The Hudsucker Proxy: What the new year is all about, Charlie Brown.
With the Christmas season, there is a plethora of movies to choose from. Some that capture the spirit of the season, from the classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Miracle On 34th Street. Others are romances like The Shop Around The Corner and Love, Actually. Then there’s Christmas action movies like Die Hard or anything Shane Black ever wrote. There’s even room for comedies like National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or (an overlooked favorite) The Ref.
But a week after Christmas, and the pickings are slimmer. There are movies about New Years Eve parties (200 Cigarettes, New Yeas Eve), movies where the New Year is a specific plot device (Money Train, Trading Places) and even movies that have a pivotal scene on New Year’s Eve (The Godfather Part 2 and When Harry Met Sally) but very few movies about what the new year represents to us.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Coen Brothers
It's 1958 -- anyway, for a few mo' minutes it is. Come midnight it's gonna be 1959. A whole 'nother feelin'. The New Year. The future...
Yeah ole daddy Earth fixin' to start one mo' trip 'round the sun, an' evvybody hopin' this ride 'round be a little mo' giddy, a little mo' gay...
All over town champagne corks is a-poppin'.
Over in the Waldorf the big shots is dancin' to the strains of Guy Lombardo... Down in Times Square the little folks is a-watchin' and a-waitin' fo' that big ball to drop...
They all tryin' to catch hold of one moment of time... to be able to say -- 'Right now! This is it! I got it!'
'Course by then it'll be past.
But they all happy, evrybody havin' a good time.
Well, almost everybody. They's a few lost souls floatin' 'round out there.
Now if ya'll ain't from the city, we have something here called "the rat race." Got a way of chewing folks up so that they don't want no celebrating, don't want no cheerin' up, and don't care nothing 'bout no New Year's.
This one's Norville Barnes.”
And with that opening, the film begins, and I gotta tell you, it gets me every time.
The Hudsucker Proxy is about the rise and betrayal of a young fresh faced kid off the bus from Muncie, Indiana, Norville Barnes, played by a young, wide-eyed Tim Robbins. Norville arrives in the big city and gets a job at the lowest point, the mail-room of Hudsucker Industries. At the same time, the founder and President of the company, Wearing Hudsucker (Charles Durning), interrupts a board meeting to leap out the window of the 44th (45th, counting the mezzanine) to his death. When the board learns that Wearing’s shares of Hudsucker stock will be available to the public in one month, Janurary 1, their shock turns to horror. But vice-president Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman, in one of the greatest moustache- twirling roles of all time) has a plan: Get an idiot, place him as president, depress the stock worth, then buy up all of the shares once the new year hits and vote the idiot out. Now if only they can find an idiot...
Jennifer Jason Leigh rounds off the cast as Amy Archer, a brassy, cynical reporter who goes undercover as Norville’s secretary to expose the new president of Hudsucker Industries as the moron everybody believes he is. The problem is, while naive, Norville isn’t an idiot. In fact, Norville has a million dollar idea that’ll put Huducker back on top.
Naturally, everybody is skeptical, except for Mussburger. What better way to sink Hudsucker stock? So Hudsucker Industries goes forward with the production of the.... dingus.
In an amazing sequence, we see the idea go from idea to prototype to the cost analysis to the naming to the phenomenal overnight success of...
Naturally, this success doesn’t sit well with the board, and Mussburger must put more insidious plans in place to oust poor Norville, whose success has gone to his head just when Amy was starting to believe in his goodness. I don’t want to give the rest away, but I will say that the Coen Brothers made this as a tribute to the legendary director Frank Capra.
Anybody who has seen any of Capra’s films (his 2 most famous being It’s A Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) will recognize that the Coen Brothers were writing a love letter to the filmmaker when they made The Hudsucker Proxy. With its themes of miracles, darkness vs light, belief in goodness being more powerful than cynicism, hope overcoming hopelessness, and it never being too late for new beginnings, as well as use of the “Capra Myth”: ‘that individual courage invariably triumphs over collective evil’, I think they succeeded.
So this New Year’s Day, maybnewe before the brunch but after the Advil, I cannot recommend a movie higher than The Hudsucker Proxy for a comforting dose of hope for the new year.
