HAIL, MARX!

Bashing commies in comedies doesn't happen often, but when it does, it typically yields gold. The best examples of this niche genre are Ernst Lubitsch's sublime Ninotchka and Billy Wilder's hilarious Cold War comedy One, Two, Three. After those two classics, it seems we endured decade after decade of dull films about how awful the McCarthy period was, featuring painfully earnest turns by Robert De Niro, George Clooney, or Bryan Cranston.

Thank God, then, for the Coen Brothers' send-up of Hollywood Bolsheviks in their 2016 comedy Hail, Caesar!, which, funnily enough, stars, among others, George Clooney of all people.

In this satire of Hollywood's 1950's studio system, Clooney plays Baird Whitlock, a slow-witted movie star currently starring in a stodgy biblical epic titled Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ, which recalls films such as The Robe, The Prodigal, and Quo Vadis. Drugged and abducted by a group of communist screenwriters, Whitlock is held hostage at their secret hideout in Malibu, California, where they expound on their ideological philosophy and attempt to explain it to him. Whitlock, however, remains completely clueless.

Meanwhile, the communist screenwriters demand a ransom from Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) to resolve the situation. By this point in the movie, Mannix has already had to host a theological debate involving a panel of religious leaders—including a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, a Jewish rabbi, and an Eastern Orthodox priest—over the studio's depiction of Christ in Hail, Caesar! So, he is no doubt well-steeled for the negotiation with the blacklisted Marxists.

Perhaps it's apt, then, that at the beginning of the movie, Mannix confesses his sins to a priest—sins that are ostensibly those of the studio, which he tirelessly attempts to wrangle into order from chaos. For all intents and purposes, Mannix is playing God, overseeing the trials and tribulations of the studio's stars. He acts as judge and juror for them all. At one point, Mannix is approached by a representative from Lockheed, an aerospace technology company tied to national defense, in a downtown Chinese restaurant. The representative suggests that Mannix might find the work more stable than his current role at Capitol Pictures. Ultimately, however, Mannix decides to remain loyal to Capitol Pictures, choosing to embrace the chaos of Hollywood.

The comedy of all of these situations in Hail Caesar! lies in watching a street-talking tough guy grapple with questions of religion, politics, and sex over the course of a single day at Capitol Pictures—incidentally, the same studio featured in the Coens' earlier Hollywood black comedy Barton Fink. While the more feckless stars, like Whitlock, are seen as unwitting pawns in the battle for Hollywood's ideological direction, Mannix is more of a pragmatist, dealing only with situations as they arise and determined to keep the money-making entertainment machine running on all cylinders without obstacles disrupting its daily operations. I can also well imagine Mannix as the type of guy who, on his days off, would sit in his local cinema with a large box of popcorn and watch like a big kid when the movies start flickering onto the screen, forgetting he's had any involvement with their making.

Given that we're living through a similar era, where brainless celebrities volunteer their goofy opinions on politics without any real understanding of the issues at hand, Hail, Caesar!—although a period comedy—feels surprisingly in tune with the zeitgeist. I hadn’t fully appreciated this when I first watched it.

It was certainly refreshing to see a portrayal of the communists in Hollywood where they're depicted more as stuffy, boorish intellectuals (the type I've been all too familiar with in my life) rather than as over-romanticised heroes. I was genuinely surprised that the Coens went there, but if anyone could pull it off, it was them.

I mean, who's going to cancel the Coens?

God?!