The Coen brothers’ Hollywood comedy is a run of near-perfect pastiches, a sailor tap number, a water ballet, a singing cowboy in a dinner jacket, strung on a kidnapping plot that hardly matters. It is slighter than it looks and warmer than it sounds.
The Coen brothers have gone back to Capitol Pictures, the studio that swallowed Barton Fink twenty-five years earlier. It is now the early 1950s and the man running the lot is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a fixer who spends one day and one night putting out fires. The biggest fire is Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), star of the Roman picture that gives the film its name, who is drugged on set and carried off, skirt and breastplate and all. The film is that day. It is 106 minutes of set pieces wearing a plot as a disguise, and once you accept that, it is a good time.
The pastiches are the point and they are done properly. Roger Deakins shoots each one in the manner of its period: the water ballet from directly above, the pool a hard turquoise, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) rising out of the middle in a rubber tail; Hobie Doyle’s western in flat sunshine with rope tricks and a horse that knows its cue; the drawing-room drama in soft silver; the Roman epic all gold and marble and reverent low angles. Jess Gonchor builds a lot where a short walk crosses a thousand years. Mary Zophres puts Johansson in the tail, Channing Tatum in sailor whites and Tilda Swinton in hats that could take an eye out. Carter Burwell writes the film-within-the-film a chorus that swells like the real thing, and gives Mannix’s actual night something quieter and more worried.
Two of the numbers are as good as anything the Coens have made. Burt Gurney (Tatum) leads a bar full of sailors in a tap routine lamenting the absence of women, played dead straight for the full length of a real number, and we grinned all the way through it, partly at the dancing and partly at how seriously everyone is taking it. And there is the scene in which Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) tries to get Hobie to say the line “Would that it were so simple.” Fiennes’s patience curdles one syllable at a time; Alden Ehrenreich’s mouth simply cannot make the shape. We laughed harder than we had in months, and it is essentially two men saying five words.
Ehrenreich is the discovery. He plays Hobie as decent and baffled, a boy who can do anything with a lasso and nothing with a sentence, and the film, unusually for these directors, never sneers at him. Brolin does the heavier work. His Mannix slaps a starlet’s photographer, slaps Whitlock, and goes to confession at dawn to admit he has had a cigarette he promised his wife (Alison Pill) he would give up. An aircraft company keeps offering him a serious job with serious hours, and the film’s real question, asked quietly under the nonsense, is whether making nonsense is honourable work for a grown man. Clooney does his idiot routine well. Swinton plays both Thacker sisters as if they were the same woman refusing to admit it. Frances McDormand gets one scene as the editor C. C. Calhoun, a Moviola and a scarf, and it is perfect.
What does not work is the kidnapping. Once we meet the kidnappers, the film becomes a seminar, and the second half takes the plot somewhere we will not describe, except to say it comes to less than it should. Whitlock disappears from the film for long stretches. Around the hour mark we realised we were waiting for the next number rather than the next scene, and that is a fault in the writing, not in us. The Coens cut their own films, and the cutting between the lot and the beach house has a stop-start feel, so that neither strand builds. The ending is quiet on purpose. We understood that, and we still wanted more.
Barton Fink used this same studio to make a nightmare about whether pictures are worth a serious person’s life. This is the same lot in daylight asking the same thing, and it answers more kindly and with less force. See it for the sailors, the cowboy and the water ballet, and for Brolin’s jaw. Do not expect it to add up; the Coens have decided it should not. It carries a 12A, and the best of it would fit into forty minutes.
