"The Hudsucker Proxy": review

Tim Robbins as Norville Barnes and Paul Newman as Sidney Mussburger

[WARNING: spoilers for a 1994 film.]

The Coen brothers are well known for their stylized filmmaking, which often involves the Saturday Night Live trick of creating characters who have one distinct, exaggerated tic or mannerism in speech or behavior. I noted this long ago in my 2011 review of their remake of "True Grit." Way back in 1994, the brothers made "The Hudsucker Proxy," a movie with an unmarketable title (how many normies know what a proxy is? and what's a Hudsucker?) that crashed and burned upon release. I saw the film while on a date in Korea; my date told me that star Tim Robbins's chipmunk cheeks reminded her of my own. I thought it was a great date movie, full of romantic ups and downs and big, sweeping emotions. The film was produced and directed by the Coen brothers; it starred Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Charles Durning, Bruce Campbell, Bill Cobbs, Harry Burgin, and Jim True, and a couple of brief cameos by Anna Nicole Smith in the role of "Za-Za."

The film begins right at the end of 1958, with young Norville Barnes (Robbins) about to throw himself off a skyscraper while the voice of Moses (Cobb), a "clock man" and caretaker, provides voiceover narration. Moses tells us to rewind back to earlier in December, and most of the rest of the film is a flashback that catches us up to Norville's suicide-by-gravity moment. Norville, naive and fresh from business school in Muncie, Indiana, arrives wide-eyed in New York City, hoping to land a good job for himself. He waits with all of the other employment-seeking schlubs to see what openings there are but is disappointed to learn that almost every opening requires experience. It's the classic paradox when starting out: to get a job, you need experience, but to get experience, you need a job. Depressed, Norville sits at a café/bar and orders coffee while staring at newspaper want ads. Seeing nothing, he leaves, but his coffee cup had left a ring around one particular ad. In a series of fortuitous events, the paper is blown out the door by a gust of wind, and it follows Norville, landing gently on his calf. Norville absently pulls the paper away from his leg and sees the ad inside the coffee-cup ring: no experience required. This job, which Norville pounces on, is for a mailroom position at Hudsucker Industries, a huge company located in a 44 (or 45 if you count the mezzanine)-story skyscraper—the very one that Norville will eventually think about jumping off. 

Once in the mailroom, Norville is buried under an avalanche of information about codes and procedures and the million little reasons and excuses the company will find to dock your pay. Meanwhile, high up in the building, on one of the very top floors, CEO Waring Hudsucker (Durning) is listening to a glowing financial report about how stocks are up, profits are at record levels, and the company is "loaded." With a blank smile on his face, Hudsucker puts his pocket watch on the long executive table, waits for the appropriate moment, then runs down the table, crashes through the plate-glass window, and plummets to his death 44 (or 45 if you count the mezzanine) floors below. In the mailroom, Norville, as the new guy, is charged with the unenviable duty of delivering a Blue Letter communiqué to Sidney Mussburger (Newman), Hudsucker's right-hand man. 

Norville, goofy and absent-minded, stuffs the letter into his apron and fearfully makes his way up to Mussburger with the help of wisecracking elevator operator Buzz (True), who is already making Waring Hudsucker jokes before the CEO's body has even had a chance to cool. Norville meets Mussburger and fails to deliver the Blue Letter, instead pitching an idea he has for a mysterious toy ("You know—for kids!") he has designed. His design looks like nothing more than a circle. Mussburger, aware that Hudsucker Industries will be publicly traded at the start of the new year, has been looking for a way to drive company stock prices down so that his executives can buy up all the shares now, before they become public. When Mussburger sees Norville, a lightbulb turns on: why not put this young idiot at the head of the company? Let him make stupid mistakes due to obtuseness and inexperience; investors will lose confidence, and stock prices will fall. Let Norville Barnes, then, become the proxy for ex-CEO Waring Hudsucker! Norville, whose greatest and stupidest idea is a cryptic circle, suddenly finds himself promoted to CEO. As predicted, stock prices fall.

Across the way, Pulitzer Prize-winning ace reporter Amy Archer (Leigh) smells a rat. The appearance of the new CEO is too sudden, too convenient, and she can sense there are shenanigans as stock prices keep dropping. She's heard rumors that this Norville Barnes guy is a nincompoop, but she wants to see for herself, so she goes undercover as a secretary to work for Barnes. At first, she too is convinced Norville is just a naive idiot, but as she gets to know him better, she begins to realize he's actually a good and decent person. Meanwhile, Norville pitches his cryptic-circle idea to the board, and the board, thinking this will further tank profits and stock prices, heartily agrees to produce what they at first call his "dingus" but eventually call the hula hoop. The hula hoop doesn't sell at first—not until one enterprising kid is spotted on the street doing wild tricks with it. The kids who see this go nuts. The hula hoop sells like wildfire, and suddenly, Hudsucker Industries is strong and profitable again, much to the fury of Mussburger and the board. Enjoying his fame and fortune, Norville's personality changes for the worse, and Amy, who had been falling in love with Norville, decides to abandon him. Meanwhile Aloysius (Hurgin), the other janitor/factotum in the building besides Moses, discovers Amy Archer is actually a spy, which leads to Sidney Mussburger telling Norville that the board will be firing him as of the new year. Depressed, Norville gets drunk and is chased through the streets by Buzz and a crowd. He ends up at the Hudsucker skyscraper, where he goes to the executive floor, finds his old mailroom uniform, dons it, opens a huge window, and steps out onto the ledge.

This leads us back to the movie's first scene, with Norville standing on a windy ledge at the building's top floor. The malevolent Aloysius locks the window that Norville had stepped out of; flustered, Norville loses his balance and nearly falls, but he manages to catch the stone ledge with his fingers. He hangs there, helpless, until the strength leaves him, and he plummets, just as Waring Hudsucker had done. But about halfway down, Norville's fall bizarrely stops, and the scene switches to inside the building, where we see old Moses using a broom handle to stop the gears that turn the hands of the skyscraper's giant clock. Having effectively stopped time (and telling us, the audience, that "Strictly speaking, I'm never supposed to do this"), Moses has allowed the floating Norville to receive a visit from a plump angel—none other than Waring Hudsucker himself. 

Hudsucker, frustrated, asks Norville why he never delivered the Blue Letter to Sidney Mussburger, then has Norville read the letter (still in Norville's mailroom-uniform apron) aloud: basically Hudsucker had felt his life becoming empty and meaningless as he got richer and more powerful, and he stipulates in the letter that his stock shares should be transferred to whoever becomes the new CEO. Hudsucker, in his letter, acknowledges that this could easily be Mussburger himself, but should the CEO be someone else, then that person would receive the shares. Technically, this means Norville—who hasn't been ousted quite yet—is now the majority owner of the company, and Norville is elated by his good fortune. Unfortunately, Aloysius finds Moses inside the clock-gear section of the building, and they fight, which knocks the broomstick loose and sets the gears in motion again. Norville falls to earth but is saved at the last second when Moses defeats Aloysius and uses the janitor's dentures to stop the clock's gears before Norville can slam into the pavement. The dentures eventually shatter from the pressure of the gears, but Norville is now only three feet off the ground, so he falls safely and runs to find Amy at a beatnik bar they'd been frequenting. They kiss passionately, reconciled, as 1959 rolls in. Moses's voiceover tells us that Sidney Mussburger ended up in a loony bin while Norville presided over Hudsucker Industries with wisdom and compassion.

In 1994, I hadn't yet gone to grad school, but after I got my master's degree in 2002, I remember thinking a lot about this movie. Some might call the whole film silly and contrived, what with an almost-literal deus ex machina ending provided by Moses—who seems to be a stand-in for or incarnation of God—but I couldn't help but see the film as rich in religious metaphors while telling a fairly simple morality tale. The skyscraper itself was a major character in the film, with Norville starting off in the bowels of the mailroom, suddenly ending up as CEO, then plummeting from the top floor in a very on-the-nose image of a physical and spiritual rise and fall. Aloysius doesn't have a speaking role, but actor Harry Burgin, who plays him, has a distinctly sinister look that imbues the character with a great deal of darkness and menace. At one point, we see Aloysius scraping off the letters on Norville's office's door, as if Aloysius represented the spirit of decay, death, and erasure. The conflation of death and the Devil is part of Christianity's past; plenty of European Christians once saw the Grim Reaper as one of the forms of Satan, and Aloysius's fistfight with Moses/God would seem to confirm he's the opposing cosmic force in this scenario.

Tonally, "The Hudsucker Proxy" is a throwback to old movies from the 50s; the romance between Norville and Amy reaches operatic highs and dramatic lows before finally settling on an era-appropriate happily ever after. (Amy initially does her awkward best to pass herself off as "a Muncie girl" to get into Norville's good graces; Norville is goofy enough to believe her clumsy chicanery.) And as was the trademark with many 90s movies and TV shows (e.g., "Parker Lewis Can't Lose," "Ally McBeal," etc.), none of the characters in the plot acts naturally: just about everyone is cartoonish and ridiculous in some way. Norville is fantastically stupid sometimes; Sidney Mussburger is over-the-top malign; Amy Archer sports a bizarre accent whose nature seems to change from scene to scene; Buzz the elevator guy is so manic as to seem hopped up on coke; even Moses and Aloysius come off as ontological heavyweights given their respective roles in human affairs. Only Bruce Campbell's Smitty, another reporter working alongside Amy, seems more or less normal.

In terms of symbols, the movie seems obsessed with watches and clocks and time, almost as if this were a Christopher Nolan film. The skyscraper clock's needle is often seen sweeping its shadow across Sidney Mussburger's office; Mussburger's watch and ticker-tape machine do their own orbits and spirals; Moses the caretaker tells us he's maintaining the huge clock's gears, but in his language, you can hear that he's the maintainer of all the orbits of everything around us, a benevolent presence who keeps it all going 'round. Norville, in a romantic moment with Amy, invokes the ideas of karma and past lives as he speculates that he and Amy might once have been, respectively, an ibex and a gazelle, nuzzling and picking insects off each other. But at the same time, almost the entire story takes place during December of 1958 (except for a few seconds into 1959 and a voiceover narration by Moses that relates Norville's future), implying that all of these orbits and arcs might be happening, but we'll be privy only to a small slice of it all—a fraction.

Many of the events in the story also seem to be Providence-driven. The newspaper with the want ad following Norville out the door; the kid who starts the hula-hoop craze and boosts Hudsucker Industries' stock; Moses' uncanny knowledge of Amy's personal life, misguided ambitions, and misconceptions regarding Norville; the miracle of time-stoppage as the most obvious sign that Moses is watching out for Norville (God loves drunkards and fools, yes?). The overall impression is of a narrative that suggests the good folks of the world, and maybe the bad folks too, are being quietly supervised, shepherded, even protected.

The movie's metaphysics did leave me with questions, though: (1) if Moses stopped time, why was Norville still able to move, why was the snow still falling, and how could the angelic form of Waring Hudsucker float and talk? No temporal flow, no movement. (2) Traditional Christianity frowns on suicide, claiming the person who does such a thing is condemning him- or herself to hell, but Waring Hudsucker descends to Norville as a happy angel. Maybe Hudsucker got the Hollywood treatment...? Even Robin Williams's "What Dreams May Come" was braver than that: in that movie, people who commit suicide do indeed damn themselves, but it's never claimed that God does this. It's a self-inflicted fate.

But as much as "The Hudsucker Proxy" is a cosmic fairy tale or morality play, I still see it as fundamentally a great date movie. So cuddle up with your best beloved, enjoy the lovely Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia by Khachaturian, and have a fun 111 minutes. And you'll be happy to know that the movie, despite bombing in theaters, has since become a cult classic, joining the pantheon of great Coen brothers' films. I've seen less than half of the Coens' filmography; sometime soon, I'll have to remedy that.