The knock on the Coens, particularly early in their career, is that they’re all brain and no heart, masterful technicians who make dazzling, inventive, and dizzyingly creative movies populated almost exclusively by characters not worth caring about. That was certainly the tone of much of the criticism directed toward 1994’s The Hudsucker Proxy, a simultaneously loving and scathing homage/parody of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra screwball comedies. Roger Ebert wrote of the film, “Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire.”
