Hail, Caesar! A Classical Scholar’s Review
Hollywood has a longstanding interest in Roman imperial politics as a mirror for modern-day America. Some recent films, like Gladiator with its ethnically diverse slave cohort fighting to revive the Republic, draw these parallels explicitly, while others, like the superb campaign-trail thriller The Ides of March — its title alone connecting it to ancient Rome — leave them implicit.
In the newly-released Hail, Caesar, directors Joel and Ethan Coen have found a new way to compare the evolution of the superpowers of ancient and modern times. Hollywood itself becomes their soundstage, as they lead us through a series of complex crossings and chiasmuses of two great historical moments, Rome in the early 1st century A.D. and America in the 1950’s.
How does a film set at the height of the Cold War come to be called Hail, Caesar, you ask? The brilliant titling of this film reveals much about its ironic and mischievous technique. Its first scene shows us a noirish tough guy named Eddie Mannix, a Hollywood fixer who bullies and bribes in order to keep his studio — significantly named Capitol — on top. A modern-day Caesar, we are perhaps meant to suspect, scenting the resemblances between Josh Brolin’s Eddie Mannix and Edgar G. Robinson’s Rico in the gangster classic Little Caesar. But suddenly, we find ourselves watching a Roman legion tramping through Gaul with George Clooney at its head, and the title “Hail, Caesar!” appears on a grainy, early-technicolor credit sequence. Capitol Studios is in the process of filming this sword-and-sandal epic, along with several other films of widely diverse genres — into each of which, in turn, the Coens plunge us with metacinematic glee.
In his madcap juggling of the competing needs of these ‘pictures,’ as movies then were called, Eddie Mannix gives most of his time and effort to “Hail, Caesar,” reflecting the traditional primacy of the historical epic in the Hollywood pantheon. This particular film is especially ambitious, both in terms of its budget and its themes; it ends with its Roman hero, played by megastar Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), transported into rapture as he witnesses the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves who died along with him. (I would issue a spoiler alert here if any were needed for the genre of movie the Coen brothers have shaped — one in which plot lines are hardly central or even, in some cases, detectable.)
This film’s epiphanic ending, together with its pious subtitle “A Tale of the Christ,” makes it virtually a dopplegänger of MGM’s Ben-Hur, one of the most laborious and renowned Hollywood productions of all time. Indeed, in one of many inside jokes that will delight film-savvy members of the audience, a cleric who has screened an early version of “Hail, Caesar” remarks on the implausibility of the chariot race, the scene for which Ben-Hur is best remembered today.
Ben-Hur, as the Coen brothers are keenly aware, went into production only a few months after the launch of Sputnik. Like similar films of its era, it drew unmistakable parallels between the contest of world systems it portrayed — that between Christianity and pagan Roman imperialism — and the rivalry that dominated the Cold War era, between American free enterprise Soviet-style Communism. (Maria Wyke has explored this parallel in her superb Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History, an installment in Routledge’s “New Ancient World” series.) In such treatments Rome is portrayed as the Evil Empire, representating the militarism and Machtpolitik that, to American eyes at least, typified the Russian drive toward world domination. Conversion to Christianity, for the film’s hero and (as the audience knows will follow) for the empire as a whole, spells the triumph of personal freedom and a peace-loving political ethos over autocracy and expansionism.
Ben-Hur’s use of Rome to represent America’s superpower enemy seems hopelessly dated in the 21st century, when the question “Are We Rome?” (the title of Cullen Murphy’s 2007 political critique) suggest a very different parallel. The naïve faith of the Cold War biblical epics make a fat target for the Coens, famous for their jaundiced view of pieties of all kinds, especially religious ones (as seen in A Serious Man, their spoof of their own Jewish upbringing). The making of “Hail, Caesar,” as seen from the perspective of Hail, Caesar, embodies not only the simplistic self-confidence of America in the 1950’s, but also the arrogance and power of the Hollywood magnates who grew rich by reinforcing it — creating simulacra of religious transport that vanish as soon as the director calls “cut.”
But Eddie Mannix, the hero of Hail, Caesar, is a genuinely pious man, a committed Catholic who goes to confession on a daily basis and is seen on one occasion praying over a set of rosary beads. His religious faith is here grafted onto his loyalty to the studio he serves and its head, a certain Mr. Skank who calls all the shots yet remains offstage, like a Euripidean god.
But that loyalty is tested by a headhunter from the Lockheed Corporation, who offers Mannix a chance to serve true power — the hydrogen bomb, just then (in the movie’s slightly warped chronology) under development. As he grows ever more importunate, the headhunter puts Mannix at a crossroads, torn between two versions of the Cold War American dream: the movie industry — seen, from Lockheed’s perspective, as a factory of frivolous lies — and the hard truths of the military-industrial complex. (It’s interesting to note that the Coen brothers were at work on the screenplay of Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, in which American air power and opposition to Communism also loom large but are seen in more positive terms, at nearly the same time they were making Hail, Caesar.)
Meanwhile, Baird Whitlock, the debauched star of “Hail, Caesar,” is at a crossroads of his own. Wandering loopily about Los Angeles in the costume of the Roman tribune he plays, Whitlock hearkens to the siren song of Communism, embodied here in a fictionalized version of the Hollywood Ten (a cadre of 1950’s screenwriters who voiced support for the Soviet system). Perfectly played by George Clooney, Whitlock is a pompous simpleton who will follow any ideological path as long as there’s a stiff drink being served along the way. When, at the film’s conclusion, we see him suddenly snap back into character as Antoninus Autolycus — a man who also stands at a crossroads, as a Roman general witnessing the crucifixion of Christ — the ironies become thick enough to cut with a legionnaire’s gladius.
To be sure, Hail, Caesar has its flaws. Some of its plot threads lead nowhere or vanish without warning; one, involving Scarlett Johansson and Jonah Hill, seems to have been written merely to supply cameo roles for top box-office names. But it is wildly entertaining, with its kaleidoscopic variety of movie scenes taking place on the various soundstages of Capitol Studios. For the classically-minded moviegoer, it offers an insightful look at the role that ancient Rome has played in cinematic history and in America’s understanding of itself. Joel and Ethan Coen, who earlier in their career riffed on Homer’s Odyssey (O Brother, Where Art Thou), continue to show how our understanding of the ancient world can inform, and ironize, our view of modernity.
James Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, N.Y., and author of several books, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero. He reviews regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
