The Hudsucker Proxy

The Hudsucker Proxy; comedy, USA, 1994; D: Joel Coen, S: Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, John Mahoney, Jim True-Frost, Bill Cobbs, Charles Durning, Bruce Campbell, Mike Starr, Peter Gallagher, Steve Buscemi, Anna Nicole Smith

New York, 1 9 5 0s. The president of Hudsucker Industries, Mr. Waring Hudsucker, commits suicide by jumping through a window from the top of his own building. The board of directors, headed by the ruthless Sindey J. Mussburger, place the naive Norville Barnes, who just came from a province, for the new president, hoping he will ruin the company with his bad leadership, so that they can buy their stocks cheaply. But Norville proves to be more capable than they expected when he invents the Hula Hoop and draws the attention of journalist Amy who decides to spy on him, but that is discovered by Sidney who fires him. Still, when Norville jumps through the window, he is saved by the angel of Hudsucker, and thus takes over the company.

With this extremely tame, gentle and correct comedy, Joel and Ethan Coen crafted their most expensive film up to that time with a budget of 25 million $, but when it only grossed 3 million $ at the US box office, they decided never to invest so much into their nostalgic odes to golden Hollywood films. The Coens somehow always strived towards the comical, but when they made "The Hudsucker Proxy", a pure comedy, they somehow made it too artificial to be funny: the only truly laugh-out-loud part is the monumentally stylized, epically fascinating sequence at the start in which Mr. Hudsucker (Durning) is falling from the top of a very, very tall skyscraper, looking down and "waving" at people at the bottom to "move away" from the spot he will fall on, which is not only the highlight of the movie, but even arguably the best directed sequence in all of the Coens' movies. However, as a whole, even some of Coens' dramas were funnier than this film, since nothing ever comes close to the brilliance of that sequence. 

The only way to understand the brilliance is to be patient and admire the Coens' distinctive visual style, that turns this into an excellent fantasy and satire on capitalism where any new product is under massive scrutiny, equipped with their 'overhuman' authorship, while their gentle homage to classic films like "Christmas in July", "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and especially "His Girl Friday" (since Jennifer Jason Leigh is imitating Russell's madly fast talking), has some neat charm and even gives a little dose of emotions in their otherwise cold worlds. Tim Robbins is great as the naive, but lovable hero Norville, Paul Newman is also amazing, while the meticulous set design and a few virtuoso directed scenes ensures the story can be rewatched several times. The corny-silly ending doesn't work, but everything up to it does, and the Coens again display an obsessive care for details and ideas (the imprint of a wet coffee glass circle on a job advert in the newspaper; the fall and "resurrection" of the hula hoop when it is thrown on the streets, but picked up by a kid that starts playing with it, which attracts its mass appeal).

Grade:+++