- THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
With Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Charles Durning, John Mahoney, Jim True, and William Cobbs.
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The only other lowly Hudsucker employee who shares some of Moses’ metaphysical nature is a bald, white, cadaverous figure named Aloysius. Clearly signifying Death, he paints the names on the doors of the executive offices whenever someone moves up or down the corporate ladder. When Moses stops the clock and saves Barnes’s life, Aloysius gets in a fist fight with him in order to get the clock started again and send Barnes crashing to his death–to become, as one character noted of Hudsucker after his leap, “abstract art on Madison Avenue.” But when the clock does start up again, Barnes doesn’t crash to his death or become abstract art when he hits the pavement. Why should he? After all, this is a Coen brothers movie, where anything can happen. And however formalistic their aims may be, the Coen brothers show about as much interest in abstract art as they do in the period when this movie is supposed to be taking place, 1958 and 1959.
I suppose I wouldn’t be this exasperated if the Coens didn’t keep expressing more contempt for period verisimilitude from one picture to the next–from the anachronistic dialogue in Miller’s Crossing, set in 1929, to the needlessly demeaning caricatures of Clifford Odets and William Faulkner in Barton Fink, to the depiction of 1958 here, where people dress in 30s clothes and go to 40s diners while speaking every which way. If cartoony silliness was their aim, why couldn’t they have looked at 50s cartoons a little more and 30s and 40s comedies a little less?
What we have, in short, is the plot of a standard rags-to-riches Hollywood comedy, assuming there is such a thing. The Coen brothers evidently make this assumption, but is it justified? Most reviews of The Hudsucker Proxy that I’ve seen claim that the movie derives from the comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, and the assumption in this case appears to be that Frank-Capra-and-Preston-Sturges is a single homogeneous unit–a form of mental shorthand that demeans the singularity and value of both directors. Throwing them together as if they were interchangeable obscures the fact that Sturges’s cynicism and absurdism are in part responses to Capra’s optimism and sentimentality, and the fact that these filmmakers had different things to say about American life and said them in appreciably different styles, from the point of view of writing as well as directing.
And the 50s, the ostensible period of The Hudsucker Proxy? Well, there are a few nice moments when a crooner something like Dean Martin (Peter Gallagher) sings “Memories Are Made of This,” and a few brief appearances by men in white coats carrying a straitjacket and a butterfly net, recalling 50s cartoonish notions of insanity, along with a couple of labored psychiatry gags that are about as amusing as one executive’s abortive suicide attempt (he collides with Plexiglas: ain’t that a riot?). We also get an awkward cameo from “Dwight D. Eisenhower” and a detailed fantasy about the creation of the hula hoop (“You know–for kids”). Otherwise this movie might as well be taking place on the moon.
