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.
Viable Option 