The Hudsucker Proxy

Joel and Ethan Coen (Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink) may indeed be the last of the great American filmmakers. Certainly, that’s the way they make their movies. Every production from the brothers plays as if it were a summation of a century’s worth of cinema. Their newest, The Hudsucker Proxy, is no exception. It borrows wildly from everywhere, and presents virtually every scene as if it were the final statement on the cosmically grim farce of big business. It has both a crazed brilliance and a sappy layer of adolescent excess. It’s the supreme over-achiever – and seems destined to a quick death at the mainstream box office.

And no wonder. The Hudsucker Proxy is so baffling it defies description. On the surface, it’s a slapstick tale about a naïve young man (Tim Robbins) who goes to work for a company whose executives tend to end their board meetings by jumping out of the windows. When the head of the firm, Warren Hudsucker (Charles Durning), takes the plunge, Robbins finds himself inexplicably propelled from the mailroom to the president’s chair. It never occurs to him that his lightning-fast rise has nothing to do with his school book savvy from the Muncie College of Business Adminstration.

Instead, his success has everything to do with the fact that he’s dumb. The board of the Hudsucker Corporation needs an idiot who can run the company into the ground, preferably before the stocks of the late Mr. Hudsucker are put on the market. The board wants to buy the stocks themselves and they want them cheap. As the second-in-command of the firm, Paul Newman carefully grooms Robbins to be the wrong man doing all of the wrong things.

The plan is a shoe-in, except that everyone has underestimated Robbins’ one good idea. And no wonder – graphically represented, it’s a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. How are the board members supposed to know that it’ll be the biggest selling gizmo of 1958?

At its surface, The Hudsucker Proxy feels like a demented retread of a Frank Capra comedy. This is impression is furthered by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s part as an undercover reporter, a part too overtly lifted from Meet John Doe. But Leigh’s weird impersonation of Katherine Hepburn is stolen from about six other films. Likewise, the movie’s verbal exaggeration is more of a throwback to the chaotic farces of Preston Sturges. Visually, the whole thing is a bizarre mishmash of Batman and Brazil.

But The Hudsucker Proxy takes seriously (sort of) its key premise that the forces of good and evil have locked into battle over the soul of one nitwit. The miracle ending of The Hudsucker Proxy is partly an inside joke – one that reveals the Coen brothers’ tendency toward metaphysical grandstanding.

But at either level, The Hudsucker Proxy is one of the best movies of the year. It’s also one of the more aggravating, especially in the way it bobs and weaves between cartoonish humor and dark rumblings about universal duplicity. But it’s worth the viewing. In fact, it’s worth several viewings.