The Hudsucker Proxy stars Tim Robbins as Norville Barnes, a grinning dolt from Muncie, Indiana, who gets a job in the mailroom of New York's Hudsucker Industries just as the company's disturbed founder, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), goes ape and hurls himself from a 40-story office building window. ("That's 41 stories, counting the mezzanine," says a board member.)
As the late founder's right-hand man, Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman), says, "Waring Hudsucker is abstract art on Madison Avenue." The company needs a new figurehead A preferably one so stupid that he won't interfere with Mussburger's nefarious plan. Clearly, Norville is his man. He hopes the heartland rube's brainless stewardship will drive the value of Hudsucker stock straight into the sewer, where Mussburger and his pals can snap it up for a song. But a couple of complications gum things up: Norville's invention of the hula hoop, which, a la The Producers, unexpectedly becomes a national phenomenon; and a resourceful investigative reporter named Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh, doing a smashing Rosalind Russell impression), who goes undercover at Hudsucker to expose the cabal's scam.
But as always with the Coens, plot is subservient to atmosphere and mood and look. The real stars of this overlong but energetic movie are the photography, the sets, and the special effects, which compress a half-century's worth of gothic gigantism and Art Deco oppressiveness into 90 minutes of screen time. The movie's real theme is how old movies influence the way we imagine the past, and how the clarity and power of those imaginings can make the past seem positively mythic A or at the very least, more interesting than the present.
The titanic offices and factory interiors and ballrooms A as well as the grotto-like restaurants and bars on display (nobody in this movie has a home life) A make even the film's most Machiavellian characters seem hilariously petty. Sidney J. Mussburger might fancy himself the devil incarnate, but when you see him in the context of his airplane-hangar-sized office, he's more like a devilled egg. One piece of tile falling from that 100-foot-high ceiling could squash him. And Hudsucker Industries would quickly learn to get along in his absence. The industrial revolution created this nightmarishly overscaled world A a world that's rapidly approaching the point where it will no longer need human beings at all. Not since Chaplin's Modern Times have conveyor belts and message tubes and huge gears seemed so frightening. Norville survives so effortlessly in their presence precisely because he's too stupid to realize how much danger he's in.
For a decade now, detractors have been saying that the Coen brothers make ornate, passionless, jack-in-the-box movies A that they're more interested in raiding the visual splendors of film history and technique than telling emotionally accessible stories about likeable human beings. Now even the Coens' staunchest defenders are agreeing with this assessment. They've revised their past opinions of the Coens and labeled The Hudsucker Proxy an overbudgeted, underwritten botch A the kind of mistake that can negatively color filmgoers' perceptions of a whole career.
For a number of reasons, this is hooey. First, so many American filmmakers are so profoundly disinterested in developing a consistent style or theme or look (see Ron Howard, for instance) that the very presence of the Coen brothers in your local multiplex is cause for celebration. Second, if fiendishly elaborate, puzzle-box extravaganzas like Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Barton Fink A movies that shift and change and deepen with repeated viewings A don't qualify as passionate, then what sorts of films do?
At their best, the Coens' films completely envelop you, transporting you back in time A or more accurately, sideways, into a freakish alternate universe where contemporary ideas collide with old-movie characters and conventions. Even The Hudsucker Proxy A the least unified and most comedically hit-and-miss movie the Coens have yet produced A boasts images that rival the best of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton, and lines of dialogue so sly ("An expose!" suggests Amy's editor, "J. Edgar Hoover A crimebuster or pantywaist?") and evocative ("On this sad day in 1957, Waring Hudsucker merged with the infinite") that they trounce almost everything else being written for movies today.
Finally, the Coens have never called themselves sentimentalists, and Lord knows they've never wanted to be loved. They're satirists and ironists, adopting a godlike perspective, setting archetypal characters inside gorgeous mazes constructed out of bits and pieces of popular art (film-noir shadows, silent movie slapstick routines, comic-book compositions), and watching them squirm around like ants who would easily devour one another if luck and fate didn't keep mucking up their nasty little plans. If a preference for wit and irony over emotion is proof that an artist is irrelevant, then Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Dorothy Parker, Luis Bu*uel, Salvador Dali, Stanley Kubrick, and the Marx Brothers -- whose acidic, prankish world views echo throughout the Coens' movies -- would have faded from America's collective unconscious long ago.
What damages The Hudsucker Proxy more than anything else is that the raw material from which it was constructed doesn't jibe with the Coens' sensibilities. Frank Capra and Preston Sturges didn't shy away from irony or darkness, but they didn't wallow in them, either. Their world views were optimistic; they had faith in the little guy and in the essential goodness and decency of the world that produced him. The Coens don't. Which is why, when Norville becomes the recipient of eleventh-hour divine intervention, and the movie falls blessedly silent as honest-to-goodness "magic" enters to save the day, it's hard to be carried away by the wonder of it all, because you keep hearing a weird, annoying sound inside your head -- the sound of two brothers snickering.
I guess you can't escape your origins. How else to explain why former-sitcom-powerhouses-turned-movie-directors (Garry Marshall, Penny Marshall, Henry Winkler, Rob Reiner) make movies that are brimming with sharp jokes, good intentions, and human warmth, but ultimately feel like nothing more than really good TV shows? Ron Howard's The Paper is a perfect case study. Co-written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way) and his brother Stephen, a former newspaper reporter and a current Time editor, it follows 24 hours in the life of a brawling big-city tabloid perpetually on the brink of collapse.
All the timeworn newspaper movie stereotypes are in place -- including the supercompetent metro editor (Michael Keaton), his bean-counting boss (Glenn Close), the paper's vaguely thuggish publisher (Jason Robards), and the slump-shouldered, gruff-yet-tenderhearted, I'm-too-old-for-this editor in chief (Robert Duvall). The film invents a few new stereotypes, too A the best of which are the street-savvy Latina cop reporter (Roma Maffia), the panicky neophyte photographer (Amelia Campbell), and the half-nuts, half-brilliant investigative-reporter-turned-Jimmy Breslinish city columnist (Randy Quaid, whose early Eighties wardrobe, lanky body, high forehead, and mean little eyes suggest Frankenstein's monster reincarnated as a burned-out high school teacher).
The Paper starts slowly, introducing its major plot thread (two black kids are wrongfully arrested for the murder of two whites -- can the fourth estate find out what really happened?) and layering it with sharp details. I especially liked how the grungy, cigar-puffing, unionized press room guys refuse to take last-minute orders from anybody below the rank of God, and the editors' wiseguy banter about what makes a good tabloid headline ("Just once, can we run one without an exclamation point?"), and some great throwaway lines ("All," intones Duvall, "of this newspaper's columnists...need...to...shut...the fuck...up!").
After an hour or so, the picture picks up steam and threatens to turn into something special A the most playful yet thoroughly adult movie of Howard's career and a fine newspaper flick. Then it lapses into depressingly familiar sitcom tics A cutesy confessions, love-me monologues, overdone slapstick, and dreadfully forced visual metaphors. (The climactic sequence, which intercuts the production of a morning newspaper with the birth of a child, is the strongest argument in favor of studio interference I've seen recently.)
This is a movie that can't make up its mind what it wants to be -- a drama, a comedy, a farce, an urban epic, a satire, a cop thriller, a domestic melodrama. The movies that The Paper uses as source material at least picked one or two very distinctive objectives and chased them with vigor, and their directors didn't feel threatened by the prospect that viewers might have to struggle to keep up. (The dialogue in Deadline, USA and His Girl Friday and Sweet Smell of Success zips by so fast, and conveys so much information, that trying to digest it all can give you an adrenaline high.)
Worse is the movie's condescending attitude. Everything is underlined twice. Howard and the brothers Koepp apparently don't trust viewers to grasp anything without help; they must believe we're incapable of figuring out that a character has just done something crazy or unethical or noble unless they highlight it with swelling music or transparently "chaotic" camerawork or a noxious speech. After a while, the whole enterprise doesn't even feel like a really good TV show any more. It feels like a show you'd rave about to friends on first viewing, then keep forgetting to tape.
