"If we had but...""

Hail Caesar! (2016) was one of the less commercially successful Coen brothers films, perhaps because it demanded too much audience familiarity with the cultural and political environment of the 1950s. It is set in a Hollywood film studio of that era and focuses primarily on the production of a Biblical epic about "the Christ." I like most of the Coen films, and I enjoyed most of this one (I'm always a fan of films in which the Coens cast George Clooney as an idiot). A month or so ago, Alan Jacobs wrote about one particular scene:

Baird Whitlock as Autolochus: This Hebrew is son of the one God, the God of this far-flung tribe. And why shouldn’t God’s anointed appear here, among these strange people, in this strange place? Here, Gracchus, in this sundrenched land. Why should he not take this form — the form of an ordinary man? A man bringing us not the old truths, but a new one.

Gracchus: A new truth?

Autolochus: A truth beyond the truth that we can see. A truth beyond this world, a truth told not in words but in light. A truth that we could see if we had but … if we had but — but —

Director: Cut. CUT! Faith. Had but faith.

Baird Whitlock: Faith. Faith! FAITH!! Goddamn! Isn’t it —

Director: They changed it. ....

Jacobs:

.... The next scene is one of the climactic scenes in the movie — both the Hail, Caesar! that he is filming and the one that we are watching. He speaks his lines very well. They are vivid words, and he gives them power. As the speech quoted above moves gathers rhetorical momentum, the people on the set sit up and take notice. The script girl, the grip, cameramen, sound men — they hear this message delivered eloquently, compellingly. Like Gracchus, they respond in their souls to this “new truth,” this promise of a beautiful revolution in their lives and in the world. “It is a truth,” Antoninus Autolochus says, “that we could lay hold of, had we but…”

“Had we but…” And then we realize that Baird Whitlock is a wonderful actor, but to him, the words he’s been given to speak are just his lines. They do not sink any deeper into his consciousness than that. He says them very well; he says them as though he means them. But he doesn’t mean them. He can’t remember what it is that would enable us to lay hold of this new truth — and indeed, the filmmakers aren’t so sure either, because when Baird learned his lines some other word had been there in place of “faith”....

As Baird Whitlock speaks, people are moved primarily by words and voice. Some screenwriter(s) wrote these words, and then Baird Whitlock says these words with conviction and eloquence. He’s an actor; he inhabits the language, and that alone is enough to draw the audience in — the audience in this case being simply the crew. But the Coen brothers play a little trick on us here, because as Baird Whitlock is speaking, we start to hear music, swelling orchestral music that undergirds and amplifies his words. But of course, that wouldn’t be audible on set — indeed, the score wouldn’t yet have been composed. ....

You get a sense that the crew are imaginatively supplying an orchestral score appropriate to the scene. And when you add that music to well-chosen words enunciated skillfully by an actor with real personal presence, well — disbelief doesn’t stand a chance, does it? .... (more)

Alan Jacobs, "If we had but faith," The Homeward Sympathy, July 1, 2026.