Despite its lushly shimmering sets and costumes, The Hudsucker Proxy is cold and businesslike at heart. Actually, the problem with this latest offering from the gifted Coen brothers (director Joel and producer Ethan) is that it has no heart. Instead it is a methodical dissection of the populist comedies made by Frank Capra and Preston Sturges in the '30s and '40s.
The setting here is an Oz-like New York City in 1958, where a midwestern galoot (Robbins) arrives hoping to make it big with his invention, the hula hoop. He is plucked almost immediately from the mailroom of the giant Hudsucker Industries and named president, the dupe in a stock manipulation scheme cooked up by greedy board members. Smelling a story, a hotshot reporter (Leigh) gets herself hired as Robbins's secretary. She, of course, falls in love with him, just as Jean Arthur did with Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Barbara Stanwyck did with Cooper in Meet John Doe, both movies from which Hudsucker steals shamelessly.
The goings-on here matter not a whit, since the Coens so patently don't care about their characters. Robbins is appealing but sweats to stir up the froth. Leigh, an actress who has shown real comic flair elsewhere, is way sour, bashing through every scene as if doing a bad imitation of Katharine Hepburn circa Bringing Up Baby. And Newman, as the board's ringleader, seems at sea, attempting to play a character in a movie concerned only with archetypes. (PG)
Duane Martin, Leon, Tonya Pinkins, Tupac Shakur, Marlon Wayans
It's not saying a lot to call this the Most Valuable Picture among this season's crop of basketball movies. But convoluted, egregiously violent and vulgar though it is, director Jeff Pollack's first feature at least has a serious point: the damaging tendency of inner-city black youngsters to become obsessed with basketball.
Martin, only 6 feet tall but a former player at New York University who turned to acting after he couldn't cut it as a pro, plays a star point guard at a high school in an unspecified city. He's an arrogant, selfish punk of a player, but he's being scouted by Georgetown University as well as by a street team led by a scummy drug dealer, the rapper Shakur.
Pollack shows little feel for the game, displaying a lazy tendency to treat dunks as the only interesting plays in basketball. The game sequences are ludicrously violent.
Pinkins plays Martin's concerned single mother with more energy than subtlety, especially after she gets involved with Leon, a former local basketball hero who has returned to the neighborhood to work as a security guard. Wayans, flouncing like a female impersonator, is Martin's best pal. Shakur, affecting a Wesley Snipes hauteur with none of Snipes's style, makes a flimsy kind of thug.
Pollack and cowriter Barry Cooper throw in a bundle of melodramatics that beg the central question of whether Martin and Leon might have been better off not being able to play basketball. C'est le cinéma: all's mediocre that ends mediocre. (R)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Ralph Novak.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
