MY MOVIE SHELF: Raising Arizona

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 23 Days to go: 19

Movie #417:  Raising Arizona

Is there any movie theme more earworm-y than Raising Arizona‘s high-pitched, keening tune? I hum along, I feel it in my bones. It gets under your skin. It infects you. It hangs around for hours, days even. It’s haunting and hypnotizing and great. And somehow it seems to fit with the special brand of absurdity that flows through the film.

Raising Arizona was only the second feature by the soon-after illustrious Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, but it firmly established their particular sensibility. Mournful shot through with silliness, optimistic despite being filled to the brim with calamity, the movie is like a joke you’re not quite sure you get (resulting in it being somewhat unsuccessful upon its release, but achieving cult status in the nearly thirty years since). Sometimes it’s surreal, sometimes it’s just weird, but through everything that happens, it’s mesmerizing and fascinating. As goofy and extreme as are the habits and reactions of H.I. “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) and Ed (Holly Hunter), you can’t help but be invested in them nonetheless.

There are a whole cast of oddball characters, in fact, throughout the film, but everything centers on the relationship of Hi and Ed and their attempts to have a baby. Hi is a petty criminal, in and out of prison for robbing convenience stores, and Ed is a decorated police officer, yet the first moment Hi sees her, he’s smitten, and before long Ed is won over by his romantic declarations. They get married, and it’s hot and heavy for a while, until Ed decides she wants a baby and is unable to have one. Enter the offspring of one Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson).

Nathan Arizona is an Arizona businessman (selling unpainted furniture) whose wife took fertility treatments and wound up giving birth to quintuplets. As Nathan joked, they now had more than they could handle, so Ed gets it in her head to ask Hi to steal her one. And what follows is an amusing take on the overwhelming undertaking of becoming a parent. (“You gotta get their DIP-TET!”)

Not that the movie is about parenthood any more than it’s about law and order. It’s a farce. It’s full of symbolism of the ideas of good versus evil, and it’s full of visual gags, and it’s full of angles and shots that compare characters and situations to other characters and situations, but it doesn’t have a message really. And that’s just fine. It doesn’t need a message for it to be compelling and impactful.  Hi is able, in the end, to come to the realization that he’s not been living a responsible life like he meant to, even if he did have the best of intentions. And when he’s not living right, nothing around him is going right either. But when he finally does right in the end, everything else falls into place as well. Including the dreamt of far-off future, in which he and Ed have a long and happy life together, filled with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their own. Which is all they ever really wanted.

I love Raising Arizona. I love the outrageousness of it and the absurdity of it and the silliness of it. I love the accents and the goofy manners of speech everyone has and pretty much everything else about it. And my name isn’t even Nathan Arizona.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Incredibles

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 49 Days to go: 35

Movie #391:  The Incredibles

To be perfectly honest, I was lukewarm toward The Incredibles the first time I saw it, but my affection for it has grown exponentially since. The reason for this, as far as I can tell, was that I still felt about seventeen when The Incredibles came out. People do this, right? I know my friends have. They get to a point in their lives where a part of them still feels younger, stuck at a certain earlier age. I actually felt seventeen ever since I was seventeen until more than a decade later. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I actually felt like a grown-up. And The Incredibles, despite being a Pixar animated feature, is a film about grown-ups.

The two main characters, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, so to speak, played by Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter, are married parents. They have three children ranging in age from infant to a tween or young teen girl. They’ve had their glory days in their youth — as superheroes Mr. Incredible (incredibly strong, am I right?) and Elastigirl — but now they’re settled. They’re in hiding, too, as are all former superheroes. There are no superheroes anymore. It’s a pretty clear metaphor for the days of carefree days and parties and no worries being out the door. Mr. Incredible used to “work alone” as he told his number-one fan Buddy (Jason Lee) who wanted more than anything to be his sidekick. But now that independence is gone. He’s an adult with responsibilities, and as any adult with responsibilities can tell you, it can be a bit of a bummer.

Mr. Incredible (or Bob Parr, his secret identity) is having a mid-life crisis. He misses his glory days, he misses feeling useful, he misses doing what he’s good at. He HATES working for an insurance company that doesn’t seem to have any interest in actually serving their customers. So when Mirage (Elizabeth Peña) offers him a chance at greatness again, he grabs at it with both hands. This is, frankly, how a lot of infidelity occurs in real life non-superhero marriages. People feel unfulfilled and instead of looking to themselves for the source of the problem, they seek an outside salve for it. It’s not a coincidence that Helen (Elastigirl’s secret identity) fears he’s having an affair when she discovers he’s lied about his whereabouts. It’s a very real problem in a very grown-up world. Bob loves Helen, of course, but it takes him finding his joy again (in beating things up, apparently) and almost losing her and the kids in order for him to express how misguided he’s been and how much they mean to him.

For Helen’s part, she’s missed the rush of being a superhero too, but she’s been too busy holding down the fort to obsess over it. She doesn’t have the luxury of having a midlife crisis because she’s got too many other things to do. I can tell you right now, I’ve had that exact same feeling myself. When push comes to shove, however, and she’s confronted with Bob’s secret employer (a vengeful Buddy, all grown up and calling himself Syndrome) intent on killing them all, she steps up to the task, bravely protecting her children and her husband from harm — just as she’s always done, only now with more hand-to-really-stretched-out-hand combat.

Yes, there are amazing powers and gadgets and a fight for good against evil. The powers of kids Violet (Sarah Vowell) and Dash (Spencer Fox) are even more exciting than those of their parents — with gurgling baby Jack-Jack promising to be a real handful in the immediate future. (All of Jack-Jack’s manifesting powers are basically superhero versions of actual toddler traits.) And sharp, sophisticated super-uniform designer Edna Mode (director Brad Bird) is completely fabulous, dahlink, of course. There’s even a secondary theme about exceptionalism versus mediocrity, and how our special gifts are what make us special, that is a nice reassuring message to kids about finding their talent, whatever it is, and following it. But first and foremost The Incredibles has always been about the challenges (and rewards) of being a husband or a wife, of having children and a home and responsibilities. Of growing up and settling down. It’s almost like it’s not a movie for kids at all. It’s a movie for their parents.