“The Hudsucker Proxy”1994 • PG • 1h 51mins • Watch trailer • Rent it We’ve arrived at our first Dare Watch. A movie too wild to just love or hate. This relentless screwball ride never lets you get your footing. Leaves your eyeballs drooling and your brain with a tummyache. For some folks, it’s the Clark Gable-era modern entry they’ve been craving. For others, a miscalculation of skyscraper scale. Either way, tonight we’re watching a meticulously crafted tale of ups and downs. It’s 1994’s Coen brothers joint The Hudsucker Proxy. Here’s the plot. It’s 1958 and Norville (Tim Robbins) lands a lesser job than he was hoping for in the mail room at Hudsucker Industries. Meanwhile, company president Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) user tests gravity by jumping out the top window. Conniving board member Mussberger (Paul Newman) hatches a plot to buy the company for cheap by driving the stock price down. How will he send the line graph into the basement? By making Norville, the guy in the basement, the new president. Norville pitches Mussberger on his big idea: A circle drawn on a paper with the insufficient explanation, “You know, for kids!” Mussberger’s got his idiot; Norville becomes Hudsucker’s proxy. Reporter Amy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) snoops on Norville for a scoop—what’s his deal? She gets wind of Mussberger’s skullduggery but nobody believes her—yet. Meanwhile, Hudsucker Industries manufactures Norville’s invention, which turns out to be a hula hoop. First it flops, then it’s a roaring success. How will Mussberger sink Hudsucker now? Can Amy print his plot in time to prevent it? And what will Norville do with his hula payola? Probably become a nicer person, right? Subscribe for free to get future posts. Costs you nothing, gives me a smile. Thanks!
Yep, this is a silly movie. But that doesn’t mean that Joel and Ethan Coen didn’t think about it a whole lot while they made it. In fact, they’d worked with Sam Rami (Evil Dead) on the script since ’81. They finished it in ’85, but it sat on ice until they had enough clout to make something so big. After the success of Blood Simple (‘84) and Barton Fink (’91), the fellas wanted to go mainstream. Together with Rami, they gave the Hudsucker script a once-over dust-off and went into production. Joel Silver picked it up, selling it to Warner Bros. Silver negotiated the brothers total artistic control, including final cut. As if, watching this, you had any doubt.
The poster tells you the main thing they were thinking. They were thinking about circles. Let’s make a tapered list of loops in this movie: A Tapered List of Loops in This Movie
Ethan Coen said this circular motif came from the Rota Fortunae—Wheel of Fortune. The goddess Fortuna spun her giant wooden mill wheel, which could change your fate dramatically depending on what position it landed on. From this mythology comes the game show Wheel of Fortune and the idea of making your fortune. “Fortune”, see, didn’t mean wealth per se. To “make your fortune” off something meant to intervene in your own fate, creating a you-benefiting timeline through force of will. In Hudsucker, life has to do with making hay while fortune smiles on you and waiting it out when it doesn’t. Because the wheel always turns.
Actor Tim Robbins himself is a microcosm of the whole movie. For some of us, he’s as bland as wallpaper glue. Makes us scratch our heads that folks build movies around him. For others, his everyman quality allows us to project ourselves onto him like a Super 8 picture cast onto a white sheet in your pal’s backyard. All I can say is that he doesn’t really stick out when he’s miscast. Instead, he becomes a charisma black hole, sucking the energy out of any scene he’s in. If that’s your cup of tea, you’ll love The Truth About Charlie, a vastly inferior remake of Charade, also featuring Mark Wahlberg as far out of his good zone as in The Happening. Here, he’s boring when he’s passive, unlikable when he’s active. A tough lead for sure.
’94 was a big year for Robbins. He was on the big screen for Hudsucker, The Shawshank Redemption, Ready to Wear, and I.Q. He only appeared in three more movies for the rest of the ‘90s, and one of them was an Austin Powers picture. He sticks to supporting roles now. I think he always did, just sometimes he got so much screen time it was easy to mistake him for the lead in flicks that really didn’t have one. Robbins has a project for Apple TV+ coming out on May 5th, Silo. Looks interesting to me.
What did audiences make of this in ’94? It premiered at Sundance in January, hit theaters in March, then opened the Cannes Film Festival in May. It lost the Palme d’Or to Pulp Fiction. It cost $25M to make—not including marketing and promo spends—but only made back $11.3M. Folks, that’s what they call a flop. Critics liked Hudsucker’s production design, how gorgeously shot it was, how detailed the models were, etc. What they didn’t like was what happens in it. Roger Ebert said, “Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously.” For Variety, Todd McCarthy summed it up by saying “a pastiche it remains”. And who was it for? The PG rating said “family film” but an all-growns cast said “kids will hate this”.
Ultimately, it looked great, but it didn’t feel great. My guess is that those who hooked into its anti-big biz themes were few. American in the mid-‘90s was about as pro-big biz at it gets. Maybe it just came out at the wrong time. Lands better now. Three months after Hudsucker, Forrest Gump would hit theaters. It proved to be the everyman story audiences actually wanted. Hudsucker, with all its ’30s references and high energy, wasn’t it. Today it remains a curio worth watching for its outstanding visuals or if you’re a Coen completist. I dare you to watch it! It might be the hidden gem that becomes your new favorite.
Next week I’m off, but I’ll be back in your inbox after that for a Triple Header I’m tentatively calling Let’s Go To Prom. We’re gettin’ fancy together. And hey, thanks for reading! I really appreciate it. If you liked this, share it someone else who would too!
NOTES:
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Friday, March 17, 2023
Pizza & a Movie #57: "The Hudsucker Proxy"
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