RAISING ARIZONA (director/writer: Joel Coen; screenwriter: Ethan Coen; cinematographer: Barry Sonnenfeld; cast: Nicolas Cage (H. I. McDonnough), Holly Hunter (Ed), Trey Wilson (Nathan Arizona, Sr.), John Goodman (Gale), William Forsythe (Evelle ), Sam McMurray (Glen), Frances McDormand (Dot), Lynne Kitei (Florence Arizona), T.J. Kuhn (Nathan Arizona, Jr.), Randall "Tex" Cobb (Leonard Smalls), 1987)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A very funny spoof about a colorful couple who must have a child and will try to get one by any means possible. The Coen brothers know how to push the right comedy buttons as they stereotype a low-class couple and move them over the edge.
H.I. (Cage) is an habitual, incompetent criminal, specializing in convenience store robberies, where he gets caught but receives light sentences because his gun is never loaded. Ed (Holly) is the prison officer who takes his picture every time he enters the prison, and after his third stay in the same prison she decides to accept his proposal and marry him. Through the use of a voiceover, emanating from H.I. as the narrator, the logical sequence of the story is followed.
Distraught when she is told by her doctor that she is barren and can never have children, Ed is even further upset that she can't adopt because of her husband's extensive prison record.
H.I., since his release, has gone straight, working at an industrial job and living in a trailer on the outskirts of Tempe, Arizona, as the Coen brothers raise the question of how long this habitual criminal can go on being a normal family man before he reverts to his old habits.
With news of quints born to a wealthy owner of the largest chain of unpainted furniture stores in Arizona, Nathan Arizona Sr. (Trey), the couple reasons that it is unfair that some have so much while others have so little. So to balance things out, they kidnap one of the quints, the photogenic Nathan Arizona Jr. (Kuhn), and bring him home.
Armed with Dr. Spock's book on how to raise the child, they are the very perfect picture of doting parents and a nuclear family. But their bliss is short-lived, as two of H.I.'s prison mates escape and come knocking on his door at 2am. Gale (Goodman) and Evelle (Forsythe) want to stay but Ed insists they are a bad influence on H.I. and for their baby and wants them to leave at once, but is talked into letting them stay for a few days.
H.I. is visited by a so-called normal family, his foreman and friend, Glen (McMurray) and his fast-talking wife Dot (McDormand), who have a household filled with adopted children. They unleash their herd of uncontrollable adopted children onto the McDonnough house and it results in slapstick-like comedy, as it ridicules these families for wanting children but thinking of them as ideals, not aware that they are real people.
The film has its moments of serious pauses, as H.I. is filled with dreams of what should be right and wrong in life. He also has fatalistic nightmares. One of his nightmares materializes, in the person of a heavily armed biker from what seems like hell, Leonard Smalls (Cobb). He is a man tracker who wants more than the $25,000 reward Nathan Arizona offered to get his baby back, as he fails to make a deal with the magnate, but not before threateningly telling him that he will get the baby.
There are a few more complications along the way, as H.I. goes berserk at Glen's suggestion that they do a wife swapping thing, and then punches his dim boss in the nose, which gets him fired. When Glen figures out who the baby is, he tells H.I. he won't turn him over to the police and collect the reward only because his wife wants the baby. The other complication is that the fugitives realize who the baby is and how valuable he is, and they take him from the couple.
There is a flat scene, where the fugitives are robbing a bank and not knowing what to do with baby Nathan, take him into the bank they are robbing. Here the comedy was predictable Chevy Chase sort of material.
The Coen brothers know how to make a quirky film and they sure know how to write side-splitting dialogue. And if you are looking for something heavier, like a lesson to be gotten from all this or a searing comment on society, maybe you could even find that here also. Though sometimes the comic situations and the way all the characters talk funny, seem forced, it still recovers from these lapses and bounces back with more off-the-wall situations once reserved for "keystone cop" comedies, like ferocious dogs chasing the hero, improbable victories for our improbable hero while fighting Goliaths, and store clerks who have hidden vengeance inside them. If it is absurd comedy that makes you do cartwheels, something that is unique and dark enough to have some bite in it, then this film is funny enough to overcome some of its failing moments.
REVIEWED ON 11/26/99 GRADE: B
Dennis Schwartz: " Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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