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Rating: Imagine taking a rookie, someone who just happened to be passing by, with no direction or skills, the village idiot, however you like. What would you have such a person do if you were in charge of a multinational company? You certainly wouldn't consider hiring him (go figure...) for any reason in the world, at most maybe someone to sort the mail delivery in the warehouse. But only if he’s been recommended by the emperor. You know, someone who holds the position of mega-galactic director in the work hierarchy, a Servelloni Mazzanti Vien dal Mare, so to speak.
Well, Norville is our man. He perfectly matches the characteristics mentioned above, with an added downside: he's truly dumb. "Not worth a damn." Tim Robbins, tall and awkwardly clumsy, wonderfully plays the protagonist of Mr. Hula Hoop ("The Hudsucker Proxy"), an unfairly underrated work in the filmography of the Coen brothers - Joel as director, Ethan as screenwriter - with Paul Newman in the role of the commander-in-chief. In this amusing comedy, where paradox and the grotesque are normal, and where time can be stopped and places and people embalmed, it happens that someone like Norville Barnes gets taken on as a mailroom clerk and finds himself running the whole company the next day. And what a company: Hudsucker Industries.
The giant in manufacturing toys and gadgets for the entertainment of an unspecified city in the United States. A place where if you don't increase turnover by millions of dollars from one year to the next, you’re kicked out and goodbye to hell. Now, why did such a thing happen? Only for one reason: the day before Norville’s arrival, the old president, a mummified relic, crashes by jumping from the hundredth floor of the building, and the subordinates, competitive sharks, need a patsy to put in the most important chair to bring the company to ruin and recapitalize. Who better than the fool? It will be Newman to make him undergo apprenticeship. But Norville has a surprise in store (even if he’s unaware of it): from a discarded plastic hoop, he invents the hula hoop, destined for great success among the joyful masses of the 60s. It is the consecration of the rookie. A man who happened to stumble upon a situation larger than himself. The film is splendid in depicting the climb to the upper echelons of an industry. Offices and skyscrapers painted with comic strip techniques, to magnify the sense of anguish and domination, the sudden fall of the old man: bursting into laughter at the dash towards the void and the inevitable crash to the ground after an equally noisy failure.
Newman is the mask of power, with the Coens’ mockery. Desks, clocks, the BIG COUNTDOWN CLOCK relentless, everything is taken to extremes. All to convey the idea of hierarchical order, a granite order, impossible to circumvent. But the Coens are there to dismantle it all. Jennifer Jason Leigh here is an enterprising girl who falls in love with Norville and, with a caregiver's instinct, helps him assert his ideas. She has a major problem: an uncontrollable verbosity, combined with continuous gesticulating, as if with St. Vitus Dance. But in the characters stretched to the extreme typical of the Coen geniuses, she makes sense too.
It reminded me a bit of "Trading Places," for the bet made at the expense of the homeless Eddie Murphy and the broker Dan Aykroyd.
Great Coens. Delightful.
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