by Brendan Foley
Cinapse Pick of the Week
Exactly what it sounds like, the Pick of the Week column is written up by the Cinapse team on rotation, focusing on films that are past the marketing cycle of either their theatrical release or their home video release. So maybe the pick of the week will be only a couple of years old. Or maybe it’ll be a silent film, cult classic, or forgotten gem. Cinapse is all about thoughtfully advocating film, new and old, and celebrating what we love no matter how marketable that may be. So join us as we share about what we’re discovering, and hopefully you’ll find some new films for your watch list, or some new validation that others out there love what you love too! Engage with us in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook! And now, our Cinapse Pick Of The Week…
The Coen Brothers have made better films than The Hudsucker Proxy, but none are as underrated.
Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and No Country for Old Men are all acknowledged masterpieces, hugely inspirational pop culture bombs that still resonate to this day. And while pictures like The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink confounded folk at the time, they’re now highly esteemed cult classics that occupy high positions in the annals of many a Coen fan.
Shit, man, even The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty attract more discussion. The Ladykillers! That’s the movie where J. Jonah Jameson has Irritable Bowel Syndrome and that’s literally the only memorable thing about that character and that’s the only even vaguely funny character in the movie.
No, the only other Coen Bros. film that feels as undervalued as The Hudsucker Proxy is A Serious Man, and that film at least got a Best Picture nomination and launched Michael Stuhlbarg to his current character actor ubiquity.
And, honestly, I can see why. The Hudsucker Proxy is a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1940s (think Howard Hawks/Frank Capra), but shot through with the propulsive visual energy of Terry Gilliam, Fritz Lang, and the Fleischer Superman cartoons. Add on that it’s a PG ‘family’ film starring all adults in a highly complex plot involving stock margins (and they didn’t even think to add in a monkey to lighten the load, a la Speed Racer. Monkeys make stock exchanges so much more interesting) with gleefully obtuse chains of language and logic, set in super-exaggerated magical-realist period New York City — oh, and just for good measure this family film opens with the hero getting ready to kill himself.
And all that convolution and abstraction is in service of a story about the invention of the hula hoop. Box office bonanza, this was never going to be.
In conception, The Hudsucker Proxy feels more like a prank or a dare than a movie. It sounds like the kind of thing a frustrated auteur would mockingly pitch to troll execs after hearing an endless recitation of superhero movies, or like the kind of laughable fake movie that the assholes in an Aaron Sorkin show would talk about. “Hey did you hear about how the Coen Brothers were making that movie about the invention of the hula hoop?” Shut up, Aaron Sorkin.
But in practice, The Hudsucker Proxy is absolute magic, a rollicking fable that gleefully trolls its own genre and premise even as it hits every prescribed beat. It’s an acidic love letter to the tradition of Capra, one hand clapping him on the back while the other makes the jerk-off sign.
If you don’t know, The Hudsucker Proxy is the story of Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a Middle American rube who heads to the Big Apple with a dreams of hitting it big. Turns out, NYC doesn’t give even the slightest of shits about him or his ambitions, and so Norville is relegated to a low-level job at Hudsucker Industries, an impossibly gigantic conglomerate whose eternally vague purpose is one of the film’s sneakiest jokes.
On the same day that Norville starts work, Hudsucker founder and president Warren Hudsucker shocks his entire board by committing suicide in front of them. Determined to buy up key stock, sinister fat cat Sydney Mussburger (played by actual deity-wrapped-in-skin Paul Newman) concocts a plan to have the company temporarily run by a moron (Norville) so prices will go down and the board can buy up the stock at reduced rate and seize control of the company.
Into this mix comes Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a hard-nosed and fast (and I mean fucking fast) talking reporter who smells a scoop and dives into the fray, determined to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
That’s the ‘what’ of the film, but what a plot synopsis can’t get across is the feel of the thing, the sheer vibrant energy with which the Coens tackle every last scene and shot of the film. As shot by Roger Deakins, The Hudsucker Proxy establishes a New York City that may not ever have really existed, but that feels real to the collective idea of New York. As the camera weaves through the snowbound rooftops of skyscrapers and as Carter Burwell’s lush score booms over the credits, it feels like the Coens took the New York City they grew up reading about in comics or seeing in cartoons and movies and somehow wrestled it into actual reality.
That exaggerated reality is used to greatest effect in Proxy’s best scene, a sequence that is on the shortlist for best Coen Brothers scene ever. The actual invention of the hula hoop is presented as a long series of intertwining gags, all choreographed to Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.” It’s a scene that just builds and builds and builds, a gleefully satisfying mini-movie built on as fast and furious a set of set-ups and payoffs as any filmmaker has yet achieved.
The gags in this film are layered deep enough to choke a Simpsons writer, with endless variety of broad slapstick, split-second visual quips, and all of it overlapped by perhaps their wordiest screenplay. This thing, man, this script must have been three hundred pages long because the sheer tonnage of verbiage expelled in this thing is insane, and all of it has that poetic clockwork precision that so defines Joel and Ethan Coen. Their love for language has always been apparent, but it has never been as end-all, be-all as it is in the hysterical onslaught of words that is The Hudsucker Proxy.
Reigning over those words like a Viking goddess standing atop a burning fleet is Jennifer Jason Leigh, soon to be shrieking her way into America’s heart in The Hateful Eight. I’ve seen this movie several times and good Christ do I still not understand how she is able to speak this dialogue at such a machine gun clip without ever once faltering. Everyone is aces in this thing, but Leigh shows every last one of them up time and time again. She nails the tone with impossible accuracy, pinpointing both the broad archetype of her role while also finding a specificity and humanity within the character. Yes, Amy Archer is a very self-conscious riff on the classical hot-tempered, no-nonsense dame that caused so much trouble for blundering nobodies like Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart, but Leigh finds the vulnerabilities and insecurities within and pushes through to find a very real soul.
That question of soul is probably what has most held the film back from the public eye (well, that and bombing spectacularly on initial release. That’ll ding you). The Coens have a reputation for being cold and distant towards their own characters, unfeeling monsters who delight in the humiliation, degradation, and (often) mutilation of the stupid and lowly. Their detractors accuse them of being little more than sniggering children smashing model trains together, delighting in ugly, cruel destruction.
And, Ladykillers, yeah. But I’ve long thought they have a secret soft spot, those Coens, or at least, a yearning for a universe where right topples might. As truly cynical as many of their films can be, I don’t think a true cynic could give the world Marge Gunderson, or the final dream in Raising Arizona, or, you know, The Dude.
The Hudsucker Proxy is perfectly in keeping with that jaded but still beating heart. Yes they delight in beating the snot out of Norville, but there’s real joy in the way the film wraps up, with a literal Deus Ex Machina stepping in to set things right. Even if the mechanics of Proxy’s happy ending are intentionally eye-roll worthy, there’s a palpable delight to the whole proceedings, as if the Coens are gleefully throwing every single thing they can think of at the audience, unchecked by studio notes or an older filmmaker’s sense of reserve.
The Hudsucker Proxy is a love letter to cinema, to a city, and to bygone eras of style and language. So, as you ring in the New Year, do yourselves a favor and spread some love to this film.