It was a marriage made seemingly in Hell - uber-action producer Joel Silver holding the purse-strings for two of America's most idiosyncratic and innovative auteurs, Joel and Ethan Coen. In the event (and much to everyone's relief) The Hudsucker Proxy is still very much a Coen Brothers Film, just bigger.

Ingenue Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) arrives in New York in 1958, fresh out of business college in Muncie, Indiana. Norville is looking for work and, as luck would have it, Wearing Hudsucker (Charles Durning), chairman of Hudsucker Industries, has just taken a dive from the 44th floor of the Hudsucker Building. Sidney J. Mussburger (an excellent, cigar-chomping Paul Newman) needs a proxy to devalue company stock in a hurry and thinks he's found one in the mail room. But Norville has an idea he's been working on ("You know...for kids") and, in spite of Newman and mud-slinging, Pulitzer-winning journalist Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), makes the success of things that nobody wants.

The Coens have largely made a name for themselves by reinventing the golden age of American cinema and feeding it back to itself - film noir in Blood Simple, the gangster picture with Miller's Crossing, the whole industry in Cannes winner Barton Fink. Here they take on the screwball social comedy of Capra and Sturges, albeit erring more towards the latter over the often cornball sentimentalism of the former, even given the obvious parallels with the (lamentable) Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The excellent Tim Robbins is no James Stewart, and here we are glad of it. And while Leigh may not be Katherine Hepburn, most of the time she is more than capable of making you think she is with a crackerjack performance of sassy wit and comic timing that makes this possibly the best thing this intriguing actress has yet done.

Co-written with long-time collaborator Sam Raimi (who also shoots Second Unit), The Hudsucker Proxy seems more willing than before to revel in rather than transcend pastiche - there is something familiar, if exaggerated, about Dennis Gassner's Art Deco designs that reference nothing so much as Terry Gilliam in the mail room and offices of Hudsucker Industries, and, outside, re-imagine New York along similar lines to Burton's Batman. If this is the brothers' most expensive shoot to date, it shows.

Leigh and Robbins must, inevitability, fall for one another, and in doing so the picture has a slightly gassy second act that scores against both the bravura opening and a spectacularly good climax that knowingly and wittily quotes It's A Wonderful Life without it sinking under the weight of the comparison. And, as with earlier Coen work, it's often in the incidentals that the film works best - the brilliantly mounted montage of Norville's invention; Aloysius (Harry Bugin), the sinister little man who removes the names from office doors; Buzz (Jim True) the hyperactive elevator boy and first cousin to Barton Fink's Chet; and a wealth of well-judged cameos from the likes of Raimi himself, Jon Polito (so good in Miller's Crossing), Bruce Campbell, and a terrific Steve Buscemi. Regular composer Carter Burwell is on peak form, and Thom Noble edits with a sharp eye for the material.

The Hudsucker Proxy is, first and foremost, an entertainment, and as such lacks the bite of the Coens' last two films - each in their own way classics of recent American cinema - but all the same there's a cunning and a love to this material that makes it utterly irresistible.