"It's like opening day at a miniature golf course." – Pauline Kael (on "Raising Arizona")
The Coen's walk a tightrope between tragedy and comedy, between noir and screwball comedy. This is understandable: the chaotic nature of screwball meshes perfectly with the indeterministic nature of noir (noir is screwball without the comedy).
The difficulty is in maintaining a balance. Drift a little too much to one side and comedy wins, giving rise to infantile jokes, and the glib, mean-spirited tone of screwball. Drift too far to the other side, however, and you get stuff like "No Country For Old Men" and "Burn After Reading", in which we wallow in a cartoonish vision of noir, nihilism reduced to an aesthetic choice.
Like the Coen's best flicks, "Raising Arizona" lies somewhere in the middle. It's a wacky comic-book, but you feel for these cartoonish characters and their somewhat tragic tale.
Most of the Coen Brothers' films utilise reoccurring visual motifs (the hats in "Miller's Crossing", the tunnels in "A Serious Man", the hoops in "Hudsucker Proxy", the saucers in "The Man Who Wasn't There" etc). As "Raising" tells the story of a zany couple who kidnap a baby because they are not able to conceive children of their own, the chief motifs here are a more generalised swathe of birth imagery. Characters are "given birth" by puddles of mud, holes in the ground, are "reborn" from under objects and our entire cast of heroes is portrayed as being ridiculously childish. Even the film's villain, a mythical biker seemingly torn from the book of Revelations (or a "Mad Max" movie!), comes across as a big baby, the words "my mama didn't love me" tattooed to his flesh.
This biker's name, Leonard Smalls, is itself based on the character Lenny Smalls from John Steinbeck "Of Mice and Men", a retarded but powerful man-child who couldn't get close to things or people lest he destroy them with his big, dumb, baby grip. Unable to love or be loved, the film's apocalyptic biker - borne of atomic mushroom clouds and forever covered in smouldering, nuclear ash - is thus a vengeful version of Steinbeck's Mr Smalls, forever attempting to "get back at", not just his parents, but all parents. The film's title, "Raising Arizona", thus has a double meaning: raising a baby called Arizona and razing Arizona, the wacky cast's sunbaked, south-western state blown to hell.
Coupled to this vengeful man-child's parenticidal quest is the quest of "Raising Arizona's" hero, a dopey small-time criminal played by Nicholas Cage. Cage's mission is to "be reformed", to "end his criminal ways" and to "become a responsible father". In other words, he wants to grow up and stop being a child. The problem is, his wife can't conceive and so the only way he can "grow up and become a father" is to kidnap a kid.
And that's the absurd Catch-22 of the film. To stop being a child, Nick Cage has to kidnap a child, and kidnapping a child merely proves that he's still a silly man-child. Only the Coens could cook something like this up.
Like "No Country For Old Men", "Raising Arizona" ends with the recollection of a dream. Prior to this, our hero battles Lenny Smalls in an epic duel. Cage wins, but by then it's too late. Smalls, a precursor to "No Country's" Anton Chigurh, is the spirit of chaos embodied and conspiring against poor Nick Cage. Cage has no child, is unable to "stop being a baby", precisely because of Small's existence, in much the same way the omnipresent UFOs of "The Man Who Wasn't There" embody noir fate.
The film is heavily indebted to Preston Sturges, early screwballs and the 1938 comedy "Bringing Up Baby", but stylistically it branches off into wholly new territory. The Coens serve up a kind of "pop art" version of the Arizona desert, in which everything has an artificial look and fluorescent lighting makes the world look like a 24 hour convenience story.
Elsewhere the film's soundtrack is funny (yodelling and folk music), its characters are all live-action cartoons (modelled on the buffoonery of Warner animations and stuff like Woody Wood Pecker) and the Coens' dialogue is wonderfully eccentric ("Sometimes I get them menstrual cramps real hard", "Edwina's insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase", "Mighty fine cereal flakes, Mrs. McDonough"), though some passages do get tedious with their unnecessarily decorative speechifying.
More than Hitchcock, the Coens storyboard every inch of their films, lending "Raising Arizona" a look which resembles comic book panels, every shot locked into place, every image calculated and pre-planned. This gives the film a vivid style, every sequence storyboarded for maximum effect. Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld also makes excellent use of extreme high and low camera angles, wide angle lenses and gorgeous night time photography and/or locations. The film's compositions zap the eyeballs, and its camera work - gliding, always graceful - induces a certain aesthetic head-rush.
Mostly, though, the film exudes that mixture of charm and pathos that made "The Big Lebowski" so endearing. "Raising Arizona" may be a 95 minute Road Runner cartoon which mocks redneck culture (trailers, lawn chairs, accents, shot guns etc), but there's still something very sweet and likable about its characters. The irony is, it's the refusal of "troublesome" actors like Nick Cage, Steve Buscemi and Jeff Bridges to be "cartoons" which imbue the best Coen flicks with their warmth. These actors seem to occasionally, or inadvertently, rise above the Coen universe, disobeying the wills of their directorial noir Gods.
8.9/10 - Worth multiple viewings.
The Coen's walk a tightrope between tragedy and comedy, between noir and screwball comedy. This is understandable: the chaotic nature of screwball meshes perfectly with the indeterministic nature of noir (noir is screwball without the comedy).
The difficulty is in maintaining a balance. Drift a little too much to one side and comedy wins, giving rise to infantile jokes, and the glib, mean-spirited tone of screwball. Drift too far to the other side, however, and you get stuff like "No Country For Old Men" and "Burn After Reading", in which we wallow in a cartoonish vision of noir, nihilism reduced to an aesthetic choice.
Like the Coen's best flicks, "Raising Arizona" lies somewhere in the middle. It's a wacky comic-book, but you feel for these cartoonish characters and their somewhat tragic tale.
Most of the Coen Brothers' films utilise reoccurring visual motifs (the hats in "Miller's Crossing", the tunnels in "A Serious Man", the hoops in "Hudsucker Proxy", the saucers in "The Man Who Wasn't There" etc). As "Raising" tells the story of a zany couple who kidnap a baby because they are not able to conceive children of their own, the chief motifs here are a more generalised swathe of birth imagery. Characters are "given birth" by puddles of mud, holes in the ground, are "reborn" from under objects and our entire cast of heroes is portrayed as being ridiculously childish. Even the film's villain, a mythical biker seemingly torn from the book of Revelations (or a "Mad Max" movie!), comes across as a big baby, the words "my mama didn't love me" tattooed to his flesh.
This biker's name, Leonard Smalls, is itself based on the character Lenny Smalls from John Steinbeck "Of Mice and Men", a retarded but powerful man-child who couldn't get close to things or people lest he destroy them with his big, dumb, baby grip. Unable to love or be loved, the film's apocalyptic biker - borne of atomic mushroom clouds and forever covered in smouldering, nuclear ash - is thus a vengeful version of Steinbeck's Mr Smalls, forever attempting to "get back at", not just his parents, but all parents. The film's title, "Raising Arizona", thus has a double meaning: raising a baby called Arizona and razing Arizona, the wacky cast's sunbaked, south-western state blown to hell.
Coupled to this vengeful man-child's parenticidal quest is the quest of "Raising Arizona's" hero, a dopey small-time criminal played by Nicholas Cage. Cage's mission is to "be reformed", to "end his criminal ways" and to "become a responsible father". In other words, he wants to grow up and stop being a child. The problem is, his wife can't conceive and so the only way he can "grow up and become a father" is to kidnap a kid.
And that's the absurd Catch-22 of the film. To stop being a child, Nick Cage has to kidnap a child, and kidnapping a child merely proves that he's still a silly man-child. Only the Coens could cook something like this up.
Like "No Country For Old Men", "Raising Arizona" ends with the recollection of a dream. Prior to this, our hero battles Lenny Smalls in an epic duel. Cage wins, but by then it's too late. Smalls, a precursor to "No Country's" Anton Chigurh, is the spirit of chaos embodied and conspiring against poor Nick Cage. Cage has no child, is unable to "stop being a baby", precisely because of Small's existence, in much the same way the omnipresent UFOs of "The Man Who Wasn't There" embody noir fate.
The film is heavily indebted to Preston Sturges, early screwballs and the 1938 comedy "Bringing Up Baby", but stylistically it branches off into wholly new territory. The Coens serve up a kind of "pop art" version of the Arizona desert, in which everything has an artificial look and fluorescent lighting makes the world look like a 24 hour convenience story.
Elsewhere the film's soundtrack is funny (yodelling and folk music), its characters are all live-action cartoons (modelled on the buffoonery of Warner animations and stuff like Woody Wood Pecker) and the Coens' dialogue is wonderfully eccentric ("Sometimes I get them menstrual cramps real hard", "Edwina's insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase", "Mighty fine cereal flakes, Mrs. McDonough"), though some passages do get tedious with their unnecessarily decorative speechifying.
More than Hitchcock, the Coens storyboard every inch of their films, lending "Raising Arizona" a look which resembles comic book panels, every shot locked into place, every image calculated and pre-planned. This gives the film a vivid style, every sequence storyboarded for maximum effect. Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld also makes excellent use of extreme high and low camera angles, wide angle lenses and gorgeous night time photography and/or locations. The film's compositions zap the eyeballs, and its camera work - gliding, always graceful - induces a certain aesthetic head-rush.
Mostly, though, the film exudes that mixture of charm and pathos that made "The Big Lebowski" so endearing. "Raising Arizona" may be a 95 minute Road Runner cartoon which mocks redneck culture (trailers, lawn chairs, accents, shot guns etc), but there's still something very sweet and likable about its characters. The irony is, it's the refusal of "troublesome" actors like Nick Cage, Steve Buscemi and Jeff Bridges to be "cartoons" which imbue the best Coen flicks with their warmth. These actors seem to occasionally, or inadvertently, rise above the Coen universe, disobeying the wills of their directorial noir Gods.
8.9/10 - Worth multiple viewings.