The Hudsucker Proxy

Why don't more people love this crazy movie?

Minor spoilers

Ethan and Joel Coen are indubitably a talented set of brothers. The duo have become massively famous with movie hits such as Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski and Fargo. However, a few of their films have failed to find the kind of massive audience appreciation they expected. The Hudsucker Proxy, released in 1994, is one of these—the kind of movie about which it's almost impossible to feel ambivalence; you either love it or hate it. The strongly divided reaction to this movie has made it an underground cult favorite.

Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a wet-behind-the-ears graduate of the Muncie College of Business Administration, arrives in the Big City looking for work—just as company president Waring Hudsucker, CEO and Big Cheese (Charles Durning), makes his final dramatic exit from the top-floor company boardroom—right through a plate-glass window. Due to some company policy complications, Hudsucker Industries needs to find a proxy-president before the end of the year—someone who can inspire a panic in the stockholders, so they can lower the price of company stock and thus buy it up cheap. Norville just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and doing the wrong thing, so naturally he becomes the new company president. But Norville isn't as big of an idiot as he seems. In fact, he has a pretty revolutionary idea of his own—a special kind of toy. You know... for kids!

I'd never even heard of The Hudsucker Proxy until a few years ago, when my brother Dan described it as having some of the best lines of any movie he'd ever seen; he strongly suggested I find and watch it. I filed it away in the back of my head until just recently, when I came across a VHS copy at Hollywood Video. What I saw had me grinning and giggling with joy—a movie that starts out very black-comedy (company president, on the stroke of noon, jumps out of 44th-floor window and plummets to his death) and develops into something very different. It's witty, funny, filled with razor-sharp parody and makes very few missteps.

So if I think it's great, why do so many other people hate it?

Well, at the risk of sounding like a movie snob, I suspect that some people don't get this movie because they don't have the necessary background in film to appreciate the jokes. When working on The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen brothers and co-writer Sam Raimi wrote for an audience that was intimately familiar with American movie history and with most of the films being parodied—specifically, films like His Girl Friday, Singin' in the Rain, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It's a Wonderful Life, and numerous other classic comedies of the 1940s and '50s. This is a fair assumption to make if your audience is primarily composed of old movie buffs or film students, but unfortunately there's a large segment of the moviegoing public that refuses to watch anything filmed before the advent of Technicolor. (Hell, there's a large segment of the moviegoing public that won't watch any movie over 5 years old.) If you don't have the background in movie history, you won't understand (for example) why Jennifer Jason Leigh's character talks the way she does—it's a nice tough-gal-reporter pastiche of Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Bette Davis—nor why there's an otherwise inexplicable "love ballet" plunked into the film—it's a dig at Gene Kelly musicals, which always had at least one extraneous dance number right in the middle of the action.

Others have complained that The Hudsucker Proxy has a major writing flaw—a blindingly unsubtle deus ex machina near the end. Again, I have difficulty understanding why this is considered a flaw, as the Coen brothers seem to have done proper background work with visuals, lines and other foreshadowing details. Without giving away too much about it, let me say that the supposed flaw has to do with the nature of time—and the film up to that point is chock-full of references to time, from the voice-over narration at the very beginning, to the setting of the film on New Year's Eve, to the "Tempus Fugit" motto of a newsreel, to the ticking of a watch and the crashing bong-bong-bongs of the massive Hudsucker Industries clock. Everywhere you are reminded that time is passing, and the so-called flaw simply takes that concept and knocks it out of the ballpark. Suffice to say that this film, in addition to being a parody, also contains elements of fantasy—again, just as in It's a Wonderful Life, where protagonist George Bailey is saved from death by an angelic messenger.

This is not to say that The Hudsucker Proxy is a perfect film. Although it's written and directed with care, the casting is near-perfect and the performances are sharp and hilarious, there are a few places that don't work to full effect. For instance, two employees of Hudsucker Industries are meant to be stand-ins for the forces of Good and Evil, but their characters are not at all fleshed out, so they largely remain ciphers to us by the time the credits roll. The running time of 111 minutes is also a bit long for a comedy. But these are precious few complaints. In essence, if any of the movies I've mentioned in this review are favorites of yours, you're almost certain to love The Hudsucker Proxy. Go rent it tonight.

Remember, time flies when you're having fun.

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