The Coen brothers’ 2016 film Hail, Caeser! Follows Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as he tries to navigate and solve all the problems of the actors and filmmakers at Capitol Pictures in a short amount of time. One of the problems he has to solve revolves around the character of Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich). A singing cowboy à la Kirby Grant or Dean Martin, Hobie makes a living doing really cheesy Western roles. He is more comfortable playing the guitar or doing back-flips onto horses than he is with simply saying dialogue on camera. While his role in the film is only a B-plot at best, we get to see what happens when Hollywood tries to turn this young actor into a movie star. In the film, the front office wants Mannix to “promote” Doyle from B-western star to romantic comedy leading man, much to the confusion of the eager-to-please Hobie himself and the consternation of his new, exacting director, self-styled studio auteur Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). Relative newcomer (at the time) Alden Ehrenreich sells the hell out of Hobie’s discomfort playing a role in a chamber-piece drama and taking a starlet out for dinner. He’s charming, funny, and entirely out of his element for all these scenes, making him a compelling minor character. In the Small Parts, Small Players dossier Introduction, Will Straw writes, “We may see the details of secondary performances as devices through which attention is redistributed in the film viewing experience, away from the star face and towards the extremities of bodies (like busy hands) or the sharp-edged personalities of the bit player” (80). The personality of Doyle in Hail, Caeser! is a highlight of the film and a tool to allow the plot to keep progressing without being dry. The other two characters’ storylines that Mannix has to deal with (DeeAnna Moran and Baird Whitlock) feel much more serious than Doyle’s. At the film’s core, Doyle’s story is about someone trying to fit into a new environment and be taken seriously. His scenes feel somewhat relatable, which is an excellent way to draw the audience into the film. The Coen brothers provide plenty of payoff with Doyle once the film reaches its third and final act. To sum everything up, Hobie Doyle is a minor character in this film who is quite relatable (even though none of us are movie stars) as well as a good sense of comedic relief and is someone who redistributes the attention away from the star performers, as Straw wrote.
Works Cited
Hail, Caesar!. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2016.
Straw, Will. “The Small Parts, Small Players Dossier Introduction.” Screen, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 78–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq05
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