The Hudsucker Proxy Details

More Capra-Coen than Capra-corn, this is a throwback to the good old days of the screwball comedy. When Joel and Ethan Coen pay tribute to a period or a style of film-making, however, they never slavishly re-create, instead always managing to impart some of their own unique vision. In The Hudsucker Proxy they marry the Art Deco designs of the 1930s with the go-get-'em attitudes of the 1950s to fashion a parable that might just have something to say about America in the 1990s. And, if they miss the odd trick in saluting the good old days of Frank Capra and that harder-bitten director of screwball comedy Howard Hawks, it has to be said that a Coen misfire easily outguns the best work of many of their contemporaries. Mocking the “anything is possible” ethos of the Truman era, this is a classic “little man against the system” scenario, with Tim Robbins wonderfully ingenuous as the mail room nobody who hits gold when he invents the Hula-Hoop. In attempting to portray the kind of heartless villains associated with Edward Arnold and Eugene Pallette, Paul Newman mistakes excessive for comic, unlike Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose impression of Rosalind Russell doing a Katharine Hepburn is a hoot. Special mention, too, for cinematographer Roger Deakins and the art department (led by Dennis Gassner) because, for all its strengths as a comedy, this is also a visual triumph.

Clever and enjoyable pastiche of Hollywood comedies of the 40s, close in spirit to Preston Sturges with an ending straight out of Frank Capra. It is stylized, stylish and civilized entertainment.