[7.4/10] It would be too much to call *Hail, Caesar!* a deconstruction of Old Hollywood glamour. It would also be too much to call it a tribute to that 1950s studio sparkle either. Instead, it’s a love letter written with a poison pen -- a movie about movies that both admires and recoils from the mercenary work necessary to make these dream factories run, while remaining amusingly ambivalent about the ribbons of reveries they create.

It is also a Coen Bros. movie, so grand plots and convoluted ploys nearly reach their ridiculous fruition, only to fall apart at the last minute. Scads of self-possessed personalities veer between the absurd, the self-important, and the unvarnished sweet. And in uproarious stretches that provoke guffaws and slower situational silliness that wins wry smiles, it is damn funny.

The film tells the story of a star who’s kidnapped by Communists, a simple but earnest hayseed tapped to portray an effete sophisticate, a foul-tempered starlet whose pregnancy threatens to puncture her shining public image, and any number of other fires that the studio’s fixer must put out to keep the trains running on time. That fixer, Eddie Mannix, is the spine of the film, smoothly trudging his way from one crisis to the next, avoiding derailments with his pocket watch, gumption, and effortless understanding of whom to lean on, whom to sweet talk, and whom to slap around to keep it all moving.

But he has a chance to step off the track. Mannix carries an offer from Lockheed Martin in his back pocket, one that would give him more regular hours, an in at a more professional sort of business, and a much easier life than the 27-hours-straight he has to put in to hack it as head of physical production for a Hollywood film studio.

*Hail, Caesar!* is neither quixotic nor cynical about what entails. It makes no bones about the absurd strictures and control that studios exert over the lives of their employees. Mannix and his confederates cook up phony adoptions, cover indiscretions with political pressure, treat their dunderheaded or demanding stars more like ornery pets than people. It touches on pay for writers, laws evaded as though they’re barely there in the first place, and a workaday mundaneness that belies all the supposed magic.

And yet, the movie also pays homage to the styles and output of that age of the cinema. From a Gene Kelly-esque sailor-filled dance number, to a series of Cowboy songs and stunts, the movie lovingly recreates the tints and tropes of the old days. Monologue-laden historical epics sit next to comedies of manners. Starlets emerge from beneath artificial waves in the same fashion as Russian subs. Hitchcockian pursuits and suspenseful car rides give ways to Capra-esque crane shots and that California glow. For however much the Coen Bros. seem poised to poke fun at, or at least acknowledge, the grim realities of celluloid shimmer, they’re just as apt to deploy it to their own, tribuative ends.

Meanwhile, they mine the insanity of this all for all the comic gold they can find. (Hello, Mr. Pocket!) A group of religious figures debate the depiction of God in the studio’s latest movie, and cosmology in general, in a scene that just drips with the Coens’ dry sense of humor. Ralph Fiennes and Alden Ehrenreich nearly blow the roof off the place in a scene where the former’s cultured director tries to coach the latter’s dopey cowboy to deliver his line with a layer of performance beyond “aw, shucks.” Empty-headed actors compare the dialectics of socialism and direct action to having to shave Danny Kaye’s back. There’s a constant strain of sly absurdity, the loonies who populate this lot and this town, that the writer/directors channel throughout for both their quiet chuckles and big laughs.

The catch is that, given the expansive cast of characters and deliberately overstuffed set of stories and conflicts and conspiracies for a harried (but never ruffled) Mannix to have to resolve, the movie feels a little too loose and aimless at times. *Hail, Caesar!*, contrary to the flicks it both spoofs and valorizes, doesn’t have much momentum from scene to scene. Instead, the Coens and their team are content to jump around from character to character, crisis to crisis, and conversation to conversation like a buzzed clapper boy stumbling home. Each (or at least most) of the pieces they put together are fun to watch or interesting to mull, but they rarely amount to more than the sum of their admittedly well-constructed parts.

Still, in its best moments and sequences, the film’s charms and the talents of its creatives are hard to deny. The film low-key satirizes a familiar moment in so many films about making one type of art or another. After Mannix has whacked some sense into his big star, the leading man heads to the set and delivers one of those grand oratories that defined so many of that era’s iconic films. Playing a Roman soldier whose heart is moved, he gazes upon Christ crucified (skeptically noted as a principal, rather than an extra by a P.A.), and delivers his lines with conviction and passion (not ardor). The crew looks on in admiration; the music swells, and in the climax of the speech the orator...forgets his lines.

The director yells cut. The lead grouses about how close he was. His co-star gripes about their uncomfortable Roman costumes. And the train keeps rolling. This isn’t magic or alchemy. It’s a bunch of idiots and working stiffs hacking out pleasantries in celluloid for a paycheck or at the behest of even more mercenary forces beyond their control.

But *Hail, Caesar!* contrasts that faux, unavailing scene of the good soldier seeking his direction before a man of god with a real one. When Mannix asks his Priest for forgiveness in the confessional, he implicitly asks him whether to take the Lockheed job, with all its ease and destruction, or to stay at this tougher racket and keep corralling these nudniks by only slightly less morally-questionable means. He walks out of that confessional reassured, ready to keep helping make those features a hard-won reality, by any means at his disposal.

That’s the optimistic cynicism of *Hail, Caesar!*. The movie, and by extension the Coens, don’t seem to harbor any illusions about the pure artistry of the cinematic output. The message of the film is not that all of this tricks and juggling and extra-legal measures are not somehow worth it for the beauty committed to film. But the work itself, the labor it takes, to just be a part of that machine, is its own kind of beautiful.
Movie-making, especially in the studio days, could be a slog and a grind and even a grift, in a way that belied the glitz and glamour that Tinseltown projected to the world. The Coens make no bones about that, but with decades in the business, and their tough-running fixer, they clearly still think that work is worth more than even the biggest frame could hold.