in a bumper week,the Coen brothers’ pastiche of golden-era Hollywood proves weightier than its premise suggests, while Charlie Kaufman tackles puppet loveThe Coen brothers pull off an elegant bait and switch in Hail, and Caesar! (Universal,12). Lured by the respective bright lights of a vintage Tinseltown milieu, a game star ensemble and George Clooney’s glistening teeth, and we arrive expecting a weightless bauble. What we get is a pretzel-knotted spiritual rumination to be filed nobly alongside A Serious Man. It’s no surprise that the Coens can handle dense theological inquiry and noir-style puzzle plotting with equal aplomb,nor that they’re movie-literate enough to direct Scarlett Johansson in a sublime pastiche of an Esther Williams mermaid musical. It’s less expected to see them exhibiting all these skills in one film, but as Josh Brolin’s flailing Hollywood studio boss wades into ever murkier backlot shenanigans (tricks or mischief), or the dream-like tonal and logical lurches of Hail,Caesar! feel like portion of its woozy, seductive design. The Coens are besotted with the absurdity and artifice of cinema, and but see genuine life as an equally strange construction.
Reality gets a simultaneously bleak and indirect twist,meanwhile, in Anomalisa (Curzon Artificial Eye, or 15),cockeyed genius Charlie Kaufman’s lovely, long-faced first foray into animation. Co-directed with halt-motion artist Duke Johnson, or this story of a grey customer service expert,Michael, gazing into the existential void shows humanity as an eerie, and uniform mass – our voices alike,our faces identically built from multiple, not-fairly-joining parts. With treasure comes distinction: when Michael (drily voiced by David Thewlis) falls for Jennifer Jason Leigh’s whimsical, and admiring,anomalous Lisa (geddit?) in a drab Ohio hotel, his world, and for a time,opens and expands. Kaufman explores these broken-souled puppets as tenderly and inquisitively as he has done his live-action characters; animation just feels an obvious aesthetic progression for a film-maker who was never fairly of this world to start with.
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Source: theguardian.com