From Peter Zander
US Stars open 66th Berlinale. George Clooney wants to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel. The opening film is a look behind the scenes of the dream factory
Berlin. This Roman dress! These concrete hairstyle! And then he wears even a sword on the belt with which he constantly gets stuck in seats. In “Hail, Caesar!” George Clooney is the shooting figure. He plays the movie star anno 1953, playing in one of those opulent monumental sandals movies, but there’s nothing glamorous about him, nothing as cool but otherwise always. If George Clooney plays along with the Coen brothers, he must always be the fool. See “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”. See “Burn After Reading”. And now in “Hail, Caesar!” “I enjoy the fact that they make fun of me,” he says himself grinning. So much self-irony is ever great.
On Thursday evening, “Hail, Caesar!” the Berlinale opened – and on the red carpet left Clooney course trendy a usual tasty safe impression. Moreover, Clooney does not just use his stay in the capital to show running, he wants a political effect: On Friday he was planning a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), he announced. He wanted to talk to her also about refugees.
Even at noon, the international jury was presented with the triple Oscar winner Meryl Streep at the top. “Although I have absolutely no idea how to run a jury,” the US actress said about her first time as a leader of a festival jury. “I was already head of other companies,” added Streep and referred to their family with four children.
On the screen, the Coen brothers presented the evening then a loving tribute to the old Hollywood, on the golden age of cinema with his then still heal Star system. It is about the everyday madness in a fictitious studio called Capitol, but rather reminiscent of MGM. And the film gives us a wonderful tour of all genres: We live an Esther Williams-like water ballet with a radiant Scarlett Johansson as a bathing beauty in, a Gene Kelly musical insert with Channing Tatum in a quietschvergnüglichen sailors choreography, and even that Bible ham which gives the whole film its name, with clear references to “the robe”, the first cinemascope film that ever came to the cinema. Clooney so as Richard Burton parody. Lauter pretty, loving number deposits louder allusions to crack it. The cinema as a separate fuel reservoir.
But the focus is not Clooney, but Josh Brolin (the star of the Coen movie “No Country for Old Men”). He plays a “fixer”, so something like the man for Hot Spots. And because there’s a lot Brenz Liges in Hollywood Babylon, he has so much to do that you ever believed that he was the Studio Boss himself. The bathing beauty Scarlett Johansson proves namely, and the camera turns off, rather than vulgar shark, it also fits hardly in their fin because a pregnancy is hard to hide yet. Therefore must be arranged in order to cover up the scandal quickly a marriage. In addition to two gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton in a excellent dual role) are prevented from dirty details of the private life of the “Hail, Caesar” to print hitmakers. At full speed the “Fixer” is but only when it is abducted. And of communist screenwriters who want to reverse the polarity of the driving force of the Capitol Studios with the “capital” of Marx to left. This is perhaps the most sinister Volte this film: that McCarthy had quite with its witch hunt against alleged communist activities in Hollywood of the 50s
Again and again succeed the Coens great deposits.. If Ralph Fiennes will teach directing a singing cowboy with increasing despair a single sentence: “If there would be but just as easy”, but this is it never faultless lips. In the end, “It’s complicated” therefrom. “Hail, Caesar!” might not be the best film of the Coens. But yet a Coen film.
Much can be learned from this work. Not only on the business itself. But also a film festival like the Berlinale. A Dieter Kosslick is somehow as a fixer, someone who keep everything in balance, which must here make for Glamour and as a last resort. The balancing act between a claim and carpet, message and conversation must succeed. There’s a “Hail, Caesar!” only times the ideal candidate for an opening film.
The fact that the opening is not a world premiere, since the film is in the US for ten days, you have to accept well. And that he has there, despite all the Stars, the weakest Theatrical Release all previous Coen movies lying down, you know now already. Would it but just as easy. But it’s complicated.
“Hail Caesar!” will start in Hamburg next Thursday in theaters
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