Review: Raising Arizona

 I've reviewed a couple of Coen Brothers films in the past, The Big Lebowski and True Grit. I've discussed the Coen Brothers' uniquely absurd style that combines the realistic with the fantastical. While True Grit didn't do this as much, The Big Lebowski certainly did and Raising Arizona is in a similar vein. It is considered by some to be Nicolas Cage's best film. Which isn't really saying much considering his recent run of awful movies, but there was once a time where Mr. Cage was a respected actor who in 1996 won a Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. This film was released in 1987 long before Cage lost all of his money and perhaps his mind. It's delightfully strange film that offers a modern take on the screwball comedy. At times this movie thinks it's being funnier than it is; quirkiness can only get one so far in terms of comedy. However, there are a few genuinely funny moments in this truly inspired script.

Nicolas Cage plays H.I. “Hi” McDunnough, a jailbird with a proclivity for robbing convenience stores. Holly Hunter plays Ed, a police officer who falls in love with over the years of taking his mugshots. After being released from prison one final time, Hi proposes to Ed and the two of them get married and set up a home of their own in a trailer in what looks like the middle of the Arizona desert. One day the two of them decide that they want to have a baby, but they quickly learn that they are infertile. They try to adopt a baby, but Hi's “checkered” past prohibit them from adopting. Then in the news they read about Nathan Arizona, a local furniture magnate, whose wife has give birth to quintuplets. In their desperation, the McDunnough's decide that a family with that many babies wouldn't miss one of them, so they devise a plan to kidnap one of the quints so that they can raise it as their own. There are a couple of subplots, one involving a hilarious John Goodman as one of Hi's old friends who has escaped prison along with his brother. Another subplot revolves around a semi-demonic motorcycle riding bounty hunter hired by Nathan Arizona to get his baby back. There are frantic scenes of slapstick comedy and some wonderful screwball moments as this bizarre cast of characters interact with each other and the world around them.

While the movie does have some funny moments, most of the time it feels as though the movie is being strange for strangeness sake. While in the stylistically similar Big Lebowski, much of the strangeness was used to eventually set up a joke. Here there are many moments where we expect something funny to happen and instead all we are left with is quirkiness. This is something the Coen's have since fixed in their writing and directing styles and it has dramatically improved their films. John Goodman is a delight, providing an incongruous mix of rough ex-con with a polite southern gentleman. One of the defining traits of this movie is the way the character's talk. The dialogue is sprinkled with so many “far be it from me's” and “in as muches” that some might be distracted by it and consider it unrealistic. I find this to be one of the more charming quirks that the Coen Brothers decided on. Helen Hunter does little more than be the whining wife who urges Hi to do the right thing (after she encourages to kidnap a child, of course). Nicolas Cage does a really good job as the ex-con struggling to adjust to life on the straight and narrow and struggling not only with the new responsibilities of being a husband and father but also with the temptation to return to his old life as a criminal. His hair in this movie is also a spectacle in and of itself. This film does struggle to decide what kind of world it inhabits. Is it the real world of trailer parks, pampers and 7-11s, or the fantasy world of characters from out of this world. The answer of course is that it occupies both worlds. That's just the way the Coens do things.