Half-Baked in Corporate Hell

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

So far, it's been a great year for Art Deco. The hype for Barbra Streisand's auction of her extensive Deco collection has been almost as impressive as the objects themselves. And now the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, have made a movie in which the massive moderne settings by production designer Dennis Gassner and the glowing light cast on them by cinematographer Roger Deakins make you wonder how a decorative style at once so sleek and warm could ever have fallen out of favor.

But therein lies the trouble with The Hudsucker Proxy, which is the handsomest American movie in years. You really shouldn't be lost in the history of architecture and home furnishing at the movies. Nor should you be wondering why a film supposedly set in 1958, when classic Deco pieces were mostly to be found at the Goodwill, actually evokes aspects of the previous three decades. Most especially you should not be musing about why a movie that wants to be a funny social commentary -- the press kit hopefully evokes the names of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges -- is shot in the impersonal expressionist manner that was literally foreign to these American masters, a style that was favored by glum and self-important German directors like Fritz Lang.

This choice is particularly odd since the film is about the kind of naif Capra adored and Sturges affectionately satirized. His name is Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) and he's plucked out of the mailroom and made president of Hudsucker Industries when its founder (Charles Durning) commits spectacular suicide. You can imagine either Jimmy Stewart or Eddie Bracken in the part, but Robbins has a tricky modernist charm all his own. And you can just as easily imagine Edward Arnold as the evil genius of the board of directors, Sidney J. Mussburger, although Paul Newman brings a sprightly spite to the role.

Mussburger's plan is to let dopey Norville, an all too recent graduate of Muncie College of Business Administration, run the company into the ground so that he and his colleagues can pick up shares in a basically sound company on the cheap. The tough newspaper gal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who's supposed to expose the fraud and falls for Norville is distinctly Capraesque too. There's even angelic intervention and a touch of time warping, devices Capra employed in It's a Wonderful Life.

But despite such fanciful touches, Capra, a master of motion within the frame, never lost touch with reality, which is sadly not the case with the stylish but bloodless Hudsucker Proxy. Most important, he and Sturges, ever the sentimental wise guy, were at heart children of the light. The Coens (Joel directs, Ethan produces and they write together, this time with Sam Raimi) are creatures of darkness. At their best (the great Miller's Crossing or the dizzy Raising Arizona) they are brilliant satirists of the national propensity for violence. But here they have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.