reviews

‘The Hudsucker Proxy’: The Coen brothers’ Underappreciated Screwball Comedy

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The Hudsucker Proxy poster art by Nate Gonzales

Despite getting mixed reviews and being a box office flop, The Hudsucker Proxy remains a funny and intelligent entry in the Coen brothers’ filmography.

By Koraljka Suton

In 1981, three years before he and his brother Ethan made their directorial and screenwriting debut with Blood Simple, Joel Coen worked as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s first feature film The Evil Dead. The Coen brothers and Raimi quickly became friends and, after discovering that they share a love of 40s Hollywood comedies, the trio started working on one such script together. This creative process continued over the course of the following years, as the three filmmakers collaborated on the screenplay for Raimi’s second film Crimewave (1985) and even moved in together during the post-production of Blood Simple. But although the script for the screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy was finished in 1985, production would have to wait, because, as Joel himself said, the movie would be expensive and he and his brother were not as popular yet, having just made an independent film. And so, the Coens shelved it for the time being and went on to make Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991).

Despite none of them becoming hits (Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink even flopped at the box office), the latter went on to win three awards at the Cannes International Film Festival (Best Director, Best Actor and the Palme d’Or), garnered three Academy Award nominations (Best Supporting Actor, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design) and opened to much critical acclaim. All of this resulted in Joel Silver, producer of films such as Lethal Weapon (1987), Predator (1987) and Die Hard (1988), deciding to buy the shelved screenplay for Silver Pictures and pitch it at Warner Bros. With a $25 million budget thanks to several production companies backing the project and the Coens being allowed complete artistic control, The Hudsucker Proxy could finally see the light of day in 1994. And even though the gestation period was a long one, it was well worth the wait.

Unfortunately, neither critics nor viewers thought so upon the film’s initial release. The Coen brothers’ fifth feature and their most expensive film up until that point, bombed at the box office (earning only $11 million) and the reviews were largely mixed, accusing it of prioritizing style over substance. Be that as it may, The Hudsucker Proxy was in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (and lost to none other than Pulp Fiction) and would eventually go on to attain a cult following.

Because while it is true that the film is highly stylized, it in no way lacks substance. The Hudsucker Proxy opens to the scene of one Norville Barnes (played by Tim Robbins), preparing to jump from a skyscraper window on the last day of 1958. This was, in fact, the very first image that the screenwriters came up with. And from there they just had to decide on the whys and hows—why he was there to begin with and how they were going to get him down. What they did was take us back to December 1st 1958, the day Norville’s rise and subsequent fall began.

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Hard Truths is a horror movie

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Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London. It’s also a tough watch.

By Jackson Weaver

I asked a group of film-lovers a question recently: what’s a movie you adored but never, ever want to watch again?

The responses, and the reasoning behind them, were fairly unsurprising. Requiem for a Dream, Come and See, Midsommar: powerful stories whose exploration of the extremes of human cruelty and suffering leave you strung out, squirming, taut and exhausted. And, most importantly, with no particular itch to return.

With Hard Truths, we may have another title for the pile. It’s a surprising addition given the subject matter — no war crimes, flyblown corpses or sewn-up bear carcasses are to be found in writer-director Mike Leigh’s newest effort. Instead, it’s an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London.

There’s Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), the stay-at-home adult son whose hidden life only rarely opens to show glimpses of repressed passion (a preoccupation with planes, pilots and all things flying) and suppressed rage (a middle finger pointed at a closed door).

There’s the father, Curtley (David Webber), a sad-eyed professional tradesman who spends more time being talked at by his surrogate work-son than talking with his actual offspring. There’s the gregarious but grieving aunt; the bubbly cousin stymied at work; and our central character, the mother, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste).

 

Pansy is immured in a fortress of bitterness she can’t help but reinforce. She’s a scowling serial complainer, the kind of dependably cruel customer who prompts senior retail workers to tap new hires on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take this one.”

Difficult character study

Pansy complains about never being invited to events, and complains when she’s asked to go. She furiously scrubs and cleans every inch of her home and body, then sleeps through the day out of exhaustion brought on by myriad non-specific health concerns.

She screams in wild terror when woken, reared-up and walleyed like a cornered animal — though why she would feel cornered in her aggressively beige, suburban home isn’t immediately clear. It’s not until she screams at a similarly cornered animal in her backyard — a terrified fox looking for a way out of the trap it willingly walked into — that the film’s conceit starts to crystallize. In both cases, they are backing away from Pansy’s husband.

As a character study, Hard Truths is painfully good. It might be the most accurate portrayal of borderline personality disorder ever put on screen, and could become as well-known for depicting that condition as No Country for Old Men is for representing psychopathy. In fact, Hard Truths ruminates so incessantly and incisively on the type of person whose irrational fear of abandonment leads to emotional explosions that it could find use as a shorthand. Instead of lengthy pamphlets or uncomfortable conversations, worried relatives could ask: “Just curious, have you seen Hard Truths?”

Michele Austin (right) with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths.
Michele Austin, right, appears as Pansy’s sister Chantelle in Hard Truths. (Bleeker Street)

If it sounds sparse in terms of story, that’s because it is. Other than Pansy and her sister planning and re-planning a visit to their mother’s grave, Hard Truths is hard up for a plot. It instead rests on the power of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, and the authenticity of the backgrounds she and her surrounding cast represent.

The first, as a woman trapped in a domestic nightmare of her own making, is relentlessly compelling. Jean-Baptiste puts in the tireless work of bringing Pansy to life; not only as a curmudgeon, but one so ensnared by her patterns she can’t pull back from them — even as she watches them destroy her.

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Michael Caine and working-class stories in British cinema

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In the 1950s, the emergence of ‘angry young men’ writers and kitchen sink dramas like ‘Look Back in Anger’, led to an increase in working-class representation.

By Aimee Ferrier

For many years, the lives of working-class British people were invisible on screen. Not only that, but actors from working-class backgrounds were hard to come by, thus meaning that a large chunk of Britain’s screen icons were privately educated or well-connected figures. This imbalance within the industry prevented authentic stories from being told, silencing the voices and experiences of a massive group of the British population.

Posh actors dominated the screens with their received pronunciation accents that asserted them as well-educated figures. “The working-class person always had to have an accent before, was often a joker, and peripheral,” actor Rita Tushingham told The Independent. Indeed, there were hardly any working-class protagonists or stories about the plight of poverty, unemployment, governmental disillusionment, or abortion.

Then, in the 1950s, the ‘angry young men’ movement emerged within the world of literature, theatre, and film, changing everything. Post-war, a new generation of young people were feeling dismayed by the widespread levels of unemployment and dead-end jobs that forced people to work to the bone for little money. Many people were unable to afford nice places to live, and countless individuals were suffering from PTSD, grief, and a sense of malaise.

People’s childhood towns and cities were now destroyed by bombs, leaving what was once a community in ruins, and this physical representation of destruction and emptiness mirrored the emotions many were feeling at the time. This disillusionment came to a boiling point in the mid-1950s as people struggled to move forward and prosper in a country still ravished by the effects of war and economic disparity.

However, with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, a voice finally cut through. Michael Caine once discussed the play with The Guardian, explaining: “When it changed, it was all down to the writers. They started writing for working-class people and it made all the difference. Playwrights like Noël Coward, someone I later knew very well, wrote middle-class parts for the stage. If you had a cockney accent you were going to play the butler. But John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger in 1956, and that, I believe, was the first major piece of theatre that had a working-class hero.”

Things were beginning to change, with the stories of working-class people making more of a dent in popular culture than ever before. Other writers that were dubbed part of the ‘angry young men’ movement (although most hated this term) included Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and John Braine, whose stories really changed the game in regards to the representation of normal British people and their struggles.

At the same time, the Free Cinema documentary movement helped to pave the way for depictions of British working-class issues on screen. These filmmakers—including Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz—used a cinema vérité style to cheaply chronicle elements of working-class life to great success.

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Dr Strangelove director Sean Foley on Steve Coogan’s extraordinary performance

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By Lauren Murphy

It started with a phone call. “I thought it was a hoax,” Sean Foley says. “But in my mind’s eye I could immediately see that this could be really fun. It was one of those amazing phone calls that sometimes happen in our business, from the two producers — who basically said, ‘Do you wanna adapt and direct Dr Strangelove for the stage?’”

Foley, an experienced theatre director, writer and actor, jumped at the chance to work on the first-ever stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The Cold War satire, which stars Steve Coogan in multiple roles (originally played by Peter Sellers in the film), opened in London’s West End in October and will transfer to Dublin for a run at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in February.

“It’s an amazing story,” Foley says, nodding. “Kubrick himself called it a ‘nightmare comedy’, which is a great phrase, I think. So I was attracted to the material and the challenge of being able to stage something like that. It’s basically a comedy about the end of the world.”

 

Sean Foley in an empty theater.
Sean Foley jumped at the chance to work on the first-ever stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic
KRIS ASKEY

Foley co-adapted the script with Armando Iannucci, a man who is well versed in satirical and political fare, having created, written and directed the TV series The Thick of It and Veep, films In the Loop and The Death of Stalin, as well as co-creating (with Coogan) one of culture’s most enduring comedy characters in Alan Partridge.

“I didn’t want all the blame if it went wrong,” Foley says, laughing. “I’d known Armando for a very long time, but we’d never worked together, so I thought he’d be an absolutely perfect person to work with on the adaptation. I gave him a bell and it took him a nanosecond to say yes. It could be a poisoned chalice if you get it wrong, but I think we both felt we could bring something to it in remaking it for another medium, and in remaking it for a new audience.”

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