9th Favorite Movie - The Hudsucker Proxy

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

Everybody has one.

A movie that you absolutely love… a movie that you have seen so many times that you can quote it almost verbatim… a movie that you could watch pretty much any day, anytime… a movie that most people have never even heard of. For Bethany, it is Big Trouble. Geoff B has I Heart Huckabees. Jessica D has A Goofy Movie. The Hudsucker Proxy is my “diamond in the rough”.

Like any Coen brothers movie, The Hudsucker Proxy features great writing, witty dialogue, cartoon-like characters and a cartoon-like feel. It's as if what you are watching is not completely grounded in reality (think Raising Arizona or O Brother Where Art Thou?). In these regards, The Hudsucker Proxy resembles an episode of The Simpsons more than any other film that I can think of. Unlike most Coen brothers movies, The Hudsucker Proxy features neither John Goodman nor Frances McDormand. But it does have Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Steve Buscemi, Bruce Campbell (he made the Evil Dead movies) and the dad from Frasier.

The story surrounds Hudsucker Industries, a big corporation in New York City. Paul Newman is the #2 in charge, advisor to Mr. Hudsucker himself. One day a young, ambitious, and naïve Tim Robbins arrives to town, freshly graduated from business college. He is looking for a job – any job – but finds that his degree doesn’t help much. Everyone is looking for someone with experience. I first saw this movie when I was looking for a job after moving to Fresno, and discovered that my college degree did not mean as much as I thought it would. I related to this movie immediately, and whenever I watch it I am taken back to my experience of hitting a new city and feeling like I had something to offer… but after submitting over a hundred resumes and getting no calls, beginning to doubt I really had anything to offer. This film is a lesson on dealing with failure and success.

Eventually, I found a job at Fresno State and Tim Robbins is hired at Hudsucker Industries, where he hopes to move up but has to start at the bottom (he literally works in the basement of Hudsucker Industries as a mail clerk). On his first day on the job, tragedy strikes the man at the top of Hudsucker and a new CEO is needed. Paul Newman (who gets to play the villain in this film) appoints Tim Robbins to be the new boss with the hope that his inexperience and incompetence will deflate the stock so that he and the rest of the nefarious board members can buy it up for themselves, fire Robbins, and appoint Newman as the new CEO. It turns out that Robbins has something to offer after all – “you know, for kids!” The awkward title of the film (a 'proxy' is someone who is somehow controlled by another - like a patsy or a puppet) I believe is the main reason why the film flopped at the box office and continues to be ignored.

Within this movie is:

*The best 5 minute economics lesson you will ever find (high school teachers take note).

*The feel of a screwball comedy from the 1940’s like His Girl Friday with Jenifer Jason Leigh doing her best Audrey Hepburn impression of the fast talking, wise-cracking girl who can hold her own against the fellas.

*One of my favorite openings in cinema: a long, slow, majestic zoom throughout the snowy skyscrapers of NYC that ends on Robbins about to jump off the top of the Hudsucker building. (I even like this this opening more than Raising Arizona’s).

So, if you like Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and The Big Lebowski, I urge you to check out The Hudsucker Proxy.