SUBTITLED: "A Tale of the Christ"
That, I think, is at least the subtitle of the epic movie Capital Studio is filming in the movie HAIL CAESAR. The first interesting thing is that it was released at the same time as RISEN. There Joseph Fiennes had the central role as the Roman tasked with finding the Body of the dead Christ; in HAIL CAESAR his brother Ralph Fiennes had a central role as a movie director, Laurence Laurentz, tasked with turning a western movie star into an actor fit to inhabit an upper class romantic drama. "Would it twere so simple." The most interesting aspect of both movies is that the figure of Jesus, the Christ, stands at the direct center of each movie. RISEN, a serious drama, has the Roman Clavius investigating the disappearance of Christ's body from the tomb and, in fact, in a climactic encounter in the upper room, meeting the real "risen" Christ. HAIL CAESAR has the actor, Baird Whitlock, (playing the Roman Centurian, Autolocus) played by the actor George Clooney, meeting the living Jesus at the well of Jehoshaphat, narrated, then on the road where he is "blinded" ("squint, Baird. You are blinded by his glowing face") and perhaps his bright yellow hair. His final meeting is at the foot of the crucified Christ, called "the penitent thief," and "an Israelite priest," where Baird as Autolocus delivers the climactic speech of the movie on the nature of God and the Christ only to forget the key word FAITH, Faith, "faith. God damn it. Faith!" HAIL CAESAR, written and directed by the delightful Joel and Ethan Coen, is a comedy, a comedy about the fallen modern world that has no doubt forgotten the meaning and reality of FAITH!
The use of comedy to tell this very serious (I think) story reminds me of the humor in a Flannery O'Connor short story. That the comedy has Christ at its center is revealed by the opening images of, first, a very large image of the crucified Christ from a Catholic Church front, followed by the image of his face from that cross, the camera finally moving to a confessional where another central character, the studio "fixer," Eddie Mannix, is seen only off-camera which instead focuses on the crucifix he is holding, as well as, off to one side, his identifying grey hat. The confessional scene is humorous for the audience but not for Eddie who is quite serious. It seems he has betrayed his wife. The priest expecting a confession of adultry is instantly attentive; the confession however is that Eddie betrayed his wife by promising to give up smoking, yet sneaking two cigarettes, maybe three. Since Eddie takes Christ, the sacrament of confession, and the Christian story seriously, the audience must too, for Eddie's sake.
Almost immediately, however, we see Eddie in action in his work for the movie studio (movies are also important to Eddie and thus to us, if not immediately, definitely by the end of the movie; movies are indeed art and their meaning on various levels throughout this movie is significant). Eddie bursts into a room where a photographer is taking racy photos of one of the studio's famous movie stars, "Gloria de Lamour," really Mary Ann Shinebrot (or something. It's the fifties where Cary Grant was really Archie Leach.). We see the Flannery O'Connor element immediately in what she says when Eddie comes flying through the door: "Jesus Christ on a scooter! Eddie." What Eddie is actually doing is protecting "Gloria's" image as a good, virtuous young lady. Obviously there is no reverence in her expletive, as there was in the opening images. These contrasts exist throughout the movie, especially in Baird's moving speech at the foot of the cross. Eddie is the "fixer," as I said, and his most important job is to protect the image of Baird Whitlock, his Roman Centurian, who probably committed "sodomy" with the director of his first film, ON WINGS AS EAGLES (cue in recurring sound effect each time the title is spoken by someone), who was Laurence Laurentz.
As fixer, Eddie himself is an image of the Christ who has "fixed" human nature (MAN) by taking our sin on himself, making it possible for us to regain the virtue we lost in the FALL in the garden. Baird says as much in his climactic scene and speech at the foot of the cross. In addition, Baird's first movie, ON WINGS AS EAGLES, surely is a literary allusion to the passage in Isaiah 40 where the prophet says, "they that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,/they shall mount up with wings like eagles,/they shall run and not be weary,/they shall walk and not faint." Once you see this allusion you can't help but see (well, I can't) how it applies especially to Eddie at the end of the movie, where he comes out of the confessional again (the movie is bookended by these confessional scenes) with his strength renewed.
As with RISEN I really love this movie which I think has the depth that RISEN might lack. In that movie we are forced to take the bodily resurrection of Christ seriously and the transforming effect it has on the central character. In HAIL CAESAR we see through Eddie, with the help of the noir narrator (Michael Gambon), and the character of Baird Whitlock, exactly how the presence and absence of Faith affects the lives of the characters involved in producing the movies that so many of us in our culture grew up loving and still do. And how the absence of Faith affects living in a world where illusion is constantly struggling to undermine reality and yet in art perhaps even transforms it, as we might see in the next installment.