Fish and Cherries Productions

Synopsis: Movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) has been kidnapped! And it could not have happened at a worse time, since everything is going ass up at Capitol Pictures. DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) got herself pregnant while in the middle of shooting a movie, dignified director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) has cowboy actor Hobie Doyle (Alder Ehrenreich) thrust into a dramatic role in one of his movies that he simply does not have the acting chops for, and producer/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is struggling with the relevance of his job in the grand scheme of things while also trying to keep his screwball actors in check. Eddie and his confidants are doing their best to rescue the dunce in distress, but is everything really as straightforward as it seems? Since it’s the Coen Brothers, you can bet that it’s not.

Review: Hail, Caesar! is is a fun satire of the Golden Age of Hollywood, as well as loaded with Coen Brothers surrealness and off-beat humor. A lot of the laughs come from the satire of the era and the films, which the actors play in a more serious tone that somehow makes it even funnier. It really knows the subject material well, showing once and for all how you do satire right. George Clooney is perfect as the dim-witted Kirk Douglas-type actor with some pretty hilarious reactions and some nice downplayed physical comedy as well. The rest of the cast is no slouch either, with Tilda Swinton playing twin gossip columnists and Ralph Fiennes struggling to keep his composure while directing a subpar actor.

The ending is pure Coen Brothers, which is both funny and kind of confusing. The conflict ends on such a huge anticlimax that you can’t help but bust a gut, which is all I’m going to give away. But then when the movie wraps up in total, I was left with a sense of, “Wait, that’s what all this was leading up to?” I can understand that it’s tying a lot of disparate elements together, but it still made me double take. Still, this is definitely one of the better Coen Brothers films and you should check it out. It’s not quite as hilarious as The Big Lebowski or O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but that’s some pretty stiff competition.

Fun Tidbit: Don’t bother looking for DeeAnna Moran, Baird Whitlock, or Hobie Doyle in the Hollywood Walk of Fame or any Los Angeles graveyards; they are one hundred percent fictional. Eddie Mannix, on the other hand, was an actual, real-life Hollywood film executive, producer, and fixer that kept his actors’ exploits out of the tabloids.