Directed by Joel Coen
Written by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Sam Raimi
Starring Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Charles Durning
USA, 1994
LIKE THE COBWEBS OF MY MIND
In these past few months I have seen and written about many Hollywood films and many movies that cop or pay homage to those attitudes and styles. This was not deliberate. Today, I saw yet another pastiche, 1994’s The Hudsucker Proxy. The browns in the film’s sets suggest an old-fashioned warmth but this Coen Brothers movie (co-written by Sam Raimi) possesses a repulsive frigidity and lacks interest in emotion; this is the same reason why Fargo left me out in the cold. I can barely remember the details of the surreal Barton Fink but I found that movie very appealing, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? was a successful assemblage of Great Depression images with a shimmering cast. (One thing I love about the Coen movies I’ve seen is the consistent quality of the music; this one has a solid score by the gifted Carter Burwell.) In Hudsucker, the Coens try to assert that they are auteurs; they reign over the characters and settings and plot like dictatorial urchins.
Tim Robbins’ face has this boyish quality to it, and here he plays the inexperienced Norville Barnes, who is taken for a fool and is hired to replace the president of Hudsucker Industries, who flew through the office window. The board of directors plans to make the stock of this huge company fall so low that they can buy it cheap, raise the value, and become instantaneously rich. Simple-minded Norville invents the hula-hoop and the stock skyrockets while both reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and the directors try to trip him up. The movie’s really about style but, unlike in good movies, the content fails to grow out of the style and vice versa. The Coens are trying to raise up modestly great movies and defunct formulas visually, into some stratosphere of dazzling fantasy and optical feast, but they don’t give what they present before you any working space.
The movie borrows from motifs and performances of the past: the innocent dope calls to mind Jimmy Stewart, and Ralph Bellamy in The Awful Truth, and God knows who else; Jennifer Jason Leigh’s highly enjoyable fast-talking is an obvious reference to newspaper-girl Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby; the design of a table in the Hudsucker building looks strikingly similar to the Yellow Brick Road; and some sequences even have the rhythm and whirligig motion of pre-fifties musicals. Paul Newman stars in this movie and one of his most famous films is inside the title and, according to what I’ve read in synopses (I haven’t seen the movie), his character here is just about as selfish as Hud.
This unfriendly hero-story is a visual spectacle and its surfacey textures look like they’re right out of a Batman cartoon. Supposedly this is some satire of evil business tycoons (or some lesson about business; my friend told me his teacher was showing it in class). The many attempted suicides are treated with a quickness and relative casualness reminiscent of The Apartment, only the effect is more flip and motiveless, in the Coen Brothers’ style. The notions about industry are just about as comic-strip as The Apartment too, but they’re pushed to empty extremes so the film cannot possibly teach us anything about business, and I’m sure it’s not supposed to (I’m not sure if it’s supposed to do anything). The only reason why this would be playing in high school business courses is to inspire us, like Capra, to pursue our dreams against all odds, even ignorance.
The movie doesn’t really aim to be anything more than a spectacle that nostalgically incorporates the look of several different kinds of movies; the spectacle is only slightly stunning because it doesn’t succeed in being nostalgic. How is this any different from vacuous effects showcases like the Michael Bay movies? We are always one step ahead of the script because it’s all formula writing, so the Coens play a few games with plot ornamentation. They try all sorts of tricks to help us remember it’s their film, a writer-director/auteur film: they interrupt the proceedings with a snippet of Bizet and silk trains and wraps out of Singin’ in the Rain’s sequence with Cyd Charrise; they literally stop natural time in the story. But the only things that really get us through all this are the Leigh and John Mahoney performances.
The Robbins character is thrown to the curb in terms of emotional development; he’s so darn mercurial that he goes from do-gooder to real creep almost immediately and we no longer have any sympathy whatsoever for him. We get a lot of old traditions and themes like the poor black guy and the poor white guy going at each other, and the tough, smart working girl who is repressed and really wants to be loved, but the movie is never half as fun as the classics it takes from- it’s cold-hearted, and no amount of lacquer and lighting can disguise it.
By Andrew Chan [AUGUST 8, 2001]