In Fargo, the Coen brothers’ 1996 masterpiece, a suitcase filled with one million dollars gets buried in a snowy field, the currency never to be spent. In Hail, Caesar!, the filmmakers’ 2016 entry, a suitcase filled with one hundred thousand bucks (the old-time Hollywood equivalent of a million) gets dropped to the bottom of the sea.
Despite the similar fates of the luggage, it turns out these two films offer fundamentally different philosophies. Fargo’s characters hurt friends, family members, and accomplices in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) actually says aloud to the captured perp in the backseat of her cruiser: “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that?” In Hail Caesar!, the characters do know it, you know? But they also know they have to acquire a little money somehow.
Hail Caesar! is billed as a comedy, and looks like one—gonzo musical numbers, outlandish characters, and enough absurdist elements (poisoned chalices, lassos made of spaghetti) to qualify as “camp.” Sadly, I spent more of the film’s running time getting ready to laugh than actually laughing. Some viewers may thus dismiss this supposed comedy for not being funny enough, and I could hardly blame them. But in staying with the movie, and all its subplots of adoption paperwork and staged romances and twin gossip columnists, I found there was more to it than a lack of jokes.
The central players in Hail CaesarI wrestle with a version of the same question—how do we keep our morality intact while also providing for ourselves and our families?
Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), to keep himself going, confesses his sins daily. When he’s not strong-arming his employees in an effort to protect Capitol Pictures, he seems like a faithful husband and attentive father. He’s doing OK. But in the midst of various crises on various film sets, Mannix gets offered a job at Lockheed Martin. The pay would be great, the hours easy, and if he can just avoid thinking about the Bikini Island mushroom cloud photo that the Lockheed recruiter uses as a sales pitch, Mannix can envision himself in a new career.
The prize commodity of Mannix’s current employer, Capitol Pictures, is Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who has skated through life as a talented pretty boy. Whitlock has blindly followed a path to stardom, enjoying all the booze and benefits such stardom confers, and has had little reason to consider the consequences of his actions. But after he’s kidnapped by a consortium of Communists (calling themselves The Future) intent on disrupting the “means of production,” Whitlock is perfectly ready to view Capitol Pictures—the studio that has provided him every luxury—as the enemy. There’s no telling what someone will think the first time he attempts thinking.
As for The Future, they’re a collective of screenwriters and other non-famous Hollywood functionaries who have enough money to live in a swanky house on the Pacific Ocean and hire a maid, but are still united in their belief that they’ve been screwed. These are not starving revolutionaries breaking windows for a crust of bread; these are intellectual revolutionaries who worship at the altar of economic fairness. Think of the oldest, richest, and most disgruntled of Bernie Sanders supporters (and not the massively underemployed millennial Bernie Sanders supporters). The Future doesn’t need Whitlock’s ransom money for itself. We know this because the money is earmarked directly for the Soviet Union. Then, when true believer Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is about to abandon America and join his comrades aboard a Russian sub, Gurney’s dog jumps from a rowboat to follow his master. Rather than see the mutt drown to death, Gurney drops the suitcase and catches the dog in his arms. The rowboat full of The Future contingent simply stares, with nary a thought to retrieving the suitcase before it falls to its watery grave.
Whitlock eventually gets returned to the studio, where he tries to convert Mannix to the red side. In the middle of Whitlock’s argument, Mannix slaps him in the face. Mannix may be passing on the Lockheed job—drawing the line at earning his salary by way of nuclear proliferation—but he’ll be damned if he’ll let his meal ticket turn commie. It never occurred to Whitlock that thinking for himself might be construed as disloyalty, and Clooney, open-mouthed and unblinking (there might as well be a “!?” floating over his head), plays his shock for all it’s worth.
Mannix offers no rebuttal to the academic theory Whitlock has memorized, but only insists that the films they make have value—that Whitlock is producing something of worth. Whitlock can believe this, and maybe Mannix can even convince himself. If he does, it’s easy for Mannix to ignore questions about how this worth gets measured, how the value he creates gets turned into wealth, or how that wealth becomes divided among those who helped to create it. He has to ignore these questions, because otherwise he’d have to confront them. After all, no one from The Future would deny a film’s inherent worth—they would only insist that everyone (especially the writers) get their cut.
Following Mannix’s diatribe, Whitlock quickly falls back in line and returns to the set, but not before Mannix issues one final directive: “Go out there and be a star.”
Fargo, a “black comedy,” ends in the happy home of Marge and Norm Gunderson, an expectant married couple who find joy in each other and in their careers. The greedy have been punished with death or jail, but we’re meant to believe that the world has plenty of rewards for those who aspire to do good. Darker, perhaps, is the ending to Hail, Caesar!, in which Baird Whitlock gives an impassioned, star-worthy speech on the set of the big budget Biblical epic (titled Hail, Caesar!, of course), only to ruin the take when he can’t remember the word “faith.” Whitlock doesn’t believe in what he’s saying or doing any more than Mannix believes it reasonable to assault his actors in the name of making a motion picture. But in Hail Caesar!, even good people have to pretend to believe in something. It’s the only way to get paid.