The Hudsucker Proxy
When does an indulgence become sour? I ask this because indulgence is the word that most immediately comes to mind at the finish of this film. And largely in a negative way. Closer to flippancy than resplendence. And yet the same word can be leveled at the last film I watched. Ocean's 12. A movie which I thought, on the merits, was not exactly good, and yet I had a good time with it. It's a weird pair of films to compare. The filmmaker is perhaps less so; it's not unreasonable to consider Soderbergh and the Coens in the same relative stratosphere, both in terms of longevity and breadth of work. HudSucker Proxy was made very early on by the Coens. Ocean's 12 was made perhaps at the peak of Soderbergh's cache. Where and for this being such an early film in their canon, the technical achievement is remarkable. This film looks and feels beautiful and striking in a way that I've described as obvious, but not unwelcome. One of the reasons why, deep down, I love the Oceans film so much is because you get the very strong sense that Soderbergh is cooking up for you the most delicious and expensive meal in the world. It is a project where he is alchemizing his pleasures and giving them to you, letting you get swept a lot in the exact same way he would be, and that is very much not the goal of The Hudsucker Proxy.
Frankly, it's difficult to tell what the goal of the film is beyond technical wonderment and perhaps a skewering of lesser film. One gets the sense that the Coens are making fun rather than having it. The pastiche here runs the gamut from boardroom drama to His Girl Friday, and speedruns the list of clichés, many of which are funny in isolation. The script is, if incoherent, extremely clever, peppered with one-liners and callbacks.
But... you leave the movie with a kind of unfulfillment. The Coens can both be humanistic, but I simply do not care about any single member of this group. What's worse, I'm not sure I'm supposed to.