Movie Review: Joel and Ethan Coen take Tinseltown to task in the uproarious “Hail, Caesar!”

“Hail, Caesar” begins with a foreboding close-up of Christ on the cross, ends in a confessional booth and spends its time in between telling the story of a decent, ordinary man who sacrifices his time and sanity to guide the wayward ignoramuses of the world towards a brighter day. The Coens have always let spirituality inform their pictures, be it the the allusions to Job in their nasty slice-of-Jewish-life comedy “A Serious Man” or the specter of existential doubt that hangs like a cloud of cigarette smoke over the head of “The Man Who Wasn’t There’s” taciturn barber Ed Crane. “Hail, Caesar!” might be their most openly faith-based picture to date, though I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest the Coens have lightened up and embraced a higher power or anything like that. They’re still as entranced as ever by entropy and “Hail, Caesar!” like many of their films, is ultimately the story of one modest man caught in an increasingly colossal and nefarious network of treachery.

It’s also sublime, silly and just plain weird, a superbly calibrated left-field lark that’s both bubblier and funnier than the brother’s more subdued last film, the brilliant folk music elegy “Inside Llewyn Davis”. However, as always with the Coens, cryptic signifiers begin to seep in around the margins. Many think the brothers to be consummate as filmmakers but punitive as artists, all too eager to drag their characters through shit and guffaw at their misfortunes. Granted, there is some truth to this, and there have been a small handful of times when the Coen’s proclivity towards comic sadism has been a bit too much for my tastes. This was mainly the case in “A Serious Man,” a flawlessly made and occasionally very funny movie that ultimately choked on the noxious fumes of its own nihility (also: easy to praise if you’re a Goy, kind of more complicated if you’re not), and also “The Hudsucker Proxy,” which is still the only Coens picture that I’d call an outright failure. But one quality that they are not often recognized for — and one that they indulge in more than many other directors — is asking questions. Who are we? What is our purpose on this earth? Why doesn’t every movie feature a lavish song-and-dance number that features Channing Tatum in a sailor’s bar called the Swingin’ Dinghy? Are a group of communist screenwriters who call themselves The Future really messengers on behalf of a radical new social order, or just a bunch of bitter gasbags who are tired of not being recognized for their work? And the big question of “Hail, Caesar!” which is why do we need the movies? Is it entertainment or gospel?

After “Hail, Caesar!” has ended, it’s not hard to tell how the Coens feel about this last question. Hell, just look at their filmography. Over the course of thirty years and seventeen mostly terrific films, the Coens have announced themselves as ravenous cinematic magpies of the postcultural age. Their films are often outright genre pastiches (see: “Miller’s Crossing,” “The Ladykillers”) imbued with their own misanthropic touch, and at the very least, all of their films are littered with a veritable grab-bag of cinephiliac references and in-jokes. “Hail, Caesar!” isn’t their first excursion into the postwar Hollywood dream factory — that honor would go to their indelible nightmare “Barton Fink,” in which John Turturro’s schnooky screenwriter discovered that hell is indeed real, and it exists in a Hollywood flophouse. But “Barton Fink” was a clammier, meaner film than the comparatively jubilant “Hail, Caesar!” which nevertheless finds opportunities to betray its fizzy exterior with piercing moments of absurdity and melancholic grace. Movies, “Hail, Caesar!” argues, give us something to believe in; something greater than ourselves. If the silver screen is like our old testament and movie stars are our modern-day deities, what are we to do when one of them is kidnapped by a gang of vengeful commies who’ve had their scripts pilfered one too many times?

This is just one of the problems facing Eddie Mannix, (a tough, touching Josh Brolin) who acts as Head of Physical Production at Capitol Pictures in Hollywood. We’re back in the 1950’s and the looming threat of communist paranoia and imminent nuclear war hangs over every seemingly trivial conversation. Like Larry Gopnik of “A Serious Man,” Mannix is a man of God who’s simply doing his best to keep his head above water during a stressful and increasingly bizarre stretch of time. Despite his heart of gold, Mannix is half enforcer/half babysitter, tasked with “fixing” up the studio’s scandals and cleaning up after the preening, self-admiring actors. There’s firstly the matter of DeeAna Moran, (Scarlett Johansson) a vulgar Ester Williams type who’s too pregnant to fit into her mermaid suit, and also Hobie Doyle, (“Tetro’s” Alden Ehrenreich) a thick-headed actor in cowboy pictures who’s recently been tasked as the new leading man of a stiff-looking costume drama directed by a foppish dandy named Laurence Laurentz (Raph Fiennes). And then there’s Baird Whitlock, (George Clooney, playing his fourth consecutive moron for the Coens) a fast-talking, empty-headed leading man whose abrupt and mysterious disappearance from the set of a truly terrible-looking Biblical epic kicks this whole mess of complications into motion. Throughout all the madness, Mannix rarely loses his cool: sure, he’s prone to sneaking the occasional cigarette or slapping an out-of-line actor around, but these are sins he cops to in confession. The tone in the priest’s voice during these scenes suggests that he’s seen Eddie a few too many times this week.

Eddie Mannix is one of the more purely decent characters in the entire Coen canon. He’s more Marge Gunderson than Llewyn Davis. Played with rugged, can-do assurance and a genteel air of polite reserve by the normally wilier Josh Brolin, Eddie is a beacon of virtue in an industry that has curiously little of it. His sincerity in how he goes about his job is weirdly poignant, though Brolin’s natural physicality also reminds you that the character can snap into bruiser mode at a moment’s notice. Mannix is a fascinating creation: both noble and tortured, a million miles away from the typical Coen scoundrel. Not that the brothers don’t give us some great weirdoes in “Hail, Caesar!”. In particular, I wanted more of Johansson as a shit-talking power femme who spits her lines out like chewing tobacco. Here, the actress displays a previously unseen gift for comedy, and she fits into the brother’s topsy-turvy world in all the ways that her character can’t fit into her mermaid suit. Ditto for Channing Tatum as matinee idol Burt Gurney: his character’s innocuous Gene Kelly affectations eventually give way to a chilling secret, one that I wish the film had explored in greater detail. Alden Ehrenreich gets some of the movie’s biggest laughs as the dim Hobie and Raph Fiennes is delightful as the uber-posh director; I kept wondering if his M. Gustave from Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” had given up being a hotel concierge and taken up directing (and, you know, skipped forward twenty years or so). Jonah Hill is quite funny in what essentially amounts to a glorified cameo while Joel’s wife, the indispensable Frances McDormand, gets one priceless sight gag that involves a lit cigarette, a piece of editing equipment and a length of scarf that’s too funny to spoil here. All the actors give themselves over to this madcap symphony with gusto and an admirable humility, though I honestly could have done without Tilda Swinton (whom I normally love) as a dueling pair of bitchy gossip columnists.

The Coens have this sort of one-two punch habit where for every purportedly ‘serious’ movie they make, they make another one just to fuck with us. Oh, you liked the simmering hatred and lonely Texas blues of “Blood Simple,” did you? Well, here’s “Raising Arizona” for you! Oh, you thought “No Country for Old Men” was the great modern-day anti-Western? What do you make of “Burn After Reading,” with its callous fitness freaks, government stooges and homicidal nincompoops? “Fargo,” then “The Big Lebowski”. “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” followed by “Intolerable Cruelty”. Clearly there’s a pattern here. And though it’s tempting to apply this same logic here, I wouldn’t necessarily say that “Hail, Caesar” falls neatly into these confines.

Of course, their previous film “Inside Llewyn Davis” was perhaps their most heartfelt work to date. The Coens have never been known for their kindness, but in that wintry, mournful film, they approached something resembling a begrudging empathy. Still, “Davis” brazenly straddled the line between comedy and tragedy, and “Hail, Caesar!,” though noticeably zanier on its surface, finds a similarly disruptive balance. It is both a display of grand buffoonery and also a serious spiritual inquiry, as well as an impressive, cynical send-up of vintage Hollywood pomposity that’s also a fond remembrance of the same. The Coens have always thrived off contrast, and their employment of comic anachronism in “Hail, Caesar!” is even more pointed than usual. When Eddie brings together a meeting of four clergymen — an Orthodox priest, a protestant “padre,” a Catholic and a rabbi — to convene on the perceived acceptability of the studio’s religious picture, Eddie asks the men if the film’s “depiction of our lord and savior Jesus Christ cuts the mustard”. The rabbi, who’s seemingly none too happy to be there, gruffly replies “God doesn’t have children. He’s a bachelor, and he’s very angry.” A quote like this can’t help but feel somehow prophetic during a later scene where Eddie debates his professional future with a defense contractor from aerospace conglomerate Lockheed Martin.

What’s miraculous and kind of beautiful about “Hail, Caesar!” is that the Coens still manage to pepper the film with moral digressions and intellectual inquiries that somehow don’t detract from the pratfalls. Don’t let the mannered, frantic exterior of this film fool you: this is one of the Coen’s most deadly serious films. To dismiss it as one of their “lighter efforts,” whatever the hell that actually means, is to skirt over the questions this film asks: do we need movies? What is the high cost of fantasy? Can a man still be fundamentally good when the game has been rigged from the start? I don’t think “Hail, Caesar!” has the answers to these questions, but the fact that it poses them at all is kind of refreshing. The gags hit you with the aggressive frequency of a seasoned lightweight fighter, but the lingering notes of doom and anxiety will leave your head spinning. Those who dismiss this one as “minor Coens” might want to take a closer look. A-