Despite strong reviews and an impressive cast, Hail, Caesar!—the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo, True Grit, No Country for Old Men)—made only $30 million at the box office and hasn’t really scored with viewers. This is a shame, since it’s one of last year’s most fascinating films, particularly from a Christian standpoint. Set in the 1950s, the film centers around a major Hollywood studio making a Ben-Hur-style epic about the life of Christ, while scandal, crime, and chaos reign in the everyday lives of its stars and staff—particularly one Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a studio fixer who works tirelessly to keep things on the rails.
Filled with gorgeous set pieces paying tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood (films such as On the Town, North by Northwest, and Singin’ in the Rain), it’s colorful, clever, and comical. One of its funniest scenes involves Mannix meeting with several clergymen in order to ensure that the film’s depiction of Christ will satisfy Jews, Catholics, and Protestants alike. Because this sequence feels like a joke (“A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into Hollywood . . . ”), some viewers may conclude that Hail, Caesar! satirizes religious belief.
But a careful examination will show that the film is not a mockery of religion or Christianity, but a sly criticism of Hollywood’s tendency to think that it is religion—that it can somehow recreate and embody all the fullness of Christ and his teachings. Yet, at the same time, Hail, Caesar! acknowledges the appeal of Christianity’s truths by portraying Eddie Mannix as an admirable Christ-figure trying to do what’s right in a ridiculously artificial milieu.
Just look at his last name: MANnix. Combined with the word Behold on the studio’s water tower, this gives us Pilate’s “Behold the Man” and points to Eddie as an incarnation of, well, the Incarnation—hence the movie’s opening shot of a bloodied Christ on the cross, echoed in the subsequent scene when Eddie’s face is spattered with shadows of raindrops as he sits in his car. We see Eddie tempted (by the Lockheed Corporation) to an easier life, which he must resist for the sake of those he wants to go on saving from their own stupidity. Eddie redeems the lost when he pulls a bird-brained starlet out of a compromising photo shoot by insisting that she belongs to Capitol Pictures (his corporation—his body!) and that it has sole rights to her likeness. That’s the language of a king, and Eddie follows up by literally paying to keep her out of trouble. And of course, at the end, Eddie is able to resist Lockheed’s siren call after consulting with the priest and then wandering up the hill of Golgotha on the set of Capitol Pictures’ Roman epic Hail, Caesar! That film-within-a-film is subtitled A Tale of the Christ, solidifying the Coens’ framework movie as a story about Jesus—specifically, Eddie Mannix.
Yet, if both the framework story and the internal movie are about Christ, then why use “Caesar” in the title? Aren’t we supposed to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s? This is precisely the Coens’ point: Hollywood is not a place where anybody renders unto God, no matter what kind of lip service the studio might pay. How can a film studio handle the gospel accurately when, for example, it has to ask the actor on the cross how fancy a lunch he gets because they’re not sure if he’s a “principal”? He might be the key figure in Scripture, but in Hollywood that almighty dollar is the driving force. (This is true even for the film’s Communist writers, who exploit people—such as movie star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney—to “make a little dough”; that’s why their guidebook, Marx’s Das Kapital, has the same name as the studio they are supposedly fighting.)
The strictly secular nature of the whole Hollywood enterprise is highlighted in the biggest emotional moment of both the internal film and its framework story: a speech by the spiritually enlightened Roman centurion (Clooney) at the foot of the cross is wrecked because Clooney’s dim-witted character, Baird Whitlock (“wit-lack”), somehow forgets the last word of his monologue—which happens to be “faith.” Hollywood can’t remember that it ever had any! Hollywood is not a place where there is faith in anything you can’t actually see. Hence the assertion, repeated twice toward the end of the film, that cinema will give us a new version of the gospel, written not in words but in light. “Photography,” after all, literally means “writing with light.” They will try to present the truth, but they are working in a medium where everything is by nature fake—that is, not quite true. (Frequent references to “light” in the film, including sun and moon, play against the hymn we hear when the film begins—Fiat Lux—which is Latin for “Let there be light.”)
This is the one uniting factor that ties together the many disparate episodes in the movie: the notion that nothing really is what it seems. DeeAnna Moran (played by Scarlett Johansson) is not a smiling mermaid but a pregnant, trash-talking floozy who may have to “adopt her own child” just to make herself look respectable. Cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich)—perhaps the one genuine person in the movie—must learn to act like a sophisticated stage thespian so he can take on yet another persona in a non-Western film; his genuineness is undermined by his set of false teeth (though at least he’s honest about this!) and by the name of his date, Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio)—a moniker lifted from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which deals with mysterious and fake identities. Burt Gurney (played by Channing Tatum) pretends to be a navy sailor but is actually a Communist who winds up on a Russian submarine. Yet even as a Commie, Gurney is a fake—living in a lavish seaside home that is clearly intended as a tribute to a similar house in another Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest (itself a 136-minute meditation on fake identity). In addition to all this, there’s an extra layer of artifice in the way the Coens’ central characters are all thinly disguised versions of real actors: DeeAnna isn’t exactly Esther Williams; Hobie isn’t precisely Gene Autry or Roy Rogers; Gurney isn’t quite Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire; and Mannix certainly isn’t the real Eddie Mannix, who was an actual MGM “fixer” in 1950s Hollywood (though nowhere near as upright as Brolin’s character in Hail, Caesar!).
The whole simulated nature of everything in Hollywood is so severe and pervasive that Capitol needs a special employee (played by Jonah Hill) whose job is to be a “professional person”—a man who can pretend to be whatever person the studio needs at any given time. And, of course, this is a character in the framework film. It isn’t just Capitol movies that are fake; the very people who work for the studio are themselves, in a significant sense, fake as well.
That’s why the assertion about writing with light is presented in both versions of Hail, Caesar!—the one by Capitol Pictures and the one by the Coen brothers. It’s all fake. Which is also why the backgrounds, the performances, and sometimes even the dialogue in the framework film feel just as synthetic as those in the various films-within-the-film. Hail, Caesar! works to present us with truth, while acknowledging that its own medium is not well suited to this task. And yet—like Eddie Mannix, and perhaps like struggling Christians everywhere—the Coens have done the best they can to embody the way, the truth, and the life of Christ in a world that is, by nature, unable to receive or understand him.
Joseph W. Smith III has been a teacher, writer, speaker, and OPC officer for more than twenty-five years. His latest book is Open Hearts: Recovering the Lost Christian Virtue of Transparency (forthcoming 2018).
