RAISING ARIZONA
With Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Trey Wilson, Randall “Tex” Cobb, and Sam McMurray.
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But the baby, in the end, not only foils the outlaws’ plans, he undoes the Coens’ chief virtue, their ebullient, blackly nihilistic sense of the absurd. Blood Simple unnerved viewers even as it delighted them because, it demonstrated that a vastly entertaining film could spring not from any reverence for the human soul, but from a callow joy in cinematic artifice, from exuberance in technical expertise, and from the same morbid fascination and good-natured sadism that compels little boys to buy ant farms and reptiles. Raised on movies and TV, the Coens are masters of the form of film genres, if not their spirit; in Blood Simple they indulged their gift by creating a wild and elegant Rube Goldberg movie that was a virtual lexicon of film styles, techniques, and allusions. Basically, Blood Simple melded the two disparate genres of film noir and silent comedy, borrowing plot, characters, and textures from the former and a worldview from the latter. Buster Keaton, whose films are set in a world based on a sublime conspiracy of the inanimate against the human, is the closest parallel. But there’s a difference: pathetic, impassive, and comically noble, the human nonetheless prevails in Keaton’s films; for the Coens the world is a machine of devious plot twists and sudden unpleasant disclosures, and the human characters, ignorant, selfish, and corrupt, haven’t got a chance. When it comes down to the conflict between man and the indifferent universe, the Coens will side with the universe every time. That’s the source of the dark, Olympian hilarity of Blood Simple, and it’s one of the Coens’ greatest strengths.
In the film’s blackout-style opening, Hi is shown to be a descendent of pioneers who fulfills his yen for anarchy, independence, and wide-open spaces by repeatedly botching convenience-store holdups and going to jail. In the course of his many incarcerations he develops a passion for Ed (Holly Hunter), the officer who takes his mug shots. She’s a stiff, petal-mouthed woman in blue, who resembles a more robust version of the fretful daughter in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Hi’s passion is requited, and the two wed in a union of wild individualism and nurturing order, that promises a paradise in the midst of John Ford’s Arizona wilderness.
The Coens have not achieved the maturity needed to appreciate the vision of a Capra or Sturges, and their gifts are too rich and deep for the likes of Heckle and Jeckle. The unlikely formal marriage of Raising Arizona is barren, and the theme the Coens adopt to fill the gap is nominal at best. One of the motifs recurrent in this picture is suggestive of their failure: a copy of Doctor Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which passes from hand to hand along with the charmingly photographed child. Dog-eared, singed, broken spined, it survives every catastrophe. But it is never read. Whether raising babies for real or exploiting them in movies, it usually helps to take a look at the instructions. When the Coens grow up enough to regard people as mysteries to be probed and not props with which to provide cheap laughs and thrills, the brilliant promise of their talents might be fulfilled.
