Hail, Caesar! Won Over Critics and Got a C- From Audiences. Both Were Right

Here are the numbers. Hail, Caesar!, the Coen brothers' 2016 comedy about a studio fixer in 1950s Hollywood, sits in the mid-80s on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer and around 44% with audiences there. Opening-night moviegoers polled by CinemaScore gave it a C-minus, a grade usually earned by horror films where the twist is that the movie's over. It took in a little over $60 million worldwide on a budget reported around $22 million, and it was nominated for an Oscar for production design, which is the Academy's way of saying the sets were funny.

Critics loved the craft, and fair enough. Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, a weary fixer who goes to confession every day for sins like sneaking a cigarette. George Clooney plays a dim movie star who gets kidnapped by a cell of communist screenwriters, who then explain economics to him, and he comes home converted, briefly, until somebody slaps him. Channing Tatum does a full sailor tap number. Scarlett Johansson does a water ballet. Alden Ehrenreich, as a singing cowboy forced into a drawing-room drama, has a scene with Ralph Fiennes's director that's as good as anything the Coens ever shot.

So what did the audience hate? Mainly, the trailer. It sold a caper: a star goes missing, the studio scrambles, mayhem. What arrived was a string of loving parodies of old studio pictures, with the kidnapping plot treated as one errand among many on Mannix's list, somewhere between the swimsuit problem and lunch. The common complaint, then and now, is that there's no real story, and you can feel the frustration of people who bought a ticket for a heist and got a lecture on the Hollywood blacklist with musical numbers.

And the movie does take its time. The communist study group goes on, as study groups do. A key payoff involves a submarine, which is a sentence that ought to be funnier than it plays. The Coens seem far more interested in the look of a 1951 soundstage than in whether we care if Clooney gets home. For a picture about a man who solves problems, it's oddly uninterested in solving anything.

Who was right? Both, which is the most annoying possible answer, and therefore probably the true one. Critics reviewed the movie the Coens made: clever, gorgeous, a valentine to an industry that ate its young and gave them nice costumes. Audiences reviewed the movie they were sold, and they were sold something that didn't exist. When the studio's own marketing department can't tell you what your movie is about, maybe the movie should have hired Eddie Mannix.

My verdict: it's a pleasure for people who already love old Hollywood, and a long afternoon for everyone else. Critics are paid to admire the furniture. Customers just want somewhere to sit.