Hail, Caesar! review: Coen bros hit peak star-cameo in superb sister film to Barton Fink

Not for the first time, the Coen brothers have reached back to the studio sound stages and producers’ offices of the Hollywood golden age to find their material. Their parallel film is Barton Fink, in which earnest playwright John Turturro heads to Los Angeles to write wrestling pictures. Hail, Caesar! is a much sunnier picture, and more purely comedic than its sepulchral predecessor; it’s also put together with a lissom confidence and a breeziness that more than compensates for a gossamer lightness when it comes to substance.

The year is 1951, and Hail, Caesar! is the name of the film within a film, a clunky Roman epic with religious overtones – more along the lines of Quo Vadis than Ben-Hur, despite sharing the latter’s subtitle: A Tale of the Christ. George Clooney plays its star, an actor called Baird Whitlock, who disappears from the set in full costume after glugging down the adulterated contents of a wine goblet, containing the old mickey finn. Soon studio boss Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) starts getting notes and phone calls from an outfit called “The Future”, demanding $100,000 for Whitlock’s safe return.

It’s fair to say that this kidnap plot, rather like that of the nihilists in The Big Lebowski, isn’t really the film’s central concern; we’re hardly on tenterhooks to find out who did it and why. It’s really just a small part of a much bigger canvas, and you can sense the Coens are really enjoying themselves filling in all the little details, from the kind of breakfast provided to movie extras to the exact type of stationery favoured by early 50s communists. Interestingly, the film deploys many of the same elements as the forthcoming blacklist biopic Trumbo – red-scare politics, sociopathic gossip columnists, philistine movie producers – but reshuffles them into a format that dispenses with Trumbo’s pedagogical tone.

The Coens have also stuffed the film with storylines, most of which start off apparently unconnected to the main events, but by the end have all locked into the same tangled web. Primarily, of course, it’s a chance for them to show off their movie-buff credentials, with the film-studio setting allowing them to recreate a range of contemporary product, from drawing-room melodramas to cheapo westerns to elaborate aquamusicals (featuring Scarlett Johansson as an Esther Williams-style bathing beauty). Both directors and cast are clearly having a lot of fun with it; the standout turn is arguably Ralph Fiennes, who provides the latest in a string of comic tours de force as the director attempting to get sophisticated diction out of the strangulated tones of an actor called Hobie Doyle (played by Beautiful Creatures’ Alden Ehrenreich), hitherto employed only as a singing cowboy.

Ehrenreich turns out to be a bit of a find: he easily stands up to all of the bigger-name actors who the Coens can now distribute among the film’s smaller roles. In shoehorning Jonah Hill, Tilda Swinton and Agyness Deyn alongside Fiennes, Johansson and Channing Tatum (who shows up as the star of a sailor musical, in extremely tight trousers), the Coens may have hit peak star-cameo. And that doesn’t even count walk-ons for cult figures such as Christopher Lambert (as Hail Caesar!’s director) and Dolph Lundgren.

The only negative effect of this logjam of small-scale delights is to somewhat swamp the normally potent presence of Brolin, notionally in the lead role, whose brooding countenance and dour forcefulness gets little purchase in the film. Some of his scenes are clearly meant to radiate a sort of James Ellroy noir, but seem somewhat out of kilter with the prevailing sprightly mood. But it hardly counts as a real weakness: Hail, Caesar! is a lot of fun, and beautifully crafted, too. One to savour.