The last time Joel and Ethan Coen made a “movie-movie” – that is, a film about filmmaking – the result was lavishly rewarded (three prizes at Cannes in 1991), commercially negligible (it made $6m) and sneeringly misanthropic. That was Barton Fink, which painted Hollywood as a soul-sucking swamp of philistinism.
One reason Hail, Caesar! represents a breakthrough for the brothers as storytellers is that it challenges those simplistic assumptions. Neither celebration nor condemnation, it opens on the face of Christ and proceeds to show coolly how movies can express and even mirror religious ideology. Barton Fink was a psychological horror film inspired by the migration to Hollywood of the playwright Clifford Odets. Hail, Caesar! also places a real figure at the centre of its loopy fantasies: the “fixer” Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who quashed nasty rumours and kept stars in line in the studio era.
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