The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
The Coen Brothers have occupied a weird little world of their own for a long time now, making movies that are motivated by some kind of damaged clockwork mechanism that we can't see. All we see is the surface, which generally consists of weird and sometimes frightening behavior that is sometimes endearing (FARGO, BLOOD SIMPLE) and often just weird and off-putting (MILLER'S CROSSING).
THE HUDSUCKER PROXY is a high-end Coen production, with big, bold sets and broad-screen cinematography in the service of nothing much in particular. It's like the cinematic version of a shaggy dog story, somehow, and the goofy voice-over narrations and the non-plot only hammer home the point.
The film takes place in an Art Deco New York of the Fifties, a world of giant boardrooms and snappy hats, where the monolithic Hudsucker Corporation makes jillions of dollars making... something. But all is not well. After the most recent declaration of record-busting profits, the president of the company hops up on the boardroom table and leaps out the window and falls what looks like half a mile before finally going splat.
This scene, which was hinted at by dozens of people before I finally saw the movie, is a good indicator of how the movie works -- or does not work. It consists of a single visual moment with no real payoff. At first I thought this was just an aberration, but the whole movie unfolds like that. It's a series of visual setups in search of a story. Another scene, for instance, has the old fuddy-duddies in the boardroom laughing at someone's wisecrack. They laugh. And laugh. And laugh. And laugh, until all possible patience and perspective has been drained out of the moment and all we're left with is weird behavior.
Eventually a plot accrues from all of this material. The new dark horse in the company (played by Paul Newman), takes hold and sticks an incompetent mailman (Tim Robbins) into the top slot, hoping to drive stock prices down. Unfortunately, the kid has an invention in mind -- actually, a whole slew of them -- and soon the company is making recordbreaking profits all over again. But that was about it. I was absorbed after the first half hour, amused by the first hour, and then everything after that was me checking my watch.
Why? Because the story never really elicits our interest on any other level other than the superficial. It is, as they have said, all style and no substance. It's like the guy who tells you a really funny joke today and then is offended when you're not still laughing a week from now. It does show that the Coens are very comfortable manipulating visual cliches for short-term payoff, and there are some scenes that are hilarious -- I liked Jennifer Jason Leigh's character, who is clearly modeled after the heroines in the screwball comedies of the Thirties.
But the Coen brothers are also capable of making us care deeply about all their characters, as they did with FARGO -- which makes this movie seem all the more calculated and humorless in comparison.
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