The Hudsucker Proxy.

I suppose The Hudsucker Proxy might pass as satire or at least as a satirical fairy tale. It certainly qualifies as an overdesigned, fatuous bore.

Proxy is a modern variant of Candide. A business school graduate (Tim Robbins) is catapulted into the presidency of a big company through the machinations of a scheming executive (Paul Newman). An investigative reporter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) holds our innocent up to public ridicule, then falls in love with him. Through pluck, luck, and the intervention of an angel, our hero triumphs. Brechtian irony is intended here. If our hero needs an angel to bail him out, the world is an evil place, indeed.

But no Brechtian skill is in evidence. The style of this movie is German expressionism crossed with Mad magazine, potentially an interesting hybrid. But its creators, the Coen brothers--Ethan and Joel--strain, strain, strain for effects. You can tell that they want every scene to sing its virtuosity but I heard only screaming, literal and figurative. One cinematic trope that you have to endure repeatedly: someone in mid-shot shouts and the camera then zooms forward as if it would leap down the actor's throat.

The shots are so strenuously composed--crowds in V formation and so forth--that they look like the stills put in stagedirecting textbooks to teach novices how to group actors. At times, I thought I was looking at the director's storyboard preparation rather than the mounted scene.

The acting is overdesigned, too. Poor Leigh, a truly talented and steadily improving actress, has been ordered to imitate Katherine Hepburn and she wears the directorial decision like a straitjacket. John Mahoney, as an exasperated newspaper editor, has to snarl and sweat like all those actors in the 1930s' comedies who played the same part. Mahoney fumes dutifully but is not interesting. (How deftly Robert Duvall humanizes his comparable role in The Paper.) Even the great Paul Newman is reduced to monochromatic rasping and gloating. The others in the cast might as well have strings attached to their arms and legs for all the creativity or humanity they get to show. Only Tim Robbins manages to break through the robotic Coen regime with a sort of saintly goofiness. The look of moronic bliss on his face as he demonstrates a hula hoop is the only pleasurable memory I took away from this movie.

What's wrong about Coen moviemaking is clearly demonstrated by one of Proxy's cleverer sequences. Newman has fallen out of a high window and Robbins has caught him by his trouser legs. Will the material hold or will Newman drop to his death? Close-up of trouser stitches beginning to give way as Robbins pulls. Flashback: Newman's tailor asks the executive if he wants single or double stitching. Newman sneers that the tailor is only trying to make a buck and that the cheaper single stitching will do. Cut to: the stitches continuing to unravel; terrified look on Newman's face as he remembers sartorial decision. Second flashback: the tailor, alone, decides to put in double stitching for free because Newman is "such a nice man." Cut to: the stitches hold! Newman is saved!

Clever, huh? Yeah, but why does that tailor think that Newman is such a nice guy? We have seen him behave like a bastard to everyone, including the tailor. That's the trouble with the Coens. They can dream up neat stuff, but they never really think about their characters, their story, or their fundamental aims.

The Paper has no idiosyncratic style. There's no shot or sequence in it that makes you exclaim, "Pure Ron Howard!" But The Paper entertains. The Hudsucker Proxy, on the other hand, has directorial signature stamped on every frame. No one makes movies like the Coens do. No one should want to. Not even the Coens.