Raising Arizona (1987)

 

Raising Arizona

“Raising Arizona” is the first movie on the List from Ethan and Joel Coen. The Coen brothers is a remarkable unit in the film industry who, like Powell and Pressburger back in the forties, make standout movies that are entirely their own. We often talk about a Coen brother movie and understand it to be that very specific kind of movie with unique elements that nobody can emulate. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal taste but as with Hitchcock, you have a fairly good idea what you are in for up front. “Raising Arizona” is very much a Coen brothers movie.

Herbert I. “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) is a repeat offender who cannot miss an opportunity for robbing convenience stores. Every time he is back in jail, he gets his mugshot taken by “Ed”, short for Edwina (Holly Hunter). This happens so often that eventually Hi proposes to Ed and she accepts.

Ed and Hi gets settled in some ramshackle shed of a home in the middle of nowhere, Arizona. Ed wants a baby, but eventually learns she is barren. Due to Hi’s criminal record they cannot adopt so when they learn that a local rich furniture tycoon, Nathan Arizona Sr., gets quintets, they decide to take one of them as he obviously has plenty. Nathan Arizona Jr. becomes very valuable with a reward of 25,000$ for bringing him back and several parties take an interest in the little boy, including Hi’s strange boss and wife (Sam McMurray and Coen regular Frances McDormand), two escapees from the local prison and old friends of Hi, Gale (another regular, John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) as well as the mysterious badass bounty hunter Smalls (Randall Cobb), who hates little things.

The result is a chase and hunt that must be seen to be believed.

“Raising Arizona” plays out as a comedy. Not because the plot is particularly comedic, but because the characters are completely left field. If you set oddball character in regular roles and let it play out, you get the recipe for a Coen brothers movie and that is exactly what we get here. Sure, there are some setups and some... not quite believable situations, but largely the story and movie is character driven. It is strange and wacky because the characters do or say what such oddball characters would be doing or saying. The Coen brothers simply let it play out with no filter. Hi has little backbone and acts impulsively because that is the character he is. Same with Ed. She is emotional and really wants a child, so she does what she does. Gale and Evelle are scatterbrained fools, so they enthusiastically do a lot of stupid shit. Because it all is so far from normal, the situations become rather extreme and so the comedy lies in where that takes us.

It is easy to sit on the side and think that all this is awfully silly and these people must be stupider than toast bread, but there is always that thread of normality that anchors a Coen brothers movie in the real world and, as in “Burn after Reading”, although the characters are completely out there, we can recognize something in them, at least their emotions and motivations. They just act out what we would normally supress. With that anchor we can actually relate and recognize and it becomes funny rather than weird.

While this is a typical description of a Coen brothers movie, it is particularly true of “Raising Arizona”. The pace is faster than the typical Coen brothers movie and maybe that is the only reservation I have with the movie. It is almost too fast. That works fantastic in the chase scenes, but in the character building part, the pacing makes the movie cartoonish and the above mentioned thread becomes too thin.

I liked the movie, but I also expected it to be more fun than it actually was. The Coen brothers went all in on this one and maybe they should have restrained themselves a bit, grounding the movie a little better. But then again, that is what makes a Coen brothers movie fly.