30 Minutes on: "The Hudsucker Proxy"

Editor's Note: "The Hudsucker Proxy" screens December 16 at midnight at IFC Center in New York City, in a nearly pristine 35mm print. For details, click here.

A critical and box-office bomb when it came out in 1994, the big business comedy-fantasy "The Hudsucker Proxy" looks better and smarter by the year. The filmmaking team of Joel and Ethan Coen made the film on the heels of "Blood Simple," "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink" (you might call it the third entry in their consecutive series of Fedora Films). Their co-writer and second unit director was none other than cult horror filmmaker and future "Spider-Man" helmer Sam Raimi, with whom they once shared a house in Los Angeles (supposedly at one point their flatmates included future Oscar winners Frances McDormand and Holly Hunter—quite a brain trust in that bungalow). The tone of "Hudsucker" is madcap, the scale epic, and the script is a pastiche of elements taken from filmmakers that the Coens adore but who wouldn't ordinarily seem compatible (indeed, most critics argued that they still weren't compatible).

The sunny idealism and ultimate expression of faith in humanity echoed Frank Capra—in particular his 1946 classic "It's a Wonderful Life," which, like "Hudsucker," is about a man who tries to commit suicide on a snowy holiday evening only to be miraculously saved. The eccentric characters speaking in colorful hard-boiled patois was pure Preston Sturges. But the enormous building interiors, interlocking gears, dramatic silhouettes and spectacular shots of miniature cityscapes (complete with multiple layers of gently falling snow, which wasn't easy to do elegantly before the refinement of CGI) take their cues from comedies about the  oppressiveness of urban-industrial life: "Playtime," "Brazil," "Modern Times," "Metropolis." Officially, the budget was $25 million, the Coens' biggest up until that point; some sources say it ended up being closer to $40 million. Today, adjusted for inflation, the movie would cost about twice that—but of course, the very idea of a major studio releasing a film like this today is laughable. It was an outlier in 1994, too. If action movie producer Joel Silver (the "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" series) hadn't championed this odd project, it's likely it never would have made it to screens long enough to be lambasted as indulgent, mean-spirited, cynical, and unfunny.

It's usually an overstatement to say that audiences  weren't ready for a film at the time of its first release, but in this case I think it applies—and maybe it still applies, because of the persistent belief that the Coens are misanthropic, cynical, are privately snickering at their characters, etc. In a lot of ways, the Coens are still misunderstood, despite winning multiple Oscars spread out over twenty-plus years and racking up a number of legit box office hits (including "O Brother Where Art Thou?" and their remake of "True Grit"). There's still a sense that they have a nihilistic streak, that they enjoy watching their characters suffer and be humiliated. I've never really felt that; I think they take a certain disgusted amusement in showing how cruel humankind can be, but that's not the same thing.

Also, I think they love innocent or naive people, as long as they aren't being cruel or self-serving, even if (maybe especially if) those characters are blithely stupid and just sort of skip through life as if it's a field of daisies. While watching "The Hudsucker Proxy" again on a big screen as part of a midnight movie series (of Christmas films, a sub-genre this really isn't an example of; maybe it snuck in because it opens and closes on New Year's Eve and has a lot of snow?) I was struck by what I perceived as a quality of lament, that in the words of a character in "Raising Arizona," sometimes it's a hard life for the little things. "The Hudsucker Proxy" is a spiritually attuned critique of capitalism, as grandiose as that probably sounds, specifically how the gears of the capitalist economy (visualized literally here, in those closeups of the clock's interior) tend to torment and emotionally grind up anyone who isn't viciously self-interested to start with. On its simplest level, the movie is saying that there's more to life than money, yet much of civilization (and specifically the post-World War II U.S. circa 1958) believes the opposite. Corny, maybe. But not wrong.

The hero, Norville Barnes of Muncie, Indiana (Tim Robbins), is a Candide-like fool stumbling through life, rather like the title character of "Forrest Gump," which coincidentally was released a few months later that same calendar year but went on to become a smash hit and win multiple Oscars. Norville is randomly elevated to the position of president of the Hudsucker Corporation after the suicide of its founder, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), as part of a conspiracy to depress the stock price and allow for a takeover by a group led by Waring's right hand man, Sid Mussburger (Paul Newman). Norville is targeted for exposure by an ambitious reporter named Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She ends up falling for him even as she's destroying his fragile and mostly undeserved success, and Norville ends up being scapegoated and hounded (citizens even chase him through the streets like Frankenstein's monster) simply for being a patsy set up by greedy, powerful men.

There's a lot going on both visually and narratively in the movie, especially in setpieces like the Hula Hoop sequence, Norville's first arrival in the city, and the opening and closing montages (narrated by Bill Cobbs' clock-minder Moses, who veers a little too close to the Magical Negro trope for comfort, though he ultimately feels both lived-in as a character and representative of the film's working class sympathies). "Hudsucker" is so visually busy, so overwhelmingly elaborate (like a giant clock of a film), that one can see how its deeper meanings might not register on first viewing. But they're there. Specifically they're present in the recurring imagery of circles and lines. It's rare outside of masters like Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg to encounter an entire major studio feature that's been worked out on the level of basic symbols and shapes as carefully as this one.

The city is a landscape of tall vertical lines, skyscrapers built with money. Sequences having to do with spending and accumulation of money are driven by lines as well: assembly lines, the pipes that take pneumatic tubes from one office to another, the vertical and horizontal line-grids of balance sheets and stock price charts, the squiggly line of ticker-tapes being spat out, the lines of the streets where cars carry newspapers and hula hoops and other goods, and where suicide jumpers eventually end up. But within this forbidding grey urban grid you encounter circles that hint at a set of eternal values or rhythms. It's these eternal values of mercy, kindness, devotion, community and sacrifice that industry and money seek to deny, or divert our attention  from—a life beyond the wage slavery of the Western-style economy, which separates the haves and have-nots by an increasingly vast gulf.