The Coens are back! That doesn’t mean their Hollywood spoof Hail, Caesar! is great fun; but at least they seem to be over the hipsterism that curdled Inside Llewyn Davis, and have returned to genuine cultural satire.
Set in 1951, Hail, Caesar! is a Boomer reflection on the period when movies expanded to CinemaScope with musicals and Biblical epics to fight off the encroachment of mundane television. (But why do the Coens play with square, rather than rectangular, screen formats?) The Coens want to parody industry habits as well as individual piety, and they do both in the figure of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), production boss at Capitol Pictures. Like the Hollywood hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Mannix is caught in a moral struggle: Fidelity to his Catholic faith and his wife are tested by the ego satisfaction of running an amusement business that pretends to be holding together a country of “kooks, misfits, and oddballs” who are increasingly unmanageable and gradually coming apart.
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