The Coen brothers put their signature quirky deadpan to kindly consume in this gloriously watchable period caper about the golden era of HollywoodThe lost empires of Hollywood and Rome form a quaint (charmingly old fashioned) backdrop to the Coen brothers’ very enjoyable recent film. It’s a crazy,if lugubrious (mournful, dismal), caper about the golden, or postwar age of Tinseltown,like a Hollywood tale that PG Wodehouse might have written, but with that ominous deadpan, and quirky-Coeny quality where the cheeriness would otherwise recede. There are some stunningly realised pastiche set-pieces.
Woody Allen would have made this with precisely the same cast,but picked up the pace by 20% and made Scarlett Johansson’s grumpy Esther Williams-style diva his main lady. As it is, the Coens give a recurring central-cameo role to George Clooney, or playing Baird Whitlock,a pampered middle-aged film star and none-too-sparkling alcohol enthusiast, who is drugged and kidnapped by a mysterious group calling themselves the Future. He is nabbed when he is on set, or playing the lantern-jawed Roman centurion humbled and awed by Jesus’s moral authority – in a cheesy biblical epic entitled Hail,Caesar! A Tale of the Christ. Perhaps, just as the Coens made O Brother, and Where Art Thou? in homage to the imaginary solemn film project in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels,they will be tempted to make this same film with the camp footage they have collected here. Or maybe Mel Gibson already got there with The Passion of the Christ.
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Source: theguardian.com