Hail, Caesar! (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2016)

[domino harvey]

I don't think a red baiting movie from the era would have painted commie writers as harmless over-intellectual bumblers who are more invested in bloviating than bodily harm, though that part is almost certainly one of the more accurate aspects of this film! When the most intimidating Communist in the film is just David Krumholtz in a mustache barking random objections, it's hard to call it sympathetic or complicit in the ideology

[Roger Ryan]

EDIT: My post was composed before the last few comments, so I see the thread is tipping toward this same idea...

"Since the whole look of the film makes it seem like it was produced in the 50s, I'm thinking the questionable attitudes regarding red-baiting, etc. belong to a film released in the 50s, not necessarily to the Coens themselves. Perhaps the film is intended to ironically show how true-life studio stories would be handled in a glossy Hollywood product from that era. This would also explain the conceit of the dance sequence having multiple set-ups, but treated as continuous action - that same kind of cheating has regularly appeared in classic "backstage" musicals and dramas.

Spoiler

The idea that the left-leaning screenwriters smugly proclaim they sneak communist propaganda into mainstream entertainment sounds like something a paranoid McCarthy-ite would write into a screenplay about the Hollywood Ten - again, potentially how a mainstream Hollywood product of that era might have addressed the issue if doing so head-on (which never happened in the 50s, of course).

I'm not saying this approach is entirely successful (I agree that the various sequences in Hail, Caesar! don't add up to a compelling whole), but I suspect the Coens want their cake and eat it, too which results in a film that is, as I mentioned earlier, more clever than funny."

[copen]

The filming of 'Merrily We Dance' is some of the funniest coens in a long time.

[feihong]

"Since the whole look of the film makes it seem like it was produced in the 50s, I'm thinking the questionable attitudes regarding red-baiting, etc. belong to a film released in the 50s, not necessarily to the Coens themselves. Perhaps the film is intended to ironically show how true-life studio stories would be handled in a glossy Hollywood product from that era. This would also explain the conceit of the dance sequence having multiple set-ups, but treated as continuous action - that same kind of cheating has regularly appeared in classic "backstage" musicals and dramas.

I think I understand what you're saying here: essentially, that the film Hail, Caesar! itself is a pastiche of the kind of "squeaky-clean, or sweep it under the rug" 50s attitudes. I have to say though, that I don't see a clear enough indication that it is the direction the Coen brothers have chosen to take. In the first place, the actual history of this era of Hollywood, and the attitudes that go with it, is lost on most of the Coen brothers' audience. It would be quite naive for the Coen brothers to assume that their average viewer today knows much at all about the blacklist, about the golden age of the singing-and-dancing musical, or about Gene Autry cowboy movies (the Gene Autry movie parody was extraordinarily crude, and pretty painful to watch––here the Coen brothers were straining extremely far in order to telegraph a parody of a kind of film that was at its height nearly 70 years ago, and which is largely available to contemporary viewers in the far back alleys of Youtube). Viewers coming to the film are for the most part relying upon the Coen brothers to illuminate an era and a history for them. They won't be able to wink and nod along with the Coens because they don't have the historical information at their fingertips; and the Coen brothers have to know this. If they don't, then they're assuming that their average viewer knows a lot about the inner workings of the Hollywood studio system of the 1950s. That's a huge assumption, and it couldn't possibly hold up to any scrutiny.

In the second place you're suggesting that the Coen brothers made their whole movie in a deliberatly archaic style, in order to communicate their post–ironic detachment from whatever comes out of their characters' mouths. But I don't think Hail, Caesar! has been made with that degree of self-conscious retro flair. Whenever we follow characters in their casual moments, out of view of film cameras, the film feels stylistically like any other Coen brothers movie. You can lift the scene in the editing room, or the dating scenes between Hobie and Carlotta, or the shock-cut scenes of twin Tildas following each other around right out of Hail, Caesar! and drop them into Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Intolerable Cruelty, Barton Fink, The Ladykillers, or any other standard Coen brothers movie, and they would fit right in in terms of editing, camera style, and narrative approach. Nothing about Hail, Caesar! has been altered from the usual Coen recipe in order to express the level of self–conscious irony that you're talking about. I don't think there's any evidence that they've made that attempt, beyond in the color–timing of the film and the cloying but especially spare narration. Naive narrative styles are not new to the Coen brothers films, either, and they didn't came across to me here as part of a larger attempt at a 50s filmmaking style.

Spoiler

The idea that the left-leaning screenwriters smugly proclaim they sneak communist propaganda into mainstream entertainment sounds like something a paranoid McCarthy-ite would write into a screenplay about the Hollywood Ten - again, potentially how a mainstream Hollywood product of that era might have addressed the issue if doing so head-on (which never happened in the 50s, of course).

This is the point that really made me gag while I was watching, and I think it's the actually the clearest indicator that the Coen brothers have no idea what the blacklisted writers were about. They seem to think that the Hollywood Ten were an organized, coordinated cell of communist agents, on a campaign to secretly create and disseminate "red" propaganda. This has been disproven again and again, through testimony, through biographical research, and so on. The Coen brothers aren't the only people in America still suggesting that the blacklisted writers were communist agents, but the extreme right–wingers that posit this view are a group with their own ultra-conservative revisionist history of the United States, who hold this view in the face of solid proof that they're mis-informed. While it is weird that the Coen brothers, presumably pretty smart people, would buy into this way of thinking, I don't see anything like the suggestion that they are doing so as a put-on. I had to read your explanation of how that scheme might have worked several times before I understood it. As a joke, it's far too convoluted for mainstream audiences. If their goal was to make fun of reactionary conservatism of the 50s, why go so far as to invent the extreme edge of this fantasy and realize it on screen? Wilkerson and McCarthy didn't even go this far at the time––it wasn't suggested that Dalton Trumbo or Abraham Polonsky were meeting Soviet submarines off the coast of Malibu, getting instructions from spies on what to write. Why damage that history further by suggesting not only that the Hollywood Ten were communists, but that they were a cell who had been purposefully writing propaganda into popular movies? It's an extraordinary stance to take. It'd be interesting to entertain anyone who thought they were able to analyze the communist propaganda content in any of the blacklisted writers' films. Try Force of Evil, even. Illuminate the specifically procommunist content. There's a film that suggests the ways in which the American economic system is rigged, sure. But when in the film does anyone suggest collective ownership is the way to overcome these problems? It's never even implied. Why then make that jump, and identify the content of the films as Soviet propaganda? Why do the Coen brothers assume that propagandistic content is there?

My problem here is that the assertion of collusion, conspiracy and espionage, besides being gauche rather than funny, is ostensibly damaging to our fragile sense of our own American history. If this is intended as a joke, then the filmmakers are rather too casually suggesting what amounts to a really irresponsible fantasy. At what point does the casual viewer, largely ignorant of the specifics of the Hollywood blacklist, simply assume that the Coen brothers must be right about the historical particulars that they're presenting to us? It's perhaps the same problem John Ford fans repeatedly dismiss in the films where he, subconsciously or self–consciously, chooses to print the legend over the facts. The blacklist was a tragedy of American intolerance, and proof that we don't always handle dissent with the equanimity of our ideal, and whether in joke or in seriousness, the Coen brothers have muddled the crucial facts of the case. I think they believe the version of events they're putting forward, but even if it is a joke, then it goes too far in the wrong direction.

[knives]

Why should the audience's ignorance matter in terms of the parody?

[matrixschmatrix]

I meqn, I think the absurd over the top quality of the way the reds are treated is fairly strong evidence that it's meant to be parodic- it's the most paranoid fantasy imaginable, but simultaneously treated with their consistent take on humanity as flawed and comically stupid. It's odd, like a parody of a parody, and thus hard to place

[feihong]

Why should the audience's ignorance matter in terms of the parody?

Because the Coen brothers are populist filmmakers. They're making Hail, Caesar! to entertain a mass of people. They're also mis-informing that mass audience. If parody excused anachronism out of hand, why isn't Hail, Caesar! filled with modern cars and street lamps, modern extras, etc.? The rules to how the parody works in the minds of the spectators are much more complicated than what you're making them out to be. And by presenting a level of historical fidelity in the film––admittedly not handled with the degree of assiduous detail I would have preferred––the filmmakers are making a pact with the audience that they have taken pains to ensure that part of what they're seeing is historically reliable. But we don't have indicated for us just precisely what parts of the film are reliable in the historical sense, and what parts are fantasy or exaggeration.

And this isn't a case like Inglourious Basterds, where the the movie A) foregrounds the idea that film about war is inherently propagandistic in nature, and inherently full of lies and half-truths, repeatedly referring back to this idea throughout its run-time, and then B) self–reflexively implies that the film we're watching is part of that same matrix, and thereby unreliable about history, and then C) proceeds to gleefully demolish history in favor of brutal film fantasy. Hail, Caesar! presents a warts-and-all backstage drama (though the warts presented aren't terribly severe blemishes, as they could have been), but its comments on the veracity of what is being put to film at Capitol Pictures are decidedly unclear. The Hollywood Ten stand-ins say they have been inserting propaganda into the pictures they are writing, and the remark passes casually, as part of the drama. The Coen brothers don't call attention to the line, question it, or foreground the issue of the objective truth presented in their film. The scene with the various religious leaders presenting their differing takes on the bible picture goes more towards presenting the different religious views as a sort of "tower of babble," and towards underlining the joke that the supposedly enlightened religious thinkers are enraptured by the same things the audience is enraptured by––the stars attached, the possibility for excitement in the chariot race, etc. There is the suggestion in this scene that the notion of biblical fidelity in the script be simply discarded as a notion, but this scene doesn't go as far towards creating that self-reflexive loop as Inglourious Basterds does in its endless recapitulation its challenge to realism. In this scene the Coen brothers do imply that the point of film is entertainment, and that you shouldn't expect source fidelity in a film script––but that is A) a naive view of how the film image works on our minds and imaginations and B) they're talking about fidelity in adapting the bible, which, as I've implied in previous posts, I view as a work of fiction. The biblical epic Capitol Pictures is filming is an adaptation of a fiction, whereas the Coen brothers are loading their own film with history and with quasi-history. The muddle of what part of the history is accurate and what is made up is not explicated by this scene, and the Coen brothers approach to their historical material is not put into perspective or relief by the discussion that takes place in the scene. Nor is it resolved anywhere else during Hail, Caesar!, as far as I can see. In the case of the Hollywood Ten, this is history which I think it's intensely insensitive to play fast and loose with. It's not as if Inglourious Basterds denies the tragedy of the holocaust––indeed, the concept of the film–based Jewish avenger, birthed retroactively in the imagination of filmmakers, is an implicit acknowledgement of the tragic real events that provide source and meaning for that creative choice.

What's more, if the Hollywood Ten stand-ins presented in Hail, Caesar! are not actually a parody of the Hollywood Ten, but in fact a parody of a conservative's impression of the Hollywood Ten...well, we never see the conservative whose impression that might be. There really is no anticommunist activist in the film. No language in the film is delivered from that stance. No one in the film is even anxious about the presence of a "red writer's room" up the California coastline. That paranoid rightist perspective is never presented to us within the film. So how is the movie a parody of that outlook?

[knives]

Because they didn't want to include modern cars. It's fine to criticize the film for what it is (and I think most of the other arguments put forth so far do), but saying that it should go the furthest in its anachronism because it features some anachronisms whether accidental or intentional is not. Also you're presupposing that the Coens see themselves as the type of populist you are accusing them of. Even if being populist meant some obligation to limiting yourself like you are suggesting who is to say that the Coens intend to be such. They're under no obligation to consider the dumbest people who could reasonably watch their films. If that was the case then your defense of Ingloriuos Basterds wouldn't matter since it is possible somebody could see the film and not know how Hitler died and misunderstand your ABCs.

Matrix and even Dom have already presented good arguments for why the rest of your post isn't sound.

[feihong]

Because they didn't want to include modern cars. It's fine to criticize the film for what it is (and I think most of the other arguments put forth so far do), but saying that it should go the furthest in its anachronism because it features some anachronisms whether accidental or intentional is not. Also you're presupposing that the Coens see themselves as the type of populist you are accusing them of. Even if being populist meant some obligation to limiting yourself like you are suggesting who is to say that the Coens intend to be such. They're under no obligation to consider the dumbest people who could reasonably watch their films. If that was the case then your defense of Ingloriuos Basterds wouldn't matter since it is possible somebody could see the film and not know how Hitler died and misunderstand your ABCs.

Matrix and even Dom have already presented good arguments for why the rest of your post isn't sound.

I think you're approaching this film from a very different direction than I am, and I'm sorry if I offended you––I had thought we were arguing in a generally friendly way, albeit sharing some passionate feelings. But I guess my retort came off as kind of snippy, or dismissive. I really didn't intend that––and I have seen my particular writing style give offense before where none was intended. Honestly, if I could figure out a way to fix that, I would. The Coen brothers can certainly make any kind of decision they want in terms of the film they make. But thinking of the film as a communication system, what people interpret from it has value, too. No question that the film presents a parody. In bringing up Inglourious Basterds, I'm intending to draw a comparison that points to the degree to which the different films delineate for their audience their various fidelities vis a vis history. I think Basterds signposts its departure into fantasy in key ways that are available to analysis, and I don't think Hail, Caesar! makes its departure from history as clear. I'm trying to suggest that parody might not be an excuse for historical inaccuracy on some levels. I'm not suggesting that the Coen brothers take their parody to the extreme of , say, Fassbinder's Die Niklashauser Fart; I'm suggesting in a sense that they aren't taking their film to that extreme because there are subconscious rules they're assigning themselves that dictate how their film narrative works. And if there are those rules they're establishing for themselves, then I'm free to pick around in them and find faults with them. What narrative rules they've established which I think are important, what narrative rules I think they should have established, what narrative rules are even apparent in the text––to me this is part of film criticism, and worth discussing.

As to whether the Coen brothers see themselves as populist filmmakers, I don't see how they could really be in the business of the kind of broad comedy they often offer without making those considerations of their audience. That doesn't mean they're exclusively speaking to the dumbest members of their viewership, and I wasn't implying that. I'm saying that as populist filmmakers, they're trying to reach out to an audience, communicate with it, make an exchange; part of that exchange is laughter, but in the Coen brothers case they are often making period-dated material, too, which draws to one extent or another on history. This film picks up on some history but also makes a lot of fantasy with historical and semi-historical pieces to it. I just wish the particular history they had chosen to feature included what I view as a more responsible attitude towards the Hollywood blacklist––specifically around this point: the film implies the blacklisted authors were like a cabal. A silly cabal, true, but one that was nevertheless an organized political action group devoted to propaganda and cloak-and-dagger missions. The film suggests that the writers were actively disseminating Soviet propaganda into their work. It may very well be that the Coen brothers thought first of a conservative's picture of a worst-case-scenario, and then thought, "wouldn't it be funny if the Hollywood Ten characters were actually Soviet spies, like the McCarthyists thought they were?" But for me that assumption crosses a line that I would never want to cross, were I in their position. That's where my problems with the film begin. My worry that people will interpret the film as fact rather than fancy comes from the way the era itself is slipping into legend. I'm 37. Peers I meet barely understand what happened during the era of the Hollywood blacklist. These aren't uneducated people, but the incident is far in the past and for a lot people it seems to have little pertinence in their lives. And the content of films set in the past, though period accuracy in the movies is no kind of exact science, is one of the ways in which we inform ourselves about the nature of our less-accessible histories. How many of us, when asked to think about the Roman empire, have pictures in our minds of the Romans which come from movies we've seen? I picture images from everything from Fall of the Roman Empire to Gladiator, to Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar. When I picture Vincent Van Gogh, I see those paintings which I have seen in galleries, but also Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life. I hear the Don McClean song in my head, and I can picture the posters where I've seen Tim Roth and Jacques Dutronc as Van Gogh. It's an act of imaginative recreation, but I don't think we always identify it as such, and separate it from our ideas of history that we've received from more reliable sources. I'm not saying we have to do so at every turn, but when you're dealing with an issue that's sensitive for people, it might be apropos to consider the level of impact your creative choices can make. I'm saying that, though I recognize the Coen brothers film to be some kind of parody, I don't feel as if I can give it carte blanche to mess around in the particular arena the Coens want to mess around in. In the end, all I'm expressing is a personal reaction to the film. I'm trying to explain my misgivings I felt as I watched. I don't think I was ever trying to make any empirical points for or against the movie––it's just a personal impression. I didn't get the sense that Matrix or Domino were trying to take my argument apart so much as present their own impressions of the film and some of the points we raised in discussion, but maybe they were? I can be a very naive reader, I believe. At any rate, I'm afraid I haven't seen the point where my argument begins taking on water.

[matrixschmatrix]

I don't know that I disagree that the movie is ultimately irresponsible, I guess the word would be- honestly, I came out of it feeling not great over it, since Communism as a whole and the demonization of American Communists/leftists generally in the 50s in particular is a subject on which I think there is so much misinformation floating around, and so much of which plays specifically into the hands of people I really hate, that it is somewhat incumbent upon one to make one's deviations from history relatively clear- I am reminded of Walter Cronkite's condemnation of JFK on similar grounds (and irresponsibility of this kind is the reason I hated Gone Girl.

That said, if I can ultimately resolve in my own mind what the movie is doing, I am less worried about what effect it might have on others- particularly something that, populist or not, played to a relatively small audience of what I assume are mostly cinephiles. And ultimately, I'm not sure the Coens themselves quite knew what they were after with this one- I feel like it's fairly clear that the Soviet sub picking up a Gene Kelly-esque secret Communist, seen off by a gaggle of hapless but dedicated Communist writers, is meant to be absurd, and not meant to be taken as anything like real history. It's silly, and feels like the culmination of a joke. I'm just not sure I can quite follow the rest of the joke, nor work out how it applies to the rest of the movie.

[colinr0380]

I haven't got to Hail, Caesar! as yet but I wonder if this goes back to the debate we briefly had over Bruno Dumont a while back. I don't really think the Coen Brothers have too much of a wider interest in criticising the societies they are portraying (the settings of their films always strike me as evocative backdrops to the front of stage drama) so much as the characters within those societies. To go into this film expecting it to have a damning (or even deep) critique of McCarthyism or Hollywood as a whole seems as if it wouldn't be the best idea based on their previous form, much as expecting a scathing critique of Judaism from A Serious Man, or the divorce business in Intolerable Cruelty, or the business world in The Hudsucker Proxy, etc.

It often strikes me that the Coens are much more character focused (it could be argued to a fault, especially when 'bigger themes' are being implicitly raised and toyed with! That's perhaps why No Country For Old Men works so well, because the background is allegorical, subordinate to and supportive of the main character relationships rather than fighting with the characters for attention), and its those characters who get the mickey taken, or the fun poked at, and have to pay the price for not being fully within the society. We're often with these characters on the margins of the society, seeing the world as strange or impenetrably weird through their eyes (say Llewyn Davis or perhaps the ultimate example of Barton Fink) and they're our way into the story, but in the end they are the ones who have to change, or be destroyed, not the world around them (I'd also argue that this is why we seem closer to Willam H. Macy's comic-tragic Jerry Lundegaard than Frances McDormand's pregnant sheriff Marge Gunderson in Fargo - one is on the way out, the other is the centre of her community)

[Michael Kerpan]

The commie writer subplot did strike me as a joke -- but one that fell completely flat for me, and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I mostly enjoyed the other aspects of the film, however.

[domino harvey]

I see where feihong is coming from, though I don't think the Coens have a responsibility per se to present and preserve studio-era Hollywood for the current generation of moviegoers. I think it's fair to criticize them for how they depict the era, but I think a moral stance is misplaced for this or any Coen Brothers movie, as I don't buy any kind of active criticism on their part beyond the same ol' infantile superiority to their material that marrs the majority of their work for me

[jindianajonz]

The Coens claim, and it may well be true, that they didn't spend long studying Mannix and MGM before making Hail Caesar!. "We're not big on research," Joel Coen told Variety. "You can go down the rabbit hole really fast." The point is that classic Hollywood is a rabbit hole. The parlour game of reference-spotting in Hail Caesar! reaches a stalemate when you can't see where the truth begins and ends.

Take DeeAnna Moran, the foul-mouthed Esther Williams take-off played with such relish by Scarlett Johansson. The scandal she needs Mannix to scrub for her is that she's pregnant and unmarried, just as the real actress Loretta Young was in 1935. The solution then, as in Hail Caesar!, was a coup de theatre that pushed Mannix and MGM head of publicity Howard Strickly to the limits of their respective talents. In order to live a publicly acceptable lie, Young fled to England to give birth and then, months later in California, adopted her own baby.
...
The father of Young's baby was Clark Gable, whose name is sprinkled throughout Hail, Caesar!, perhaps as a decoy tactic, mostly in relation to a gay sex scandal that dogs Whitlock. The the fling that produces DeeAnna's pregnancy is reminiscent of another MGM affair, the fragile romance between Judy Galrnad and Vincente Minnelli, protoge and director. With these biographical deflections Hail, Caesar! resists the status of biopic or even expose, and reminds us that even Loretta Young wasn't Loretta Young- her first name was Gretchen. Just as Judy Garland wasn't Judy Garland but Frances Gumm....

Thanks to Mannix, in Hail Caesar!, the barrier between reality and cinematic artifice slips.

[matrixschmatrix]

That's a critique that's been following them for years, certainly, but up until this one, I haven't thought it applied to much of their recent work-Inside Llewyn Davis, A Serious Man, and No Country for Old Men all strike me as intensely sincere works, in their way, and True Grit is as constrained and traditional (in the best way) a piece of entertainment as they've ever made. Even Burn After Reading, which I know some people loathed, seemed like they had a very clear idea of what they were doing, and while the entire movie is a dark, cruel farce, it has a coherent worldview and one that feels invested-in.

I think, though, that for this one I can see where it comes from- it's as thought they made an Intolerable Cruelty that wasn't actually particularly fun, and which got into thematic elements that the flipness of tone felt more out of place for. Then too, there's been a longstanding idea that the Coens are secretly very conservative (in the political sense) filmmakers, which I've never really bought- a movie like No Country explodes one's yearning for a simpler past and any sense of the possibility of a well ordered world faster than it induces the kind of terror that makes you yearn for one, and I think if they do have an overall political viewpoint it's a sort of humanist absurdism, a nihilism leavened by a genuine affection for their weirdos and a sense of overall balance. This movie, though, seemed to have that affection mostly only ironically, except perhaps for Hobie, and Hobie is more a collection of tricks and folksiness than a fully realized character.

[domino harvey]

With these biographical deflections Hail, Caesar! resists the status of biopic or even expose, and reminds us that even Loretta Young wasn't Loretta Young- her first name was Gretchen. Just as Judy Garland wasn't Judy Garland but Frances Gumm....

It does what now?

[jindianajonz]

With these biographical deflections Hail, Caesar! resists the status of biopic or even expose, and reminds us that even Loretta Young wasn't Loretta Young- her first name was Gretchen. Just as Judy Garland wasn't Judy Garland but Frances Gumm....

It does what now?

My take away is that the blend between fact and fiction in the movie parallels the way classic Hollywood turned people into stars, or rather stories. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's the closest I've seen to making sense of the whole communist subplot: It's not about rightwing paranoia as much as attempting to turn the mundane into something more compelling and dramatic.

At the very least I think the quote makes clear that educating the public about the blacklist was not even on the Coen's radar.

[Beloved Aunt]

I agree that the film has nothing coherent to say about the studio system--the studio system, if i recall, isn't even in the movie, really? Like, Eddie Mannix is the studio, and that's it? Incoherence is nothing new for the Coens, but not having an assholish pretentious panache with which to disguise this, a la Barton Fink, is. Anyway, yada yada, I didn't mind this movie and liked some aspects of it esp. the amaaaaazing photography from Roger Deakins (why no Oscar nomination?), but more importantly I thought that, while the actors were all fine (Clooney's least distinguished performance for the Coens was still pretty fun) and I like Channing Tatum a great deal, he has the sleazy charm of....everybisexualguyI'veevermet...anyway I thought the only actor in the film who successfully captured the essence of an old timey movie star was Jack Huston, and he was in the film for about a memorable two seconds, credited as "Cad in Cab", in the clip of the first fake old-timey movie Hobie stars in that we are shown, the B&W one where Hobie says "It's complicated". He was brilliant! He really got into the spirit of it, and not in an imitative way at all--he was like a genuine classic Hollywood star I'd somehow never encountered before. Why have I never seen this dude (Jack Huston) act before?

[Roger Ryan]

... Why have I never seen this dude (Jack Huston) act before?

Jack Huston (John Huston's grandson; Walter Huston's great grandson) gave a magnificent performance in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire playing a character whose disfigurement in World War I results in his wearing a mask over half his face. I predicted much bigger things for the actor, but it doesn't seem like he's gotten a lot a great opportunities.

[Beloved Aunt]

Roger Ryan, that sucks! It's always depressing when a talent you're really invested in doesn't take off the way one wants them to. I'll have to check out Boardwalk Empire now--I'm mostly too lazy to invest myself in watching anything but neo-noirs anyway!

Come to think of it, the other performances in Hail, Caesar! were okay but they mostly weren't masterful and forceful the way they are in most of the Coen bros' films. I wonder why?