The Hudsucker Proxy
To follow Seven, another movie that features a guy scraping a name off a glass door.
Perhaps Mr. Urbaniak can supply a list of other movies featuring this character and Film Forum could devote a festival to him. “The Guy Scraping The Name Off The Glass Door Fest.”
Some Coen Bros movies you like right away, some disappoint you at first, some irritate the hell out of you. But all of them have enough going on in them to warrant more than one viewing.
Intolerable Cruelty, for instance, I found slight and superficial at first. Now I love it, watched it twice in one week not long ago.
The Big Lebowski I found a definite disappointment after Fargo. Now it’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
The Hudsucker Proxy, for a long time, I found to be cold, dense and impenetrable. Starting with the title, which virtually implores an audience to stay away. Richly detailed and beautifully mounted as it is, with a career-best performance from the brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh, I still found the movie soulless and mechanical, which mystified me because I had read the script before seeing the movie, and the script was one of the best I’d ever read, overflowing with warmth, wit, great characters and sharply observed detail.
Now, I still feel like that script is still in there somewhere, but, like every other Coen Bros movie, there’s something else there that I didn’t see before.
The Coen Bros have an interesting problem. They want to tell relatively conventional stories, genre pictures even, but their approach is so unusual that it sometimes blinds the audience to their true purpose. They often will take small character beats or incidental props and blow them up to monumental importance, confusing us as to what is important in the movie.
For instance, in Intolerable Cruelty there is so much weight given to George Clooney’s teeth that one gets distracted from his character, a rather stock Hollywood type, an aging boy who needs to grow a soul. We see this character so often in Hollywood pictures (Jim Carrey in Liar, Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, Tim Allen in almost anything), of course you need a fresh take on him, but only the Coen Bros would say “what if he’s obsessed with his teeth?” (In O Brother it’s Clooney again, but this time it’s his hair.) The accents in Fargo, the rug in Lebowski, the mosquito (and the wallpaper) in Barton Fink, the hat in Millar’s Crossing, etc.
The point is, the hair and the teeth and The Dude’s rug and all that stuff is beside the point. The first time one watches a Coen Bros movie, a lot of time it seems to be a pointless comedy about people acting really weird. But it’s like they point their camera like a magnifying glass at some tiny detail in order to get a new take on an old idea.
And this philosophy extends to their whole directoral stance, and in Hudsucker threatens to capsize the whole ship. The production design, the dense, sparkling dialogue, scenes operating on many different levels at once, the complex montages and camera moves, the elaborate physical gags, and especially the hyper-intellectualized performance by Tim Robbins, all conspire to make a movie so rich on a scene-by-scene level that it’s sometimes hard to even take it all in, much less be warmed by the simple human comedy that lies at the center of the script.
But it’s in there.
Maybe for some people the idea of watching a movie you don’t like over and over until it reveals itself sounds like a chore, but for some reason that’s not the case with the Coen Bros. I can’t think of a movie of theirs I never want to see again.
On another Coen-related topic, oftentimes their slightest movies, on a second or third viewing, take on deep, even profound philosophical, religious or socialogical overtones. Obviously the ideas are in the script, but they never, ever talk about them in interviews. They always talk as if they are making the silliest, most superficial movies in the world. I wonder what, if anything, they tell their actors. I can’t believe that someone like Tim Robbins or Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges is willing to just hit their mark and do what the Coens tell them to. Or maybe they do, maybe when one works with the Coens one is happy to know that the directors know what they’re doing, and not think too much. Although I can’t think of a performance in a Coen Bros movie that looks effortless.
Anyone out there have any Coen stories?
