director
Joel Coen
screenwriters
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen
producer
Ethan Coen
music
Carter Burwell
cinematographer
Barry Sonnenfeld
editor
Michael R. Miller
cast
Nicolas Cage ('Hi' McDonnough)
Holly Hunter (Edwina 'Ed' McDonnough)
Trey Wilson (Nathan Arizona, Sr.)
John Goodman (Gale)
William Forsythe (Evelle)
Sam McMurray (Glen)
Frances McDormand (Dot)
Randall 'Tex' Cobb (Leonard Smalls)
T.J. Kuhn (Nathan Junior)
Lynne Dumin Kitei (Florence Arizona)
M. Emmet Walsh (Machine Shop Guy)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 94m
u.s.
release: March 13,
1987
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other coen
bros. films
reviewed on this website:
- barton
fink
- the
big lebowski
- blood
simple
- fargo
- the
hudsucker proxy
- intolerable
cruelty
- the
ladykillers
- the
man who wasn't there
- miller's
crossing
- o
brother, where art thou?
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Never ones to rest on their
laurels, Joel and Ethan Coen followed their exercise in stylistic
deadpan Blood
Simple with one of the looniest comedies on God's green
earth. For Serious Coens (okay, sometimes only semi-serious),
I take down my videocassette of Miller's
Crossing; for Wacky Coens, I throw on either The
Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona. I can never decide
which of the two is funnier; it depends largely on which one
I've seen most recently, and, cheesy as it is to imagine it,
I'd love to see a team-up between Jeff Bridges' Jeff "The
Dude" Lebowski and Nicolas Cage's H.I. "Hi" McDonnough
-- I challenge any Coens fan not to indulge that imaginary
movie premise for a moment.
Raising Arizona is amiably gonzo pretty much nonstop.
In the wrong hands, that could be irritating or, at the very
least, miss the mark (I refer you to the little-seen Crimewave,
written by the Coens with their friend Sam Raimi, and directed
by Raimi, for an example of a screwball farce that's fun enough
but strains too hard for true inspiration). But the Coens' first
smart move is to have the story told by Hi in a sober, hilariously
fancy narration ("Her insides were a rocky place where my
seed could find no purchase"); their second smart move is
to make everyone onscreen as colorful as M. Emmet Walsh's
Loren Visser in Blood Simple.
Hi, a repeat offender (he holds
up convenience stores with an unloaded shotgun), is seen at the
beginning going through the legal system three times, gradually
falling in love with Edwina (Ed for short), the police officer
who takes his mug shot. Holly Hunter does her tiny-determined-tough-woman
bit as Ed, but she's seldom done it better; when it turns out,
after Hi and Ed have married, that she can't get pregnant, Ed
decides to steal one of the famous "Arizona Quints"
fathered by local furniture-outlet owner Nathan Arizona (Trey
Wilson). Hi, of course, will be the one doing the stealing, and
when he initially backs down, Hunter's knife-edge tone of voice
tells you (and Hi) that they're not leaving until Ed gets what
she came for.
At home with the stolen quintuplet,
Hi and Ed try to work up the semblance of a normal family, but
their bubble is soon popped by two visitors: the brothers Gale
(John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe), Hi's buddies from
prison, who have escaped. The brothers are seen briefly in the
pre-credits sequence, but their true introduction is the rising-from-the-muck
scene, a parody of prison-escape numbers later redone (earnestly)
in The Shawshank Redemption. Gale and Evelle represent
the criminal lifestyle Hi wants to leave behind but half wants
to fall back into; Ed knows this and disdains the brothers on
sight. In his dreams, Hi is also pursued by what appears to be
a creature of his conscience -- a burly biker (Randall "Tex"
Cobb), frequently seen riding out of a flaming background, who
turns out to be a shady character hired by Nathan to track down
his baby.
This was the second of three
movies that future director Barry Sonnenfeld would shoot for
the Coens, and it's by far the most Raimi-esque. The camera rockets
around gleefully but also knows when to sit still for a comic-effect
static shot of, say, an expressionless Hi sitting next to a bawling
Ed at the doctor's office (her sadness isn't funny, but the composition
is). The Coens, taking their cue from the camera moves, encourage
almost everyone to play very broadly. Frances McDormand shows
more personality in five minutes as Ed's know-it-all friend Dot
than she did in the entirety of Blood Simple; John Goodman,
in his first of several Coen outings, spends a lot of time bellowing
but also knows what to do with lines like (in explanation of
why he and Evelle escaped) "We felt the institution no longer
had anything to offer us." And the late, great Trey Wilson
steals every frame he's in -- Nathan's impatient tirade against
the FBI ("They were jammies! They had Yodas an' shit
on 'em!") is a classic.
The one performer who plays
it more or less straight is, ironically, Nicolas Cage. Given
an absurd character with a goofy hairdo and sad mustache, and
deposited in the middle of a henhouse of loons, Cage really has
no choice but to play against the movie's crackpot reality.
Cage has the gift of being soulful and sincere no matter how
crappy the movie is, and here he's like a rebuke to the critics
who took the makers of Blood Simple to task for being
heartless. Hi is a romantic (if dopey) figure, and the movie
laughs at everything else but him; the Coens respect his dreams
of a settled life, though, of course, they can't help throwing
loud roadblocks in his way. Raising Arizona is probably
the gentlest movie the Coens have in them, and at least half
its gentleness comes from Nicolas Cage's sleepy drawl, as when
he introduces his stolen child to the TV: "Two hours a day
maximum, either educational or football so's you don't ruin your
appreciation of the finer things."
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