The guy’s a real moron

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink

What would you say is the hardest movie genre to pull off? In my opinion, it is without a doubt the Hollywood Fable. I’m thinking first and foremost of It’s a Wonderful Life and other Frank Capra melodramas from the 30s and 40s that traffic in moral uplift. The hero is a regular American man with dreams and ideas navigating a fallen world filled with liars and swindlers whose strength of character triumphs through generosity and fellow-feeling with the common man. His enemies are bigwigs, scheming capitalists, who seek only to exploit. Our hero might also become rich but it’s different for him. There may or may not be an angel involved.

Now, listen, I like some of Capra’s earlier films like It Happened One Night and other screwball comedies, and his fables have a left-populist valence that I should approve of, but in practice I find them so deeply annoying. Nowhere in film are the margins between success and failure narrower—the difference between sweet and cloying, between profound and thuddingly obvious, between uplifting and morally didactic. There is no room for error. For me, Capra’s work consistently falls on the wrong side of these divides, but perhaps that’s the result of nearly a century of intervening time and changed expectations.

The Hollywood Fable is, above all, an earnest genre, perhaps the most earnest. And yet it would be what the Coens, two of the biggest wiseacres in the business, would attempt for their fifth film, co-writing with Sam Raimi, another cinematic prankster committed to turning things on their head and kidding the material. Can you update melodrama? Can you invert and deconstruct a fable? The Hudsucker Proxy makes the attempt, to mixed success.

---

The Hudsucker Proxy stars Tim Robbins as Norville Barnes, a hayseed just arrived in New York from Muncie, Indiana in late 1958. He takes a job in the mailroom of Hudsucker Industries, a manufacturing company whose tower dominates the skyline with a massive clockface. The mailroom itself is gigantic, ear-splittingly loud, and grimly industrial, suggesting a company both terribly modern—what does Hudsucker Industries make? Everything and nothing, it seems—and something of a throwback to an earlier age of factory work. We can’t help but expect Norville to get sucked into a pneumatic tube like something from Chaplin’s Modern Times.

Upstairs, on the highest floor, a board meeting is in progress. The company’s founder and president, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), sits at the end of the table, restless, as a flunkie recites their fantastic profits across all business sectors. He steps up onto the long table, readies himself as if for a race, and runs down the length of the table, smashing through the great window and diving 44 floors to his death. His fall takes a good ten seconds, so high are these buildings. This exaggerated architecture is another cue that we’re inhabiting an earlier era of filmmaking—this is textbook German expressionism.

While the rest of the board sits in shock, Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman, glorious in his villainy) is unperturbed. He picks up Hudsucker’s abandoned cigar, remarking it would be a shame to let it go to waste. But then the hard realization: Hudsucker left no heirs and no will—his controlling interest in the company is to be converted to common shares and put up for public sales on the first of the year, just over a month away. The stock is too valuable, the board will never be able to buy enough for a majority at its current price. Solution: tank the value. Install an imbecile as president and let him humiliate the company. But where to find an imbecile?

Naturally, Norville is sent up to deliver a letter from the deceased to Mussburger, where he makes a fool of himself. Mussburger knows he’s found his imbecile. Norville is promoted straight from the mailroom to the president’s office as a montage of him and the board laughing uproariously is accompanied by ticker tape of the stock falling.

Cut to the offices of the New York Argus, where the paper’s editor Al (John Mahoney) berates his reporters that he wants to know everything there is to know about Norville Barnes, now being characterized as an Idea Man. “I tell you the guy’s a phony,” says fast-talking lady reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), “fake as a three dollar bill.” Now we have a plot—a corporate scheme, an unwitting patsy, and a journalist intent on finding the truth. So Amy contrives a meet-cute with Norville and installs herself in his office as his official stock tape reader.

She snoops around after hours, finding nothing in Norville’s desk or appointment book. She slips through a side door into the bowels of the great clock that ticks ever onward outside Norville’s window. There she meets a Magical Negro named Moses (Bill Cobbs) who seems to be all-knowing and, in his words “keep[s] the circle turning.” She learns the board has installed a nitwit on purpose. She and Norville attend a Christmas party together and share an intimate conversation overlooking the city, complicating Amy’s mission as she begins to develop real feelings for Norville even as she maintains her deception.

At the 60 minute mark, almost precisely halfway through the film, Norville presents his big idea to the board. Several times already he has shown everyone a scrap of paper with a perfect circle drawn on it, explaining, “You know, for kids!” Norville has invented the hula hoop. Cue an extended montage of Hudsucker Industries whirring to life as the hoop works its way through production and is discovered by excited children. It’s a great sequence.

What has been a quintessentially tight Coen brothers script up to this point now starts to unravel. The plot gets much more diffuse. There’s a lot of time spent on how the hula hoop is a hit, but now our Idea Man is treading water, resting on the laurels of his one success. Amy comes into his office to find him getting a massage and listening to music and gives him the classic movie “you’ve changed” speech. I think this is supposed to be a gag but it’s all very muddy. The great joke of the film is that everything takes place in a mere month when it clearly should play out over the course of a year. We have to imagine that all the newspaper headlines we see are being printed on consecutive days. If Norville is savoring his success, well, if we take the timeline seriously it’s a well-deserved victory lap and hardly indicates a lasting change of character. So in this moment we’re supposed to laugh at the absurdity of it all but also agree with Amy that he’s lost his way. This is the big challenge to their relationship but the logic of it makes it sort of confounding.

Mussburger discovers Amy is a reporter and tells Norville this lapse will be cause for removal from the board. It’s New Year’s Eve. Norville shows up at the beatnik bar Amy frequents totally wasted. Eventually a mob starts chasing him through the streets. Orderlies from an insane asylum are there with big butterfly nets to snag him. He finds himself back in the Hudsucker building and climbs out onto the ledge of his office window. He decides not to jump but the ominous janitor (Harry Bugin) we’ve seen throughout the movie locks the window behind him.

He falls. He’s going to die. Then, miraculously, he freezes in midair. Moses the Magical Negro has stuck his broom handle into the gears of the great clock, stopping it and stopping time. Moses looks straight to camera and addresses the audience directly: “Strictly speaking, I’m never supposed to do this. But have you got a better idea?” As Norville hangs in midair, the angel of Waring Hudsucker descends from heaven. He reminds Norville that he never actually delivered the letter to Mussburger that brought him to the top floor in the first place. The letter states that the person named president gets all his shares and control of the company. That’s Norville, yay! The janitor, who now appears to be the Devil I guess, enters the clock room. Moses squares up with him, ready to fight to keep time frozen and Norville alive. They brawl, Moses wins, time restarts, and Norville makes it to the ground safe and sound. He and Amy are reunited, Mussburger is sent to the asylum, and the film ends with Norville presenting his next invention, the frisbee.

---

The Hudsucker Proxy has so many wonderful elements that it’s really a shame they don’t hold together as a film. I characterized it up top as a Hollywood Fable, which it is, but that base has been thrown in a blender with so many other tropes and archetypes from the early decades of motion pictures. Not all these ingredients play well with each other, some important flavors crowded out by everything surrounding them.

Many of the film’s problems begin with Norville himself. He is clearly inspired by protagonists in the vein of Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, decent innocents who mean well but are naive enough to let their nose get stolen off their face. More specifically, Norville is clearly inspired by the disdain Joel and Ethan and Sam have for these yokels. I can practically hear them begging for a lead with a little more guile. So they’ve heightened it, made him not an innocent but an imbecile. But—have they? The film can never decide quite how dumb Norville actually is. Mostly he’s just a country boy out of step in the big city. There’s a moment after he’s learned Amy’s deception where he still thinks she’s also from his home town—part of the lie she stumbled into—and you groan that he’s so dumb that although he’s learned her whole life story is a lie he still thinks she’s a Muncie girl. But for long stretches of the film he’s not particularly dumb. The hula hoop seems like a dumb idea on its face but it’s a success. He went to business school, the joke being I guess that business school is so shallow that even an imbecile could succeed. His character is stuck betwixt and between, the script never doing enough either to confirm his stupidity or refute the way others see him.

He is also an exceptionally passive character. Once he’s seated in the president’s office, he just sits there. Again, this is funny for the implicit statement that CEOs contribute nothing to the functioning of their companies, but it presents major story problems. In cliched screenwriting terms, what does Norville want, and what does Norville need? He wants to produce the hula hoop, which he does, at which point he’s satisfied. When Amy chews him out for losing his values and living the fatcat lifestyle, this conundrum is written into the text itself. She’s practically saying to him, “This won’t do for a story, you need to do something to advance the plot, you need to be a character with a drive to do something.” But Norville doesn’t rise to her challenge; he remains swept along by events outside his control and acts only by running away, then falls haplessly and is saved by divine intervention.

Capra’s fables are heavily concerned with money and how money can be used either to exploit or uplift a community. This is again most famously illustrated by George Bailey’s vision of the alternate timeline where Mr. Potter’s rapaciousness was not counterbalanced by George’s Building and Loan company. What Capra is selling here is the fantasy of the good capitalist. You hear this all the time from people, this idea that regulations are unnecessary because companies should just do the right thing. The realities of capitalism and fiduciary responsibility of course doom such fantasies to be nothing but. So I appreciate that The Hudsucker Proxy does away with any gestures toward community or giving back, largesse in any form. Norville has given the world one thing, a cheap plastic toy, and anyone who wants one better pay up. In this way, the Coens are far more honest than Capra.

So within this hard nosed vision of the world, the fantastic elements at the end of the film clang so discordantly. If you’ve been keeping up with this series you know I love when the Coens leap registers to pull in the supernatural and the metaphysical—I love the Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona, I love Charlie spontaneously combusting the hallway and suddenly appearing as some sort of spectre or emanation of the hotel in Barton Fink. But man, I hate the divine intervention that resolves the plot here. I hate the fight scene between Moses and Aloysius the janitor. Their fight can only be interpreted as some sort of battle between Good and Evil, and just, like, what? After so much silliness this swerve into such earnestness is unconvincing and unsatisfying. And making Norville’s fate something that needs to be fought out between quasi-deities puts the plot on a level of meaning and importance totally out of step with its satirical nature.

“We never could figure out how to end the movie,” Raimi told Tad Friend for a Vogue article in 1994. “We left it two scenes from the end, with Norville up on the ledge about to jump.” This points to the fundamental challenge of modernizing the fable. You can use the basic structure to be satirical and cynical, but ultimately you write yourself into a corner. It’s a genre that demands positive resolution and an affirmation that there’s justice and order to the universe. Cynicism stands in direct opposition to these sentiments. The Coens and Raimi couldn’t figure out an ending because one that satisfied the demands of the genre and was true to their philosophy doesn’t—couldn’t—exist. “It’s almost axiomatic that a movie’s principal characters have to be sympathetic, and that the movie has to supply moral uplift,” Joel told Friend. “People like it. But it’s not interesting to us.”

Stray Notes and Coenisms

• Not enough can be said about how great Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie. The whole production would be dead in the water without the constant energy she brings. She carries the picture almost on her own. Her facility with the language, the pure dexterity required to do such intricate dialogue at such speed, is just astounding. Goddamn, just look at this:

• There are several quick scenes with Buzz the elevator boy. He’s played by Jim True-Frost, best know as Roland Pryzbylewski in The Wire. Wow!

• Steve Buscemi appears as the bartender at the beatnik bar. This makes three straight Coen movies where Buscemi gets only one scene but makes a huge impression. Here he is in Miller’s Crossing:

Here he is in Barton Fink:

And in The Hudsucker Proxy:

Being so familiar with his prominent roles in Fargo and Lebowski, it’s a trip to see him used so sparingly.