30 Minutes on: "The Hudsucker Proxy" | MZS

The sunny idealism and ultimate expression of faith in humanity echoed Frank Capra—in particular his 1946 classic "It's a Wonderful Life," which, like "Hudsucker," is about a man who tries to commit suicide on a snowy holiday evening only to be miraculously saved. The eccentric characters speaking in colorful hard-boiled patois was pure Preston Sturges. But the enormous building interiors, interlocking gears, dramatic silhouettes and spectacular shots of miniature cityscapes (complete with multiple layers of gently falling snow, which wasn't easy to do elegantly before the refinement of CGI) take their cues from comedies about the  oppressiveness of urban-industrial life: "Playtime," "Brazil," "Modern Times," "Metropolis." Officially, the budget was $25 million, the Coens' biggest up until that point; some sources say it ended up being closer to $40 million. Today, adjusted for inflation, the movie would cost about twice that—but of course, the very idea of a major studio releasing a film like this today is laughable. It was an outlier in 1994, too. If action movie producer Joel Silver (the "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" series) hadn't championed this odd project, it's likely it never would have made it to screens long enough to be lambasted as indulgent, mean-spirited, cynical, and unfunny.

It's usually an overstatement to say that audiences  weren't ready for a film at the time of its first release, but in this case I think it applies—and maybe it still applies, because of the persistent belief that the Coens are misanthropic, cynical, are privately snickering at their characters, etc. In a lot of ways, the Coens are still misunderstood, despite winning multiple Oscars spread out over twenty-plus years and racking up a number of legit box office hits (including "O Brother Where Art Thou?" and their remake of "True Grit"). There's still a sense that they have a nihilistic streak, that they enjoy watching their characters suffer and be humiliated. I've never really felt that; I think they take a certain disgusted amusement in showing how cruel humankind can be, but that's not the same thing.

Also, I think they love innocent or naive people, as long as they aren't being cruel or self-serving, even if (maybe especially if) those characters are blithely stupid and just sort of skip through life as if it's a field of daisies. While watching "The Hudsucker Proxy" again on a big screen as part of a midnight movie series (of Christmas films, a sub-genre this really isn't an example of; maybe it snuck in because it opens and closes on New Year's Eve and has a lot of snow?) I was struck by what I perceived as a quality of lament, that in the words of a character in "Raising Arizona," sometimes it's a hard life for the little things. "The Hudsucker Proxy" is a spiritually attuned critique of capitalism, as grandiose as that probably sounds, specifically how the gears of the capitalist economy (visualized literally here, in those closeups of the clock's interior) tend to torment and emotionally grind up anyone who isn't viciously self-interested to start with. On its simplest level, the movie is saying that there's more to life than money, yet much of civilization (and specifically the post-World War II U.S. circa 1958) believes the opposite. Corny, maybe. But not wrong.