My Favorite Coens Brothers Movie

The filmography of Joel and Ethan Coen was one of the first I managed to finish, a journey I embarked on because of how much I enjoyed "Raising Arizona," one of their early comedies. Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter star as Hi and Ed McDunnough, an infertile couple who decide to start a family by kidnapping someone else's bundle of joy. From the first title cards accompanied by John R. Crowder's soulful yodeling, I knew I was going to love this movie. A common criticism when it was released was that "Raising Arizona" was a case of too much style over substance, with its finely-tuned wordplay, larger-than-life characters, and occasional bursts of cartoonish imagery. But good grief, what style. With the Coens, all the little references and all the colorful lines of dialogue are all part of a cohesive whole, a delightful, off-kilter vision of the American Midwest.

In many circles, the Coens are revered for their thoughtful crime dramas, but I always liked their comedies a little better, mostly because of the memorable characters who populate them. "Raising Arizona" features Nicholas Cage in one of his best roles as Hi, the reformed convenience store robber with perpetual bed-head, who possesses an inexplicably refined mastery of the English language. And there's his lovely bride Ed, short for Edwina, the no-nonsense policewoman with a fearsome maternal instinct. And then you have the escaped convicts played by John Goodman and William Forsythe. And a sinister bounty hunter who is introduced as the "Lone Biker of the Apocalypse." He sports a tattoo on his arm that reads "Mama Didn't Love Me," and is so despicably evil, flowers literally burst into flames as he rides by on his motorcycle. Oh yes, it's that kind of movie.

Mostly, I think it’s the baby that holds everything together. You come to realize fairly early on that even the most miserable miscreants have a soft spot for the little tyke, and all the chaos and confusion as the various characters jockey for his guardianship is out of love, really. Hi’s botched convenience store holdup is committed for the want of a package of Huggies. So, despite “Raising Arizona” being full of convicts and nefarious characters, violence and mayhem, it’s really a family movie at heart. That underlying sweetness does a good job of grounding all the onscreen silliness and the Coens' wild stylistic flourishes. It's a cliché to call a film a visual roller-coaster ride, but I think it's an apt descriptor when you get a look at the amazing "Evil Dead" style Steadicam shots, madcap fights, and a glorious chase sequence involving Hi, a pack of dogs, and the aforementioned Huggies.

"Raising Arizona" was only the Coens' second film, and a good snapshot of their developing filmmaking sensibilities. In their later comedies like "The Big Lebowski" and "Burn After Reading" the caricatures would get even wilder. However, I think "Raising Arizona" is the only film where they succeeded in creating such a unique and well-rounded comic universe that didn't feel quite like anything else. "Hudsucker Proxy" was a 30s screwball comedy and "The Big Lebowski" was Raymond Chandler set in the weirder corners of 1990s Los Angeles, but how do you classify "Raising Arizona"? It's sort of a Western, and it's sort of a Bonnie and Clyde story, but mostly it does its own thing. A few details date it as an 80s film, but otherwise there's a timeless feel to the Coens' version of Arizona. Watching it today, it appears that events take place in the recent past, but you couldn't say for sure which decade it's supposed to be.

Ultimately it's the little idiosyncratic details that make the movie for me, like the extremely minor, unnamed characters who get some of the best lines in a movie full of quotable dialogue, or the odd literary references to Faulkner and Steinbeck that keep popping up throughout. It also helps that this it's one of the more accessible Coens brothers' films because the themes are so universal, and they took the trouble to include a couple of really fantastic slapstick and action sequences. As much as I enjoy their headier recent comedies like "A Simple Man," the sight of hapless Hi McDunnough on the run from the law, with a panty on his head, clutching those Huggies for dear life, will always make me laugh much, much harder.

I understand why some people consider "Raising Arizona" to be one of the minor works in the Coens' filmography, but this was the one for me where every single thing, from the yodeling to the baby-centric sight gags hit the bull's-eye dead center. It worked for me in a way that few comedies ever have, and remains one of my absolute favorites. And it's the reason why I look forward to all the Coens' new movies, but I look forward to their comedies just a little bit more.
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What I've Seen - The Coen Brothers

Blood Simple (1984)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Barton Fink (1991)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
Fargo (1996)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
The Ladykillers (2004)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Burn After Reading (2008)
A Serious Man (2009)
True Grit (2010)
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
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