The Hudsucker Proxy (Coen Brothers, 1994) Tim Robbins, Jennifer Leigh, Paul Newman; naive business graduate installed as president of a manufacturing company as part of a stock scam
Desson Howe:
... so full of busy, smart-aleck construction, producer Ethan Coen should have applied for a building permit. The Coens, who wrote the script with Sam ('Darkman') Raimi, are master architects. They can buttress any scene with attention-getting ironies, quippy retorts and exclamation- point camera angles. But they wouldn't know the big picture if it crashed down from a museum wall. As with their Cannes winner Barton Fink, Hudsucker bombards viewers with a plethora of beautiful images and distinctive moments. But nothing really emerges. ... But Coen's just spinning Wunderkind wheels. Under his steerage, Robbins's overly naive country boy, Newman's Mussolini-style capitalist and Leigh's hyperactive journalist are just sophomorically re-engineered archetypes drawn from the mythic scriptbooks of Frank Capra, Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks. Missing in this film's performances is a sense of humanity – the crucial ingredient in the movies Hudsucker is clearly trying to evoke. Hudsucker isn't the real thing at all. It's just a proxy. Washington Post.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 11 August, 2018 | Now: 26 April, 2023