The Coen brothers have made a career out of creating stories of the strange pasts of a parallel universe, from bootlegger square offs in Miller's Crossing to Depression-era odysseys in O Brother, Where Art Thou? With The Hudsucker Proxy, they take aim at a more classical style: the romantic comedy extravaganzas of classic Hollywood. With elements of It Happened One Night and The Philidelphia Story, the film is a call back to big budgets, big city lights, at the center of everything, an uplifting love story. It doesn't have the soft pinache of those films though, opting for a duller, grayer look and a rather tired deus ex machina that manages to push the film over the finish line.
A Short Climb To The Top
Tim Robbins plays Norville Barnes, a small town simpleton with big city dreams who can only find a job in a mail room. The same day, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) throws himself off the 45th (44th if you don't count the mezzanine) floor of the Hudsucker building, and with no will, his stock will be sold and the company will go public by the end of the year. Vice President Sidney Mussburger (Paul Newman) will never let this happen, and ends up putting the blissfully ignorant Barnes into power in order to drive the company into the ground. As Barnes takes his newly found seat of power as a chance to create his baby invention of the "hula hoop", Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) sees through the plans of Mussburger and tries to expose Barnes for the buffoon she believes he is. She becomes his secretary, and as the two begin to learn more about each other, they find new sides of themselves, and love as well, while rather omniscient characters drift in and out of their story.
Between the angels, the clockwatchers who control time, and cab drivers finishing a heavy lunch, everyone seems to have an opinion on the actual story, all of them caricatured old-tymey stereotypes. It's a shame, since the best part of the movie is the love story that blossoms between the leads. Leigh does an impecable impersonation of a fast talking Katherine Hepburn, trying to overcome sexual prejudice as she climbs her career ladder. As a lovable schmoe, Robbins is charmingly innocent, even when he becomes corrupted by the power afforded to him, not unlike something Cary Grant might have played in his hay day, had he the hair for it.
A Long Way Down
The Coen's are at their most aggressive in this film, thanks to a screenplay co-written by Sam Raimi, long time friend and director of the Evil Dead series and Spiderman series. While they do share some idiosyncracies, the combination of style feels a bit mismatched at times. Some scenes drag on far too long and others you wish you could have seen so much more of, as the filmmakers are dedicated to a single string of re-representation of an era and it's formula. For it's few pace problems and it's commitment to an old style to the point of reproducing it's shortcomings, the film has a lot of heart thanks to the consistently spectacular performances in the film. P.S. Listen for John Goodman as a news reel announcer! 2.5 out of 4
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