The Talkies/Raising Coen
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES RAISING COEN by Bruce Bawer ][4... "Hi" McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), the goofball protagonist of the hilarious offbeat comedy Raising Arizona, is not only a crook: he's a hapless,...
...Ed (Holly Hunter), a corrections officer, and they move into a "starter home in suburban Tempe"—i.e., a mobile home in the middle of the desert...
...So it goes...
...That's why we ended up in prison...
...dinner from TV trays in an awful little paneled room filled with black velvet paintings, "the salad days, as they say...
...These 'were the happy days," Hi tells us, while we watch him and Ed eat Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer and the author of The Middle Generation and The Contemporary Stylist...
...Another delightful aspect of the film is that the Coen brothers make fun not only of contemporary American manners and morals but of contemporary American film: Raising Arizona is full of camera moves and angles that parody the visual cliches of Friday the Thirteenth and Halloween type movies, as well as of Steven Spielberg...
...in both films, criminals betray each other, and violence begets violence...
...But the kidnapping of Nathan, Jr.—whom both Hi and Ed, characteristically, continue to refer to by that name—doesn't restore their bliss...
...T hough Blood Simple was a murder 1 drama and Raising Arizona is a farce, the two films have a great deal in common...
...Both are set in the Southwest, whose dry climate and open spaces reflect the moral aridity and intellectual vacuity of the films' characIt's an all star conservative east Call MU Free or Return Coupon 1-800-558-1244 (In Iowa call collet 515456-25115) Published by Chronicle Publications, a 110 year old independent newspaper company ATIVE I RIM N'INI 1 Box 29 SB . Hampton, Iowa 50441 CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE YES, On 21 Hampton, kase10441 I accept your subscription offer ft YEAR (52 issues) for 832.00...
...On the contrary...
...Like some of the Python movies, moreover, the films of the Coen brothers, for all their absurdity, nevertheless reflect an acute and pained awareness of the evil of which human beings are capable...
...The third and last time that he gets paroled, Hi marries Edwina, a.k.a...
...But one horrible circumstance threatens their perfect bliss...
...Soon afterwards, when they just miss losing Nathan, Jr., due to a foolish mishap, Gale and Neville weep tears of relief and Gale decides that they'll never give him up: "He's our little Gale, Jr., now...
...At the Tempe, Arizona, "maximum security facility" to which he keeps returning, for instance, Hi is part of an encounter group at which a huge, evil-looking con articulates his feeling that he is a woman trapped inside a man's body...
...Perhaps the funniest sequence is one that begins when Hi and Ed drop by a convenience stofe to buy some Huggies for Nathan, Jr., and Hi, unable to resist the temptation, holds up the joint...
...Another particularly funny sequence is the one in which Gale and Neville, having found out Nathan, Jr.'s true identity, tie up Hi and make off with the baby, determined to hold him for ransom...
...Then there's Hi's awful Polish-joketelling boss, Glenn, who recognizes Hi and Ed's baby from the TV news and threatens to turn them in unless they give the baby to him and his wife, Dot, who have been wanting another youngster (they already have half a dozen or so...
...They take the baby back to their mobile home, where Hi has strung up a banner reading WELCOME HOME SON, and Hi sets up a camera to take a portrait of his new family (or, as he puts it, "family unit...
...though neither he nor the baby's father is ever really certain that this one is Nathan, Jr...
...A despondent Ed loses "all interest in both criminal justice and housekeeping...
...Both films are about people matter-of-factly committing outrageous crimes (in Blood Simple, a man hires someone to murder his wife in cold blood...
...Everybody's got an angle, and before the film is over, Nathan, Jr., has been kidnapped and re-kidnapped five times over...
...The world of this film—which was produced by Ethan Coen, directed by Joel Coen, and written by both of the celebrated young brothers, who were previously responsible for the stunning Blood Simple—is a world whose denizens, amoral, selfish, stupid, and tacky though they be, are nonetheless highly conversant with the current cliches and jargon of pop politics, pop psychology, and pop sociology...
...It is at about this time that Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), the smarmy owner of Unpainted Arizona, a heavily advertised store that sells unpainted furniture, becomes the father of five babies—the "Arizona quints," Harry, Barry, Garry, Larry, and Nathan, Jr...
...Hi" McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), the goofball protagonist of the hilarious offbeat comedy Raising Arizona, is not only a crook: he's a hapless, pathetic small-time crook, a crook with no imagination at all who keeps getting caught for holding up convenience stores—and who keeps getting paroled, after a few months in the slammer, because he never uses live ammo...
...As Hi puts it, "Biology and the prejudices of others conspired to make us childless...
...This refusal to take responsibility for his own actions is characteristic not only of Hi but of everyone around him...
...Ma'am," Gale explains gently, "if you don't breast-feed him he'll hate you for it...
...the Mondale-Ferraro sticker on Gale and Neville's car...
...Hi, watching the news reports of the infants' birth, decides that it's unfair for Nathan Arizona to have five babies when he and Ed cannot even have one—so, urged on by Ed, who has quit her corrections job, he sneaks into the nursery of the Arizona house and purloins Nathan, Jr...
...Moreover, complications ensue almost immediately in the form of the arrival, at Hi and Ed's home, of two pals of Hi's, Gale and Neville, who have escaped from the Tempe prison and want shelter—and who are puzzled as to why Ed isn't breast-feeding her baby...
...Raising Arizona is not a work of genius, by any means, but it is inspired and inventive throughout—and this alone places it head and shoulders above most of the comedy films of the day...
...Both films, indeed, are gruesomely, grotesquely violent, violent to the point of hilarity, like a Monty Python movie...
...Though all of these characters eventually find out, then, that Hi and Ed are kidnappers, it never occurs to any of them to do the right thing and return the baby to his parents...
...And finally there's that death-dealing biker, who turns out not to be a figment of Hi's guilty imagination after all, but rather a professional manhunter named Leonard Smalls, who's out to find Nathan, Jr., and sell him to the highest bidder...
...About his recidivism, Hi (who narrates the first ten minutes or so of the film) tells us, "I tried to stand up and fly right, but it wasn't easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House...
...Date Name Address THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1987 31 ters...
...But to go on too long about such matters would be to suggest that the film is more serious than it is...
...I don't know, he seems like a nice man...
...Nicolas Cage, it should be said, is far more effective here than in his uncle Francis's Peggy Sue Got Married...
...Hi is racked with guilt, troubled by nightmares of a vengeful, monstrous, death-dealing "Lone Biker of the Apocalypse...
...In the main, Raising Arizona is a top-notch screwball comedy...
...the sign reading FARM SUBSIDY CHECKS CASHED HERE in the rural bank that Gale and Neville rob...
...Maybe he has bad advisors...
...AX ^ Bill Me Card 0 Exp...
...The most memorable sequence in Blood Simple—in which a man has to reach out of one window and into another, in the next room, to remove a knife that has been plunged through the wall and into his hand—has a very similar counterpart in Raising Arizona...
...Yet they're not completely evil: when they stop to rob a bank, they're conscientious enough not to leave the baby alone in the car for five minutes—so they drag him, car seat and all, into the bank with them...
...They want a baby, but Ed is barren, and the adoption agencies won't give them a child because of Hi's prison record...
...one is almost tempted to say that Cage was born to play Hi McDunnough—a frightening thought...
...Parts Method ^ Check Enclosed ^ Visa ^ M.C...
...they've been educated not to behave virtuously but to transfer blame, to get in touch with their feelings, to "like themselves...
...Add $20.00 for foreign postage) I understand I con obtain a fuli refund on unlimited copies at any time...
...O ne of the things that separate this movie from the typical witless and pallid contemporary film comedy is its plethora of wacky, weird details:the vulgar five-baby wooden crib, for instance, in the Arizona nursery, on which the boys' names are printed over their respective heads...
...Hi takes a factory job drilling holes in metal...
...The ensuing chase—complete with police cars, a vicious watch dog, and a pimple-faced counterboy who turns out to be far more bloodthirsty than Hi ever was—builds wonderfully, has a terrific pace, and is as elegantly choreographed as a Balanchine ballet...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
