Hail, Caesar! and Truth

So thin are the pickings that an actor as talented as Mark Rylance won for the delivery of a single line of Coen brothers dialogue. (“Aren’t you worried?” Tom Hanks’s lawyer asks him in Bridge of Spies. “Would it help?” deadpans Rylance’s Soviet agent.) But if there is anyone who understands the idiocy and fripperies and waning fortunes of Hollywood, it is the Coens.

In a new film, Hail, Caesar!, they expose the industry’s other lowest moment, a time in the early 1950s when the studio system became so powerful and self-important, executives like Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) were hired for the sole purpose of controlling everything. On the door of Mannix’s office it says “Head of Physical Production”, but even this sinister title gives little idea of what the smoothly inscrutable Mannix (a real figure) actually did. As far as I can make out, he fluffed stars and hid inconvenient secrets. He was a one-man Oscars ceremony.

At the start of the film he has nevertheless managed to lose an entire star in the shape of the tanned, stupid Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), an easily led Victor Mature type who has been kidnapped in full costume (obviously) by an underground group while filming the preposterous Hail, Caesar!, in which Whitlock plays a Roman soldier who somehow manages to upstage Christ even at his crucifixion.

Whitlock is drugged and bundled out to the coast, where he is held hostage by a roomful of communists, blacklisted directors and screenwriters, one of whose piteous boasts is “I wrote all the All the Way to... pictures”. Mannix desperately tries to locate Whitlock while keeping the story from the gossip twins Thora and Thessaly Thacker (Tilda Swinton). He must also calm a director, Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), who is horrified by an uncouth western star, Hobie Doyle, foisted on him by the studio boss Mr Skank (based on Louis B Mayer), ruining his tinkling comedy of manners, Merrily We Dance.

Other problems include DeeAnna Moran, a brassy starlet who wants publicly to adopt the child she has given birth to in secret. DeeAnna offers Scarlett Johansson a unique opportunity: to act. I don’t think I’ve seen her less like herself, a filthy and manipulative synchronised swimmer who spends most of the film dressed, malevolently, in a “fish ass” (as a mermaid).

Some have said this is a “bad” Coen brothers film for its incoherence and scattiness, for the strangeness of walk-on, walk-off characters: it is true it often feels like a string of cameos and tableaux, notes and half-thought ideas for other films, all carelessly put together. But saying any Coen brothers film is “bad” is about as helpful as saying a Picasso is “bad” . It may not be their best, but you just want to keep on looking at it.

It addresses their usual themes: the futility and utter pointlessness of life. Mannix is such a failure as a human being, he cannot even do confession properly, slinking in to complain to the priest about infinitesimal crimes such as lying to his wife, when we all know he must have done far more terrible things. He seems indefinable, unreachable — perhaps too much of a black hole. He is a mystery even to Thessaly Thorn, a woman who does not generally deal in mysteries, foghorning her story ideas as she pursues him through the bougainvillea in a selection of extremely unmysterious outfits.

As the Thorn twins, Swinton delivers little more than a cameo. Frances McDormand also appears briefly as a gnarly old editor tucked away in a darkened bungalow. Channing Tatum glides on for a dance scene. It isn’t coherent, slick or meaningful. It has a shockingly abrupt ending, as if someone just yanked the tape out. But the Coens don’t make movies to win awards; they make them because that’s what they love doing. I’ve never seen actors having such rollicking fun.

Ghraib concern: Cate Blanchett stars in Truth

Truth is exactly the opposite: a self-important, wildly constipated industry-pleaser, featuring Cate Blanchett as the bizarre figure of Mary Mapes, an American television producer who in 2004 was best known for her work exposing the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Robert Redford, who has a deathless knack for turning any film into a vehicle for himself however small his role, plays the pompous, overconfident news anchor Dan Rather, who works with Mapes on scoops. One relates to the (now) piffling matter of George W Bush’s possibly shonky military record. Rather presents documents that supposedly prove his guilt, but are subsequently disputed as fake. It becomes clear that Mapes has failed to observe one of the first laws of journalism, that the truth isn’t always enough, you also need evidence.

The first 40 minutes is as confusing as any film could be. Nobody manages to explain the plot — that it is election time, that any problems with Bush’s military record could derail his re-election campaign (he “may have gone Awol from the military for over a year!”). A lot of time is spent having stagey journalist fights, crying and reciting each other’s CVs. The script is larded with jargon. People don’t have meetings, they break things down. They don’t hire staff, they hire (cue Top Gun montage) the best in their fields. Phones aren’t used, they are smashed, thrown.

It seems like life-or-death stuff, until you realise they are actually arguing over whether a 1970s typewriter could have produced a superscript “th” as the documents about Bush’s flying records suggest. “Find us another goddamn ‘th’ in the official record,” an executive screams. “We need to find that ‘th’!” Redford plays the whole thing as he usually does, as if someone has secretly let him in on the end of the story. Elisabeth Moss is sidelined as one of Mapes’s female subordinates.

To beef up the human side of the drama, Moss’s character asks a colleague about the abuse Mapes suffered at the hands of her father. Mapes is a journalist because, as Moss posits, her father beat her up for being so determined, so dogged, “for asking questions”? Please.

Hail, Caesar!
12A, 106 mins
★★★★

Truth
15, 125 mins
★★

@camillalong