Table Talk: Is Hail, Caesar! an Easter Movie?

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Anton: In my opening narration for our video essay, “9 Unconventional & Under-Appreciated Movies for Easter,” I noted that, while Christmas movies get more attention, Easter is another holiday that the Three Brothers like to structure our movie watching around.

Of course, this is also evident from the Best Easter Movie lists we put out in 2012 (“The Best Easter Movies”) and 2020 (“12 More Movies for Easter”).

One unconventional movie for Easter we haven’t mentioned before is the 2016 Coen brothers period comedy, Hail, Caesar!, starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, and Scarlett Johansson, among other top-notch actors. It’s set in 1950s Hollywood and is about a producer and fixer for Capitol Pictures, Eddie Mannix (played by Brolin), who has to try to recover a movie star, Baird Whitlock (played by Clooney), who has gone missing as the studio tries to wrap up principal photography for their big sword-and-sandals epic called Hail, Caesar! As he tries to recover Whitlock, Mannix deals with a host of other issues, and even contemplates a change of profession.

Right about now, readers are probably wondering, why would you think this is an Easter movie?

I think the genesis for our proposal is Anders and I each revisiting Hail, Caesar! around Easter 2022. (We had all seen it in theatres back in 2016, when Aren reviewed it for the site.) Ever since then, the idea of Hail, Caesar! as an Easter movie has been bouncing around in my head. I rewatched the movie again in 2024, on the weekend of Palm Sunday. 

Anders, it seems it has basically become a part of your Easter rotation now, hasn’t it?

Anders: Yes, for the last few years I’ve watched Hail, Caesar! each Easter weekend after my Friday viewing of Ben-Hur with the family. I plan on watching it again this weekend as well.

It might feel like a strange Easter choice, since on the surface it is a film about 50s Hollywood, as you note. (Fun aside: Capitol Pictures, the studio that Mannix works for, is the same, make-believe, studio that gives Barton Fink his screenwriting contract in the eponymous film)

To further make the film’s Holy Week bonafides more suspect, Hail, Caesar! is made by two secular Jewish writers who are more known for their caustic satires than their religiosity. But I would argue that Hail, Caesar!! draws on many of the same themes that make other Coen brothers films of interest to those who are preoccupied by existential and spiritual themes.

Making Meaning: The Film’s Philosophical and Religious Concerns

Anton: So, Hail, Caesar! is a movie about making a Ben-Hur-type movie. The title card for the movie within the movie is, in fact, Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ, alluding to Ben-Hur’s subtitle. Certain scenes that we see from the movie-within-the-movie recall famous moments in Ben-Hur, such as the scene in which a Jesus whose face we never see offers water Charleton Heston’s Judah Ben-Hur. In the Coens’ version, Clooney’s Baird Whitlock will look up from his cup to take in Christ's face. These moments are the film’s most tangible connections to the subject matter of a typical Easter Jesus movie. But the connections go deeper than references to Ben-Hur, I think. 

Anders: Yes, the obvious Easter connection is the surface level aspect that this is a film that is literally framed around the making of a sword-and-sandals epic that takes Christ as its subject matter. The film-within-the-film itself is part Ben-Hur, part The Robe, the 1953 film about the Roman centurion present at Calvary. In Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of The Christ, Clooney’s Whitlock is playing a version of Richard Burton’s character from The Robe, and Whitlock seems to be as much of a blowhard as the real-life Burton was.

But then the film takes a sharp left turn as Whitlock is kidnapped by a bunch of American Communists, mostly a group of screenwriters, who are the students of leftist, post-Frankfurt School guru, and later New Left inspiration, Herbert Marcuse. 

Anton: Yes, doesn’t someone say at one point, “Prof. Marcuse”?

Anders: Yes, that’s how we know who it’s supposed to be (aside from Marcuse being the most famous Marxist professor in post-war California). The screenwriters are obviously an allusion to the coming Hollywood purges and naming of names during the HUAC hearings. 

But to get back to why this is relevant to a discussion of Easter, I would suggest one of the key things is that this is a film about conversion or confirmation, in a couple different ways: there’s a direct mirror between the experience of Whitlock’s Roman centurion’s conversion to Christianity and Whitlock’s own falling under the sway of the Communists. It suggests an interesting connection between the utopian visions of both movements, one spiritual, one materialist.

Anton: That’s a good point. Whitlock plays a conversion experience on screen, while having a conversion experience. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Communism was one of the ideological (and totalitarian) movements that attempted to provide meaning in the modern world, filling the void, if you will, left by the retreat of Christianity from its dominance over the modern West.

I’ve been trying to think through what all this means. The cryptic meaning of things is often part of the fun of the Coens’ films.

I’m intrigued by the Marcuse reference, since he is often criticized, by conservatives, as the figure who fathered the New Left, or the Marxist-infused leftist cultural and identity politics, which pivoted from an emphasis on class and economics to other forms of liberation: sexual, racial, etc.

What’s interesting is that the Coen brothers' films have, in my view, frequently grappled with how people find meaning in a world that seems to have a religious or philosophical vacuum. If traditional religion, especially Christianity, but also forms of Judaism, have declined as having the central authority in holding and making meaning in modernity, other things have gone in to fill the void, whether it is Communism, progressive politics, etc. Whitlock is brought into a new understanding of what value and worth are according to Marxist historical materialism.

I think Eddie Mannix’s conversation about changing jobs for “serious” stuff like Lockheed and the Hydrogen Bomb also taps into the technological transformations that are challenging old ways of seeing the world in the mid-twentieth century, after World War Two and the atom bomb. Corporatism and technocracy offer another vision for structuring society, albeit based on a sort utilitarian view of life.

Anyways, I just see the Coens as continually considering, how do we make meaning, how do we assign value and worth to things? And they always have characters grappling with these big questions, whether in the face of crime and evil, or in this case, in the face of Hollywood trivialities.

Anders: Ok, so we have Whitlock and others belief in the triumph of the proletariat through the dialectic (I find Whitlock’s articulations of his new found faith in the dialectical method and Marxism one of the funniest scenes in the film, the expressions of a new convert), 

But then you point out the other kind of grappling with meaning that we get with Eddie Mannix. This is the film’s more serious plot, if we want to call it that: it is Mannix’s own Dark Night of the Soul, as he must weigh his dedication to Capitol Pictures versus taking a job with a military contractor. Mannix’s Catholicism plays a major role in the film. He’s very concerned with making Hail, Caesar! a respectful and worthy portrayal of Christ. His scrupulousness, even as he works as a Hollywood fixer, is clear in how many times he goes to confession during the film, even though it takes place over the course of a day or so.

Anton: Aren noted, in his review from 2016, that the movie constantly has Mannix assert that “the picture has worth.”

It seems to me that the Coen brothers have become, in recent years, some of the big American filmmakers to not shy away from the presence of religion in their films. 

Can we read the movie as another of the Coen brothers' biblical or religious movies, just as how A Serious Man could be considered a loose adaptation of the Book of Job, with the whirlwind in the final shot.

Anders: Absolutely. One of this film’s most memorable bits is the discussion between the three representatives of the Christian faith, and the Rabbi (played by Star Trek: Voyager’s Robert Picardo), discussing whether the film is a respectful portrayal of Christ. It sounds like the set up to a joke, and it’s very funny, but it also nicely outlines the various approaches of the faiths to the person of Jesus.

Anton: It’s a great scene! Like in parts of A Serious Man, that sequence is both knowledgeable, satirical, and serious, all at once. It’s the kind of scene which only the Coen brothers can do well in all those different ways.

Making Movies: The Film as a Portrait of 1950s Hollywood

Anton: As much as Hail, Caesar! is about the movie-making business, it is not exactly a love letter to Hollywood. It shows the place to be ridiculous and overblown—and yet, strangely “of worth,” to borrow the phrase from Mannix.

Anders: Absolutely, most of the characters come across as vain, morally vacant, and self-serving. Aside from Mannix, and perhaps the film’s “Holy Fool,” Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), the singing cowboy with whom there is more than meets the eye.

Anton: Do you want to elaborate what you mean by that?

Anders: Almost everyone at Capitol Pictures is a stereotype of self-centred Hollywood jerks. But Hobie is a straightforward and earnest person, doing his job—whether that’s a dangerous cowboy stunt, trying to tie his tongue around the mannered dialogue of a high-brow comedy, or escorting an up-and-coming starlet to her movie premiere. He accepts his lot in life, but he’s also a person of moral character. He stands up for what he thinks is right, even if he isn’t the brightest bulb. He’s also ultimately the one who solves the mystery of Whitlock’s disappearance when he notices that musical star Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) has the ransom suitcase and follows his gut and returns Whitlock to the studio from the Communists. In other words, Hobie is the one person who seems sure of who he is, and not just as a celebrity or performer but also as a human being. I do think Holy Fool is the right description for him.

Anton: The Hollywood setting also invites the later-life Coens to ask questions about their own careers as filmmakers. Have we done anything of worth in our lives devoted to making movies?

The movie is very much about the meaning of life and art’s role in that. Can a life devoted to the mundane aspects of producing something like a classical Hollywood movie, the kind of art that’s as commercial and industrial as it gets—can that also be part of a life lived well?

Aren said it well in his review:

In the midst of all the showbiz farce is a serious examination about the meaning of life. Is the meaning of life to better your fellow human beings by raising the common standard of living, like the communist screenwriters argue? Is it to secure a stable, high-paying career, like the one a representative from Lockheed constantly offers Eddie Mannix in the private military sector? Or is it to entertain the masses, to give them a moment of respite in the midst of life’s confusions?

The film ultimately argues that the last of these options is closest to the truth, despite ribbing Hollywood’s frequent shallowness. It equates the movies with a comforting spiritual lesson: an intangible that defies reality but offers solace and meaning to a world often bereft of it.

So, in a way, the film’s different characters represent different philosophical points of view, and it sets up the film as a kind of dialogue about life and meaning, with Mannix navigating the different options and having to decide.

Since we are using Hail, Caesar! to also discuss Easter movies, I would argue that the film also indirectly suggests that Hollywood movies, whether biblical epics or even less conventionally religious fare, such as the genres modelled on screen through the movie, can be sources of meaning in our lives.   

By extension, it can be “of worth” to watch a movie over the Easter weekend. Movies are not simply diversions.

Anders: Well said.

Is Hail, Caesar! an Easter Movie?

Anton: Okay, we discussed how the movie is about making meaning in our lives and through movies. But now we need to each provide our answer to the initial question: is Hail, Caesar! an Easter movie?

Anders: I think so. If we go off our discussion last year of what makes a Christmas movie, we can apply a similar rubric. While it’s not set at Easter, insofar as it is concerned with the figure of Christ and makes reference to popular Easter-tide films like Ben-Hur and The Robe, that’s a start. But I think what makes the film good Easter viewing is that it’s really concerned with the larger questions of value and meaning, in art and in life. It’s concerned with characters who are, knowingly or not, seeking a kind of redemption. Eddie Mannix wants to know that his job has worth, that he can indeed serve Christ in the service of creating quality entertainment.

Anton: I agree. Hail, Caesar! both has the necessary subject matter, even if it is largely subordinated to the movie-within-the-movie. But it also has a redemption narrative and themes (which we’ve discussed) that strongly relate to the holiday and that make the film highly suitable for viewing over the Easter weekend.

Anders: And then we have the pseudo-conversion narrative for Baird Whitlock, who after his experience with the Communists returns to the studio and delivers an amazing monologue on set at the foot of the cross. His experience has deepened the art of a character who is said to be a womanizing and vain fool earlier. So we have characters who are changed through their experience with various incarnations of the Christ in cinema. 

It may all be a bit “meta”, but Hail Caesar! is about the way that movies themselves can facilitate change in us, both behind and in front of the screen.

Hail, Caesar! (USA, 2016)

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen; starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Channing Tatum.

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