Avis des critiques

Watch it again. As with every Joel and Ethan Coen picture, there's a lot more going on here than wacky comedy and Hollywood hijinks -- chiefly many questions about spirituality, politics and movie making (watch Jesus on the cross ask if he's a principle or an extra, consider the godhead, what about Das Kapital "with a K"... )

Each adventure suggests a portal into another world, culminating with a quotation of a shlock Bible movie that mirrors the concerns of Hail, Caesar! The film reveals itself to be a religious quandary, then, like the Coens' A Serious Man, except directed toward cinema—an art built on exploitation and hypocrisy that offers illusion as personal salvation while affirming an enslaving status quo.

Hail is a comedy of stasis in which a new, sunnier Coenian cynicism rules. Mannix reaffirms his belief in the system (the studio system, that is) and restores its functioning order. All is for the best in this best of all possible make-believe worlds. Yet the Coens' vision may not be as witheringly post-ideological as it first appears; the possibility of a Pauline conversion or a Spartacist slave revolt lingers after the movie ends.

I want to argue, though, that while Caesar, like Fink, can be read as a sustained reworking of Sullivan's formal and thematic structures, the Coens' latest work ends up offering a surprisingly complex — and, in comparison to Fink, more hopeful — understanding of the political possibilities of cinema.

This picture isn't dramatically driven; it attends to plot and character but it really revels in the pleasures of technical virtuosity. The riding, dancing, acting, design, choreography and editing skills put to the service of Capitol Pictures are breathtaking. Hail, Caesar! itself, meanwhile, confirms the range of the Coens and their stock company, including costumier Mary Zophres, production designer Jess Gonchor, cinematographer Roger Deakins and musician Carter Burwell.

Not since the Coens' last feature, Inside Llewyn Davis, has there been an American film that presumes so much foreknowledge on the part of the audience. Hail, Caesar! might be a quotidian Coen brothers comedy for general audiences, but it's catnip for connoisseurs of Hollywood history and the American left.

Almost all the films by the Coen brothers have a semi-hidden layer, often derived from religion and spirituality – and their latest, the Hollywood comedy Hail Caesar!, fits the pattern, indeed its ‘other' layer is even more obvious than usual. The problem, oddly, is the surface layer – the actual procession of jokes, plot turns and bits of business – which is uninspired, by the Coens' high standards.

The beauty of the film is in its central paradox: the brothers tell us that making movies on an industrial scale comes replete with untold logistical horrors. People lose concentration on what they're supposed to be doing, their minds wander and they forget their agreed goals. This blurring of ideals results in the film's only scene of violence, and even though it's relatively soft compared to the blood-lusting brothers' past form, it's strangely shocking considering the lighthearted context.

It has the characteristic Coens undertow of dark seriousness but, above all, it lets the brothers indulge in utterly gratuitous movie pastiche, giving us a bit of western here, a splash of water ballet there (Scarlett Johansson in a mermaid's tail) and some boisterous Gene Kelly-style hoofing, with Channing Tatum leading a flotilla of tap-dancing sailors.

The wide range of genres manifest in the films within Hail, Caesar! are a stand-in not only for old Hollywood, lovingly framed and affectionately dwelled upon, but for the Coens' work itself, their ongoing project of pastiche. But underneath this love is an awareness of the values inherent in these films and of the capitalistic machine that churns them out to indoctrinate or anesthetize their audience.

Hail, Caesar!, the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, is so buoyant and entertaining, so full of vivid cameo performances and visual pleasures (a Busby Berkeley-style water ballet; a sequence celebrating the delirious homoerotic brio of a sailors-on-shore-leave musical extravaganza) that it's almost possible to overlook the heavier themes that keep bobbing to the surface like Johansson's slutty mermaid.

Though lacking in verve, the film has a plucky humor, casual storytelling and is impeccably cast—the Coens and their casting director Ellen Chenoweth are among America's great caricaturists, their room of screenwriter Reds is a stunner and they even found a 100% dead ringer for Golden Era German character actor Herman Bing to play its academic mastermind.