The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
This came after 'Raising Arizona'. Another attempt on making comedy by Ethan and Joel Coen. But they have done it. 'The Hudsucker Proxy' is one of the finest satirical presentations wrapped up in 129 minute show. I felt more like watching some play. In terms of acting, all the lead stars including Paul Newman, Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh are marvelous and it is definite that the way script is written, it would have required talented actors such as these to put the screen on fire. There are some moments where you realize that though this is fiction yet this is so similar to the real life situations. Such as the 'double stitch' scene. But yes, this is completely character based cinema. Like you take different people from different walks of life and take their tales from various phases of their working/professional lives, put them together and ask a master storyteller such as Coen Brothers to make into a movie and what you'll receive is 'The Hudsucker Proxy'.
My Rating: 7.25/10
My Rating: 7.25/10
posted by Chandra Jayant at 3:21 AM
1 Comments:
I just finished watching 'The Hudsucker Proxy', my 3rd straight Coen Brother movie after 'Miller’s Crossing' and this year’s Oscar nominee 'A Serious Man'. Like rest of their films, you can see that Hudsucker too is soaked in deadpan sarcasm and black humor. And like all their films, this too means different things to different people. I, for instance, found 'A Serious Man' a horrible film – a jew/rabbi jargon that went completely over my head. It was like spending half your time in a Maths exam on a single problem, without being able to make a head or tale of it.But I won’t be too harsh on Hudsucker, for it was indeed a good watch, if not a great one. Acting, as in all Coen films, is great, especially Tim Robbins as the ‘imbecile’ protagonist and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Pulitzer Prizewinning journo masquerading as Robbins’ receptionist, Amy in order to uncover the truth behind his freakish appointment as the President of the manufacturing firm Hudsucker Industries. One of the funniest scenes in the film is where Robbins asks his receptionist to reply back to the female journalist (Leigh herself) who wrote a scathing article about him. He starts off, “Amy take this down: Dear Miss Archer. I call you 'Miss' because you seem to have 'missed' the boat completely on this one!” He leans back to savor what he thinks is a witty remark and then continues reciting “How on earth would you know whether I'm an imbecile when you don't even have the guts to come in here and interview me man-to-man! No, change ‘man-to-man’ to ‘face-to-face’, no change ‘face-to-face’ to ‘eye-to-eye’ and 'guts' to 'common decency'.”
All in all, it’s the mix of witty dialogues and effortless acting that keep the laughs coming. But the problem with Hudsucker is that you may not want to pay to watch a film like this; as long as the laughs are coming for free, you’ll take it. No wonder the movie bombed at the box office when it was released. But then that is the case with almost all Coen films. They are marred with Box office inefficiency. It’s interesting how the two brothers manage to finance their films time after time. Maybe the DVD rentals compensate for the losses. But I’ll leave that to some B-school case study competition and hope that their next, True Grit (slated for release this year), will finally break the box office jinx. Till then, let’s keep making proxies.
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