In the 2016 film Hail, Caeser! Jonah Hill plays the role of Joe Silverman, a surety agent and professional fall guy employed by Capitol Pictures in the 1950s. When starlet Scarlett Johansson’s DeeAnna Moran becomes pregnant without a husband to show for it, Silverman agrees to be the child’s foster parent. Silverman winds up getting ahead in the deal; Moran’s searching for a “reliable” man, and they’re married by the film’s end. Hill provides extra comedic relief in the film, focused mainly on a joke centred around when his character once served six months in prison because Capitol Pictures needed a fall guy, and he’s still working for them without question. Silverman only appears in one scene of the film, making him stand out as quite a minor character. His appearance is perhaps one of the most memorable in the film because the scene he is in focuses primarily on his character, even though the scene is used to advance DeeAnna Moran’s story. In his essay Referential acting and the ensemble cast, Ernest Mathjis closely examines the concept of referential acting and how it allows an ensemble cast to work throughout a film. According to Mathjis, “Referential acting involves the self-conscious design of a performance on the basis of a previous one, often by the same actors, but also based on archetypes, exemplary models or cliched stereotypes” (91) and that it includes “homage, quotation, and allusion” (91). Putting Mathjis’ concept into Silverman, there is a scene early on in the film where DeAnna Moran is telling somebody else that if there were a good, reliable man out there, she would have married him, and when we are introduced to Silverman, he is called “reliable” by another character in the same office as DeAnna and him, alluding to their eventual marriage at the film’s end. Ultimately, his character is used to elevate DeeAnna Moran, who is already a minor character in the film, making Silverman a minor character.
Works Cited
Mathijis, Ernest. “Referential Acting and the Ensemble Cast.” Screen, vol. 52, no. 1, 2011, pp. 89-96. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq063
Hail, Caesar!. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2016.
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