Raising Arizona (1987)

If ever you wondered what inspired movie and TV show writers to cram endless amounts of intellectualism into characters of decidedly average means and intellect, this absurdist comedy is almost certainly on each and every list. I am sure that there have been numerous witty films using the same character-dialogue pairing as Raising Arizona. Given how near-sighted much of the film and television industries have been recently when looking for inspiration, however, the popularity of this early Coen Brothers film makes it an easy target for imitation.

Herbert “Hi” McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) is a petty thief who speaks like a literature and linguistics professor. Every time he is arrested for robbing convenience stores, he flirts with the same policewoman (Holly Hunter). Over the course of several arrests, he learns that she is newly single after a painful breakup with her fiancé. Upon his latest release from prison, he proposes to his beloved Ed (short for Edwina) and the two marry and settle down in a trailer in the middle of the Arizona landscape.

The pair is desperate to have children but they learn that Ed is infertile. Given Hi’s criminal history, adoption is also out of the question. After seeing a story about a local business tycoon and his wife celebrating the birth of quintuplets, Hi and Ed plot to kidnap one of the youngin’s under the logic that these people have more kids than they need or can manage. Keeping and caring for the child prove to be a challenge as Hi and Ed are beset by the police, a demented bounty hunter, and two of Hi’s bumbling prison pals who just escaped and are looking to make a quick buck with the reward money.

The nice thing about Raising Arizona is that it never plays out under false pretenses. From the very beginning, the characters’ behavior and the writing makes it clear in no certain terms that this film is not to be taken seriously. The trouble with this approach is that it doesn’t guarantee that some viewers won't try to take it seriously anyway. On the flip-side, this absurdist nature of this film’s comedy doesn’t allow for audiences to turn off their brains and chuckle it up for an hour and a half. You do get to turn off a great portion of your brain while taking it all in, but you also need to turn on a very small, specific part of the brain that doesn’t get used often enough.

Nicolas Cage espouses his lines with a dreamy, gentlemanly swagger. His prison pals speak in a similar manner but are nowhere near as eloquent as Hi. Ed, on the other hand, speaks a more normal language. She gets her moments of wordy glory but her common tongue and her spitfire personality plays well against Hi’s drifter-esque mentality. It’s the collision of these attitudes, speech styles and behavior that generate most of the laughs.

Some will find the wordplay over the top and unnecessary. But I ask you, what would this film have going for it otherwise? It would just be a kidnapper comedy with outlandish characters that don’t make sense. If nothing else, the Coen’s verbose script acts as a gateway to accepting the rest of the film. If you can gel with the script, all the gags and situational humor will be easy to digest. If you can’t get past the dialogue, you’re less likely to swallow everything else.

Much of the physical comedy is recycled from nearly a century of cinema silliness. The execution of these gags is always where comedy films rise and fall. Raising Arizona makes them work. The corny, pseudo-intellectual dialogue butters you up enough that everything else in this film is funny by default. The Coen Brothers know their broad target audience will already be having fun with the film and they continually go for broke with what moviegoers typically expect from a comedy.

Is it perfect? No, but you’ll most likely laugh your way through any logical flaws (if you really are determined enough to apply logic here) and other minor mistakes. That is the sign of a classic comedy that will be appreciated by generations to come. Raising Arizona is a fine blend of blue-collar and elitism, the likes of which may be imitated for years to come but never successfully replicated.

RATING: 4 out of 5