Today an essay I wrote & edited about The Hudsucker Proxy ran over at Rogerebert.com. Today Philip Seymour Hoffman died. Today Eduardo Coutinho was killed. A few days ago it was Pete Seeger, Maximilian Schell and Miklós Jancsó. I have no energy to write. Nothing to say. I'm defeated by all of this. I'm going to post some thoughts I'd already written about Hudsucker because I want to do something with myself before I retire from today, content as I am to watch The Long Day Closes and not speak another word. It really was a shit day. Today we need cinema.
After years of hearing about what a joyless slog Intolerable Cruelty was, imagine my surprise when I discovered it was a delicious confectionary of expertly crafted wordplay and near-explosive levels of chemistry between its two quite flappable leads. "How had this happened?" I wondered, while laughing my ass off, "how could a film this good by America's cinematic sweethearts have been swept under the rug like that?" The Coen Brothers were at least used to that sort of disappointment. After all, they'd made The Hudsucker Proxy. Intolerable Cruelty is a delight, to be true, an homage to Howard Hawks, Leo McCary and Preston Sturges' comedies of remarriage centering appropriately enough on a divorce attorney who tastes his own bitter medicine and as well as it works just as well as tribute and stand alone comedy (George Clooney's comedic prowess never gets enough notice for my liking). Next to Hudsucker, however, Intolerable looks more like the work of Mitchell Leisen than Preston Sturges. Sturges was the genuine article in American comedy. In his best films, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail The Conquering Hero and Unfaithfully Yours (As long as we're sticking up for the underdog here I'll just say that Unfaithfully Yours is a gem and I will hear no one besmirch it), he balanced humour so bold you wonder how it slipped past the censors, scabrous satire of values unique to wartime America and romance that shot past heartwarming into gripping. He had such a perfect hand with sentiment that he could appear to be making fun of the very notion of it, even as he freely indulged. He was one of a kind. But leave it to The Coen Brothers to make a film that pretends to his throne and earns the right to sit there. Painstakingly crafted through nostalgia-colored glasses and set in a place we recognize as our past but in no definite moment (despite the assurance that we're in the 1958 of Coen favourite Separate Tables), corporate stooge Tim Robbins rockets to the top of a toy company despite having no knowledge of the job or that he's being set up for a literal and metaphorical fall by his handler, a never-sleazier Paul Newman, cashing in on his impossible-to-dislike irascibility and charm. The boardroom antics, Sturges-esque wordplay and bureaucratic chutes-and-ladders are hilarious, but once Jennifer Jason Leigh enters the story, this stops being a comedy no one laughed at and becomes a masterpiece whose failure isn't just baffling, it's a tragedy on par with the sinking of the Titanic, the execution of the Rosenbergs or the cancellation of Pushing Daisies. Leigh's portrayal of a savvy journalist who goes undercover to scoop Robbins' rise to fame mirrors Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town but without hiding her unscrupulousness so disingenuously as Frank Capra does. It's a testament to the Coen's writing and feather-light direction (rendered on resplendent art deco production design, for my money their best, through the prism of Roger Deakins dark-matter-heavy photography) that they pursue a route that out-bleaks famous Scrooges like Capra and Sturges, and still manages to seem more lighthearted than Meet John Doe or Unfaithfully Yours, which flirt with murder and suicide as aggressively as Leigh does with Robbins. Leigh's feisty journalist is a more endearing proto-feminist trouser-sporter than Cate Blanchet's Hepburn impersonation; better still, she brings a soft sexuality to her role that outstrips even the Claudette Colberts and Barbara Stanwycks of the golden age, and again, genuinely. Through the performance, through her palpably masked longing, through her robust personality. She maybe a shade of fast-talking-dames past, but she's a fully realized character, and if you don't want to marry her by the time the credits role, you must be a Franklin Pangborn character. Or worse, William Demarest. I still marvel at the level of detail that went into making Hudsucker Proxy such a loving, feel-good tribute to loving, feel-good comedies so dipped in sarcasm you could drown in it. And that's even without taking into account how fucking funny it is. It's that rare film that gets nearly everything right (wouldn't be on this list if it were actually perfect). When the film failed at the box office, I bet Preston Sturges took a belt for both Joel and Ethan Coen in auteur heaven. "Don't worry, boys. They didn't get me, either."
I have a piece on Inside Llewyn Davis over at Mostlyfilm.com this week in time for its UK release. And below is what I wrote about it for my best of the year list. It would have been my best film of the year if I hadn't seen the other great dark, romantic period piece of last year, The Immigrant. Though that won't see proper release for another few months. The thing about Llewyn Davis is that even having said all I've said, there's an inexhaustible quality to the film; you could write ten thousand words a day for a month and still it would reward repeat viewings. For instance I never got around to mentioning until right now that every single song in the film is about leaving and dying. That Llewyn's journey is toward annihilation. Toward a dark, uncertain tomorrow. It rejects the future. It rejects anyone else's notion of success. It rejects bullshit. No film has ever shown me how I, we, live today. If it can't say anything about the future it's because none of us know and we're all scared. The film's finest moment of reflection comes in a road-side diner. Llewyn sits opposite two strangers, miles from home or fortune, in a room echoing the sound of passing cars like the howls of rage and disappointment he's been hearing all his life, racing by like every single opportunity he's missed. And he's here. Three hours from Chicago, in the blinding dark.
"Guys, we can't ALL identify with Llewyn Davis." wrote Matt Prigge after a few weeks of everyone in the world walking out of Joel & Ethan Coen's latest dark night of the soul and feeling like they'd lived some part of it before. In defense of everyone else, if you're a man who's as used to failure as success, or more accurately, have gotten so used to failure that success must be taken in microscopic doses, you understand what it means to be Llewyn Davis. Who's Llewyn Davis? He's the wrong cat. He could have made it but the pool was too full of contenders just like him who knew how to play the game a little better, or didn't know there was a game to play. Davis knows only too well that the game is real and rigged to boot. Anyone else who ever figured this out and said "no" was going to get an extra barb in their heart whenever he slips and falls, whenever he realizes his loved ones are getting fucked over, whenever he pushes his family away, everytime he nails one of his songs to no applause, and especially when he sits at that lunch counter with no money to his name, taking his feet gently out of his sopping wet shoes hoping they'll dry faster. That particular close-up broke my heart in six places. I lost count of the injustices he suffered that I'd also lived through; when I left it was into pouring rain, feeling like there was lead in my shoes. If there's solace, and there is, it's that the Coen Brothers know how to render the struggle for acceptance and the cruelty of fate better than just about anyone. They've returned to the colour palette that made Hudsucker Proxy feel immortal; director of photography Bruno Delbonnel's humane camera turning even the worst demons on Llewyn's shoulder into angels. And then there's the music. I'm definitely someone who's had more than his fill of Marcus Mumford and have on occassion hoped he would pack up his guitar and leave me alone, but his voice works as the broken promise of achievement. That radio-ready voice could and may well have been Llewyn's ticket to fame, but he'll never know that world. All he has is the bittersweet sound of Mumford (or Mike Timlin) to taunt him. Nevermind that it's their saddest screenplay, their most breath-taking evocation of any time period and that in Oscar Isaac one of the greatest performances they've ever directed, the Coens made me understand and even come to appreciate Mumford's voice. If I didn't already think this was their best film, that fact alone would have pushed it into classic territory. Forget that, though, it's too personal. Inside Llewyn Davis combines the lovely Folkways-styled soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the often terrifying depths of human behavior, drive and solitude of No Country For Old Men, the Job-like suffering and hysterical dark humour that drove A Serious Man, the frustration and injustice at the heart of The Man Who Wasn't There and somehow manages to keep alive the romantic worldview that kept Hudsucker afloat, not to mention following just three years after that film's 1958 New York setting. It's like a greatest hits record, but every cut sounds brand new. Who doesn't wish they could achieve that. In the meantime, we can settle for feeling like Llewyn Davis, putting the guitar down to finish the last verse unaccompanied knowing that no matter how good we're doing, there's no money in it.
