I was disappointed to see the one star accorded to The Hudsucker Proxy in your April 1 review. I quite enjoyed and appreciated the film for what it is. I thought: It’s a shame that Jonathan Rosenbaum’s rather tiresome and verbose review can’t get beyond a simplistic compendium of motifs and Trivial Pursuit style gurgitation of references to the films of Sturges and Capra and any other film he sees as obviously seminal in the “formulation” of HP.
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But then I realized that the review wasn’t, as I had been led to believe, about HP at all. Rather it’s about, or could be titled, Jonathan Rosenbaum: his ego and erudition. The Reader also seems to think that by giving Rosenbaum a lot of column inches in which to wax grandiloquent, that the reader (small r, clearly) will take him all the more Seriously.
HP is best appreciated as a film not pretending to be anything else but . . . a film. It’s wonderful in its highly styled and mannered artificiality and rich quotation from various periods and styles of film, the corresponding zeitgeist of those eras and how they have become embellished in our memories. Gosh, Rosenbaum even missed the wry 90s references to a beat juice bar and the word phat. (And a couple of facts: Norville was hired as a mail room worker, and he was pushed, did not jump, off the 45th, 44th counting the mezzanine, floor.)
