooney dial), is kidnapped by a group of communists who call themselves The Future. Mannix works to get Whitlock back while also dealing with a pregnant starlet (Scarlett Johannsen), a dashing tap dancer (Channing Tatum), and, most notably, a cowpoke star (Alden Ehrenreich) trying to make the transition into “prestige pictures.” All of these characters end up colliding with each other in ways that don’t make a lot of sense and aren’t particularly compelling, not that it matters much anyway. The Coens make occasional nods at the spiritual confusion and despair of Inside Llewyn Davis and A Serious Man—Mannix is considering working for Lockheed, a more “serious” business, and he spends much of the movie confessing to his priest—but then they mostly drop it. They’re too busy having fun. 
 
 And they sure are having fun. Hail, Caesar! should be thought of less as a movie than as an assemblage of scenes that are going to make fantastic segments of the Coens’ lifetime-achievement award montages over the next 20 years. As a pure exercise in giddy sensation, the movie delivers, with scenes that will make your grin rise up over your ears. Whatever else they’re trying to do with this movie, they’re mostly just having a blast recreating old-time Hollywood scenes with their own spin, whether it’s a musical high-dive with full orchestra, a “classy” drama that features a beleaguered director (Ralph Fiennes; everyone is in this movie) desperately trying to draw non-garbled line readings from his cowboy star, or a sand-and-sandals epic that ends up being all about Jesus. (A scene where Mannix consults with four religious figures to make sure the movie is appropriately kosher is a riot.) But the big set piece, the one that brings the movie to a total stop, is an inspired tap-dance sequence in which Channing Tatum leads a group of sailors through “No Dames.” On one level, it’s a cheesy and endearing sendup of scenes from the time, divorced from whatever camp subtext. But more than that, it’s just a rip-roaring, lose-your-mind sequence—a true Coens classic. It’s the best scene in the movie, and one you’ll still be humming when you leave the theater. 
 
 That scene is completely independent of, and irrelevant to, the rest of Hail, Caesar!, which is both the movie’s virtue and its cross to bear. You may find yourself impatient with some of the Coens’ digressions, and frustrated by their total disinterest in wrapping up any of the plot threads, and you’ll be right. The Coens are too talented not to make a trifle like this interesting, but it is nonetheless a trifle, which brings out some of their worst tendencies; when the Coens are off, there’s a certain muted contempt that comes across. Their fooling-around, when unchecked, can begin to feel like dismissiveness. If you find yourself caring about Baird Whitlock or what happens to him, or whether the good-hearted cowboy singer can figure out how to say his lines right, the joke is on you. At their best, the Coens keep you at a distance and pull you tight. Here, you’re constantly on the outside looking in. 
 
 ||||| “We’re not talking about money—we’re talking about economics!” Hail, Caesar!, Joel and Ethan Coen’s broadest comedy since The Ladykillers, lampoons Christian and leftist dogma by pitting straw men and stuffed shirts against whatever passes for common sense in the Coensverse, embodied by yet another of the sibling duo’s beloved plainspoken cowboys. The Coens, who skew crypto-conservative, can’t take anything resembling an ideology or counterculture seriously, but here they defer to the logic of “good feels right,” which is just as much of a non-answer as the jargon that gets recited by the movie’s assorted religious authorities (three priests, a minister, and a rabbi) and Communists. Like the often overlooked A Serious Man, this is all about the absurdity of crises of faith. However, the Coens’ fondness for intentional anti-climax—put to pointed and poignant use in movies like Inside Llewyn Davis, No Country For Old Men, Barton Fink, and A Serious Man—gets the better of them. 
 
 Perhaps it seems like over-thinking to quibble with the ideological talking points of a movie that mostly dawdles from one skit or cameo to another, interspersed with the occasional song-and-dance number, and which contains one of the best comic set pieces of the Coens’ career: a director and his recently re-cast lead trying to work through a single awful line of dialogue (“Would that it were so simple”) while filming a turgid melodrama. But like so many of the brothers’ later films, Hail, Caesar! ends where it started, with the characters having huffed and gnashed their teeth and changed nothing—and whereas their great movies side with loser heroes, turning failures into studies of people struggling to hold on in the face of apparent meaningless, this one seems to be out to teach them a lesson to leave well enough alone. To all those who would characterize the Coens as smug misanthropes: Enjoy this bounty of ammunition. 
 
 Set in Hollywood in the mid-1950s, Hail, Caesar! sometimes feels like the Coens’ 1941, which is to say that its central joke is that it’s playing the fears of its era at face value: That Tinseltown is a Sodom and Gomorrah of vice and anti-American subtexts, and that Soviet submarines lurk in American waters, signaled by leftist study groups. It’s all extremely on-the-nose; after all, this is the kind of film that introduces a gay movie star with a butt-bumping sailor-themed musical number called “No Dames.” The period setting is sketched in broad strokes (fittingly, the only real-life filmmaker name-checked here is Norman Taurog, director of Elvis vehicles and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies), giving the Coens a chance to play with dated and outmoded film techniques: wipes, bird’s-eye-view matte paintings, painted backdrops, unconvincing model submarines, and, in the movie’s most perverse act of homage, a very long driving scene of questionable urgency. 
 
 The aforementioned crises of faith are represented by Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a devoutly Catholic studio executive who is mulling over a lucrative job offer from Lockheed as he races around town to keep his projects running on schedule and his leads out of the gossip columns, and Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the hard-partying star of a religious epic (also called Hail, Caesar!), kidnapped by reds who turn him on to Karl Marx and against his employers at the unsubtly named Capitol Pictures. What they both need, per the Coens, is a smack of aw-shucks common sense, which comes in the form of stuntman-turned-cowboy-actor Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich, downright revelatory). Doyle’s folksiness and thick twang are played for laughs, but his Western bona fides—complete with a mouth full of false teeth from his days as a horse wrangler—are revered in the manner of No Country For Old Men’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell or The Big Lebowski’s nameless stranger. (Compare to Inside Llewyn Davis’ phony cowboy Al Cody, the most pathetic loser in a movie full of them.) 
 
 Along with the usual putdowns of highfalutin artsy-fartsy types (a dog named Engels; a pronunciation of “rodeo” that rivals The Big Lebowski’s “thorough” and Burn After Reading’s “memoir” at establishing snoot-hood), the movie takes swipes at something the Coens have never shown much of an interest in before: Christian iconography, represented by the ridiculous film-within-the-film Hail, Caesar!, which “tastefully” depicts Christ only from the back, as a robed figure with a head of impeccable long, straight blond hair. There are other movies seen in various stages of production on the Capitol lot, none completely convincing as period pastiche, some funny as send-ups of bad filmmaking: a musical starring an Esther Williams type named DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), who refers to her mermaid costume as a “fish ass;” Merrily We Dance, directed by ascot-wearing priss Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes); bits of Doyle’s singing cowboy movies and the latest from Gene Kelly-esque dancer-athlete Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum, showing off a surprisingly passable singing voice). 
 
 Add in a string of one-scene cameos (everyone from Jonah Hill to Christopher Lambert), wacky gags (like having Tilda Swinton play rival gossip columnists), and an extended scene in which Mannix holds a meeting with religious leaders to consult on Hail, Caesar!, only to have an Orthodox priest complain about the realism of the chariot scenes and a rabbi shrug every answer, and what you’ve got is one overstuffed movie. Though the Coens are celluloid-shooting visual classicists, their films often have unusual or lopsided structures, introducing major characters very late or taking narrative detours halfway through. And as with so much about this writer-director-producer-editor duo, their best and worst instincts are inseparable. The same aversion to classical form that’s produced the filmmakers’ most ingenious shifts and denials of closure turns Hail, Caesar! into a grab-bag of ideas in various stages of formation, full of dead ends and seemingly pointless sequences, peppered with out-of-nowhere narration by Michael Gambon. Somewhere in there are stretches of the Coens’ funniest comedy since The Big Lebowski; it just takes a little patience.
– Hail, Caesar! is the 17th film by moviemaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen—of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men fame— and tells the story of a studio fixer (Josh Brolin) searching for a kidnapped movie star (George Clooney) in 1950s Hollywood, though that plot is mostly an excuse for multiple movie genre parodies and song-and-dance numbers. The film is garnering mixed reviews, but as humorist John Moe tweets: "Few things make me as excited as a Coen brothers movie with mixed reviews." Hail, Caesar! also stars Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, and Jonah Hill. Hail, Caesar! "is perhaps the most jagged, disjointed, and ramshackle of all the Coen brothers’ movies," according to Will Leitch at the New Republic. "It is also, from start to finish, one of the funniest films the Coens have ever made." The movie delivers "scenes that will make your grin rise up over your ears," while also showcasing a "certain muted contempt" on the part of the Coens. It other words: It's "pure Coenism, for better or worse." Manohla Dargis at the New York Times calls Hail, Caesar! "a typically sly, off-center comedy" that "has more going on than there might seem." It "at times brings to mind one of those old plot-free film revues that featured a grab bag of studio talent performing in strung-together musical, comic, and dramatic scenes." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the AV Club is less charitable: "To all those who would characterize the Coens as smug misanthropes: Enjoy this bounty of ammunition." Hail, Caesar! "lampoons Christian and leftist dogma by pitting straw men and stuffed shirts against whatever passes for common sense in the Coensverse." At the Atlantic, Christopher Orr admits that while it might not be one of the Coens' best films, Hail, Caesar! is still an "unexpectedly sweet and utterly satisfying confection, a loving sendup of the Hollywood of yesteryear" that is "bright and genial" while lacking "the cruel edge of many of their comedies."