Roger Ebert Review: 2.0 stars out of 4

Two little creatures are perched on my shoulders, one whispering into each ear. One carries a pitchfork. The other has gossamer wings. They are dictating this review of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY:

Angel: This is the best-looking movie I've seen in years, a feast for the eyes and the imagination. The art direction and set design are breathtaking, re-creating the world of 1930s screwball comedy in which towering skyscrapers and vast boardrooms were the playing fields for the ambitions of corrupt executives, ambitious kids, unsung geniuses and lady newspaper reporters with nails as sharp as their wisecracks.

Devil: But 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.

Angel: But those performances are right on target. Tim Robbins stars, as a mailroom clerk who finds himself thrust into the presidency of the giant Hudsucker Corp. Paul Newman is the gray eminence behind the scenes, who engineers Robbins' ascendancy because he believes the kid is hopelessly incompetent and will drive the stock price down—just what Newman desires. And Jennifer Jason Leigh has been studying Rosalind Russell in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, and has the part down perfect: the hard-bitten, fast-talking girl reporter who sits on your desk, lights a cigarette and lays down the law.

Devil: So what? Was there anyone in this movie to really care about? And did the screwball aspects of the story ever take hold? Screwball comedy needs a certain looseness, an anarchic spirit that's alien to the meticulous productions of the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, who in this film as in their others (BLOOD SIMPLE, RAISING ARIZONA, MILLER'S CROSSING, BARTON FINK) seem to be so much in love with old movies that they shape their own ideas into the forms of films made before they were born.

Angel: Which brings me back to why I want to see the movie again. There is a grandness to the very conception of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, which sets the stage in the opening sequence, as an executive jumps out of a skyscraper and the camera precedes him in a headlong fall down what looks like a couple of hundred stories of terrifying free-fall, before … but you know the scene I mean. It was exhilarating.

Devil: But to what purpose other than pure style? And isn't there a glitch between the movie's look and style, which are clearly 1930s Art Deco, and its claim to be set in the 1950s?

Angel: Who really cares about stuff like that? Putting it in the 1950s allowed the Coens to have a lot of fun with the brainstorm of the Robbins character, who invents the hula hoop and makes untold billions for Hudsucker. And the hula hoop, in turn, provides an excuse for a montage showing hoopery sweeping across America—a filmmaking device which the Coens somehow are able to exploit and kid at the same time.

Devil: Wouldn't it have been a little more fun, though, if the hula hoop came as a surprise? The ads and the poster for the Coens' movie shows Tim Robbins holding a big hula hoop, so walking into the theater, you know the secret. It's typical of their approach: They obviously think their plot is unimportant except as a clothesline for the visuals. And wasn't there something dead at the heart of all of this? A kind of chill in the air? A feeling that the movie was more thought than art, more calculated than inspired? Doesn't the viewer spend more time admiring the sights on the screen than caring about them? Isn't there something wrong when you walk out of a movie humming the sets?

Angel: That's the tired old rap against the Coens, that they're all technique and no heart. How many movies do have heart these days? Not many. Most movies recycle tired old formulas; even a so-called Generation X rebel picture like REALITY BITES is just a retread of a 1930s romantic comedy that could have played on the same double bill with whatever inspired THE HUDSUCKER PROXY. One good reason to go to the movies is to feast the eyes, even if the brain remains unchallenged. And HUDSUCKER is a pleasure to regard.

Devil: Unless … you want something more from a movie.

CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Review: 3.5 stars out of 5

The Coen brothers, writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan, have often been accused of making coldly calculating movies with no emotional essence. Ironically, the sentimental HUDSUCKER PROXY —an homage to such incurably humanist directors as Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and even Preston Sturges, whose superficial cynicism barely concealed an abiding faith in human nature—is the best evidence yet of their heartlessness.

Synopsis

Ambitious hayseed Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), endlessly optimistic graduate of the Muncie College of Business Administration, comes to the big city with even bigger ambitions. When he gets a job in the mailroom of powerful Hudsucker Industries, he's convinced his rise to the top has begun. What he doesn't know is how quickly it's going to happen. In the wake of the suicide of head honcho Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), Machiavellian chairman of the board Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman) is plotting a devious stock manipulation that will depress the value of Hudsucker holdings so he and his co-conspirators can buy it up cheaply and make a killing. His plan: make some moron head of Hudsucker Industries, let him run the company temporarily into the ground, then seize the excuse to oust him and take control. It's clear where Norville fits into this plan.

Crackerjack newspaperwoman Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the sort of reporter who can't ask the way to the ladies room without mentioning her Pulitzer, is assigned to get the dirt on Norville Barnes, and does. Her articles, including the one headlined "Imbecile Heads Hudsucker," have the desired effect on Hudsucker Industries stock. But then the unimaginable happens. First, Archer—who has taken a false name and contrived to get herself hired as Norville's secretary—falls in love with her boss, who's naive but not as stupid as he seems. And second, Norville's apparently boneheaded idea, a circular toy that spends ages in product development, becomes a monster hit. It's a hula hoop—"You know, for kids," Norville explains unhelpfully—and soon all America is shimmying away. Success swells Norville's head, and Mussberger and his cronies drive Norville out the same high window through which Hudsucker made his exit.

But miraculous fate intervenes: Hudsucker's angel stops time and saves Norville from going splat on the pavement, and his miraculous rescue gives him the moral strength he needs to go back and fix the mess he's made of things. The key to making everything right lies in a forgotten detail—a high priority, internal memo from Hudsucker that Norville was given to deliver on his first day of work and forgot in the bustle of being made president—that ousts the devious Mussberger and leaves Norville free to restore decency and fair business practices to the Hudsucker empire.

Critique

The trouble with the characters in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY is that they're not characters, they're icons. Norville Barnes, Amy Archer, Sidney Mussburger, Waring Hudsucker, and the vast supporting rabble are all brittle, precious pastiches of characters cobbled together from three decades worth of Hollywood clichés. Some are truly brilliant—Peter Gallagher's fleeting cameo as Vic Tenetta, a damp-lipped, bright-eyed lounge singer in the Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin tradition, is a show-stopper—but they all suffer from a pervasive sense of hollow cleverness, the kind that makes people say, "Ye ah, but so what?" Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance, equal parts Rosalind Russell's briskness of gesture and Katharine Hepburn's lockjawed accent, drew the most criticism, probably because she, of all the stars, most completely resisted the temptation to lapse—even for a moment—into a more naturalistic style of acting. Leigh's performance is the perfect counterpart to the soaring, conspicuously artificial sets and carefully crafted decor, from the job listings posted on an arrivals/departures board to the cogs and gears of the huge clock (reminiscent of Lang's METROPOLIS) that graces the Hudsucker Building facade; if she'd stood still she might have disappeared. Instead, she was roundly criticized for getting entirely into the spirit of things, because few viewers followed.

It's clear that the Coens and collaborator Sam Raimi (THE EVIL DEAD), who co-wrote the screenplay, are in love with classical Hollywood films—with the glossy photography, the incredible sets, the overwrought scores, the rapid-fire dialogue, the outrageous miracles of narrative invention that glide right by in an insular world that could only have existed in the movies. They're movie geeks, but of a very particular type: like Quentin Tarantino, they don't have favorite films so much as they have favorite genres, favorite types of scenes, favorite kinds of characters, favorite styles of dialogue. THE HUDSUCKER PROXY is a meticulous Valentine to a bygone tradition of filmmaking, and from the breathtaking opening shot, a slow track through a meticulous New York skyscraper set gently dusted with snow, it's nothing if not fastidiously beautiful and true to its inspirations. But there are times when it recalls BILL AND COO (1947), a routine small town drama acted entirely by trained birds. It's all just amazing, but its amazing-ness is its sole point.