FILM: COEN HEADS

Joel and Ethan pay comic tribute to the '50s The Coen brothers tread such a fine line between the wittily surreal and the just plain bizarre that it's a wonder they don't fall into the pit of pomposity more often. Their last film (Joel directs, Ethan produces, and both write), Barton Fink, was an unmitigated disaster -- a pretentious movie ridiculing a man for his pretentiousness. But when they can keep the bulk of their work on this side of reality (as they did in Blood Simple and Raising Arizona), few filmmakers can match them for sheer cleverness. For the most part, their latest effort, The Hudsucker Proxy, manages to stay focused and funny without being dragged down by any weighty intentions. Ostensibly a loving but satiric homage to the kitsch of the late '50s, the movie is thoroughly incisive and biting. Unfortunately, every few scenes or so, Hudsucker starts to simply ape the style it's trying to parody. The film details the rapid rise and fall of one Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a recent graduate of the Muncie College of Business Administration who suddenly finds himself president of massive Hudsucker Industries after the previous head (Charles Durning) takes a leap out the 44th story window (45th, if you count the mezzanine) of the Hudsucker Building. The board of directors, led by carnivorous Sid Musberger (Paul Newman), promotes Norville out of the mailroom in hopes of driving the price of the stock down enough for them to buy a controlling interest. For a while, as the innocent Norville becomes caught in the bizarre machinations of the board, Hudsucker feels like a perverse cross between Terry Gilliam's Brazil, any Tim Burton film, and an old Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy picture like Desk Set. In fact, halfway through the movie Jennifer Jason Leigh turns up doing a near perfect Hepburn impression (with a few Bette Davis mannerisms thrown in for good measure) as Amy Archer, a spunky reporter out to expose Norville as a fraud. Unfortunately, from the moment Leigh appears on-screen, the entire tone of the movie gets thrown out of whack. Until then, Hudsucker does a wonderful job of gently mocking the uptight cheerfulness of '50s romantic comedies. But Leigh is so good in her standard chameleon job that she loses any sense of irony. While everyone else is playing the comedic subtext, she's playing it straight. Every time she appears, she throws Hudsucker's rhythms off. The other performers are more than game, however. Newman is in rare form as Musberger, a true shark of a man who's never without his trusty cigar (he even finds time to light up while dangling out an office window). And Tim Robbins continues to amaze. Rarely has an actor been able to go from goofy naivetZ (Bull Durham) to utter evil (The Player and Bob Roberts) and back again with such apparent ease. In addition to making a boob like Norville so likable, he even shows a real flair for physical comedy -- his attempt to extinguish a fire in Musberger's office is a piece of Chaplin-esque genius. The Coen brothers clearly had fun writing Hudsucker (with an assist from horror maven Sam Raimi, who was also largely responsible for the film's gorgeous visuals), and that sense of fun is infectious. It's hard not to smile at the cleverness of the dialogue (when describing Norville's invention of the hula hoop, Amy describes it as "a thing that could bring everyone together -- even if it keeps them apart spatially"). In addition, they do a wonderful job exposing some of the sillier cinematic conventions of the Eisenhower Era: the way time is compressed to an absurd degree (Norville's transition from mailboy to corporate exec to overnight sensation to Public Enemy #1 occurs between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve); the way any skill can be mastered in a minute (a boy picks up one of Norbert's hula hoops and is an instant wizard, even spinning it around his head); and the way everyone speaks at a mile a minute (there's even a rhyming elevator operator who never seems to stop to breathe). In the end, The Hudsucker Proxy is a fairly entertaining ode to a bygone era that occasionally gets too caught up in that era for its own good. Had Joel Coen gotten Ms. Leigh to cut loose a little, the overall tone would have been much more consistent and much more enjoyable.

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