The Coen Brothers' Transcendently Nasty 1994 Cult Classic The Hudsucker Proxy is a Movie to Get Lost In
The past few years have seen the emergence of a curious new genre: origin stories for popular consumer products. 2023 alone saw the release of Blackberry, a Canadian film about the invention of the titular gizmo, Flaming Hot, a crowd-pleaser about the creation of Flaming Hot Cheetos and Air, which chronicled how Air Jordans came to be the hottest sneakers around.
These are all at least based on a true story, though in the time-test history of show-business, the filmmakers made up shit when the historical record proved insufficiently dramatic or exciting.
The Coen Brothers were way ahead of this strange, capitalism-romanticizing cinematic wave with the 1994 cult classic The Hudsucker Proxy. The Coens smart-ass tribute to screwball comedy presents a fictional origin story for the Hula Hoop, and, very briefly, the frisbee.
In this alternate history the kooky circle that captured our country’s imagination first as a fad and then as a popular toy is the invention of idiot-savant businessman Norville Barnes.
As played by Tim Robbins, Norville is a towering doofus blessed and cursed with child-like innocence. He comes to New York to make it in business but every door is shut to him until he spies an opening in the mailroom of Hudsucker Industries.
The massive corporation is rocked when founder and president Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) decides to leap out of one of the windows to a grisly death. This leaves a vacuum and nature famously abhors a vacuum.
This leads cynical bastard Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) to propose a scheme to artificially deflate the company’s stock so that they can buy it at rock bottom prices by hiring an incompetent stooge as Hudsucker’s replacement.
Sidney and the rest of the ancient opportunists settle on Norville because he seems like an ignorant rube from the sticks that they can push around and bully.
Norville may look and act like an idiot. He might also be an idiot but he’s an idiot-savant with an idea as simple as it is irresistible: a round hoop with sand inside that consumers can keep aloft through the swiveling of their hips.
It isn’t long until Hula Hoop mania sweeps the nation. All it takes is a taste of success for Norville to instantly abandon his Midwestern roots and turn into the worst kind of phony.
Norville’s naïveté makes him a juicy target for both Sidney J. Mussburger’s cynical corporate machinations and the unhinged ambition of Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a hotshot reporter who never tires of reminding her colleagues and the world of her Pulitzer Prize.
In a virtuoso turn Leigh plays the dogged journalist as the screwiest of screwball dames. She speaks at a clip a machine gun would envy but the more she learns about Norville the more she likes him.
She’s a Coen-style smart-ass who is mortified to find herself experiencing unfamiliar emotions like empathy, compassion and concern.
Norville’s rise is short and dramatic. His fall is much lengthier and even more dramatic. When the heat from Hula Hoops begins to fade the inventor/executive is dismissed as a one trick pony.
The Coen Brothers are even more merciless than usual this time around. Thanks largely to the power of super-producer Joel Silver, who is more associated with giant action blockbusters than auteurist dark comedy, the brothers managed to secure a thirty-five million dollar budget for a movie with next to nothing in the way of commercial prospects.
The film surprised no one by flopping. It’s not hard to see why. Audiences like to be able to relate to heroes. They want to root for the hero and Norville is an easily corrupted stooge who is way more likable than he has any right being due to the calf-like dewiness Robbins brings to the role, to the sense that he’s an overgrown child who acts without thinking.
In a two star contemporary review Roger Ebert wrote, “the problem with the movie is that it's all surface and no substance. Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.”
I agree with everything that Ebert wrote except that I see the film’s purposeful insincerity, cynicism and style for the sake of style as features rather than flaws.
The Coen Brothers are cynical bastards who seemingly humanity. I don’t blame them. Have you seen what humanity has been up to as of late? Not good. Not good at all.
The Hudsucker Proxy is one of their most cynical films. As Ebert complained, it is devoid of even a single moment of sincerity or earnestness. It does not make any attempt to portray its characters as flesh and blood human beings with agency and desires and souls rather than well-worn cinematic types.
This is a Coen Brothers movie, however, so the writing and the acting transcends mere caricature and stereotype.
What do the Coen Brothers believe in? They believe in the power of words. They believe in the pleasure and joy that can be derived from talking as well as listening. They believe in beauty.
The Hudsucker Proxy is gorgeous. Every frame belongs on a wall in a museum. Joel and Ethan make the most of what must have seemed like a vast fortune to them because thirty-five million dollars was a fortune back in 1994, even if it was chump change to a big macher like Silver.
The skyscraper where much of The Hudsucker Proxy takes place is a masterpiece of production design. Scenes in the mailroom boasts the deepest of deep focus. The mailroom looks impossibly vast, as if it were the size of a football stadium rather than just another floor in a building.
The corporate boardroom is a character onto itself. It’s a place for old men seemingly on the very brink of death to scheme and plot and do everything in their power to hold onto their old money rather than make way for the future.
Everything is perfectly in place here. As is almost invariably the case The Coen Brothers realize a vision at once wildly ambitious and perversely modest down to a molecular level. They know exactly what they’re doing and what effect it will have on an audience.
Like the rest of the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre, The Hudsucker Proxy angrily demands to be seen repeatedly. If you’ve only seen it once or twice you haven’t really seen it all. I’ve seen The Hudsucker Proxy five or six times at this point and I’m still finding new things to love about it.
There’s something wonderfully subversive about making a dark comedy about the evils of capitalism that is a sure-fire money-loser that also promises to alienate the masses.
The Coen Brothers’ irreverent take on the films of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges is all brain and mouth and no heart. I wouldn’t have it any other way. The Coen Brothers weren’t just good at this kind of mean-spirited comedy; they were the very best.
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