Baker John's Underrated Movie Review of the Month: RAISING ARIZONA

Although you might not believe it, us bakers at A&J King talk about bread only a small amount of the time, and much of that is discussing various mistakes we’ve been making and how to correct them. In order to highlight some of the other conversations we have around the table, I’ve enlisted Baker John to write a monthly column on one of our favorite subjects: Underrated movies. This is a topic, along with “If They Were Making a Movie About the Bakery, Who Would Play You” game and the “You’ve Never Heard of My Favorite Band” discussions, that find their way into daily conversation. What you’re about to read is real. - Editor*****

First, a quick aside: I have received several forceful emails requesting that I quantify the phrase “underrated”. This is an easy question to answer, so I figured I would answer it here. Truth be told, I don’t have any criteria. I just pick a movie I really enjoy, and start evangelizing. If you weren’t curious as to my answers, you wouldn’t ask the proverbial question. Don’t poke the hive with a stick if you don’t want to get stung.

Written by Joel and Ethan Coen, and directed by Joel, this film underlines their love of the common, uneducated man as a deep thinker. “Raising Arizona” follows the reformation of H.I. McDunnough, a convenience store robber and a simple man, who has the soul of a philosopher and the single best modern day monologues set to celluloid. Played by a young Nicolas Cage, his southwestern drawl narrates the first minutes of this movie, wherein he details multiple arrests, and his subsequent acquaintance with the policewoman photographer “Ed”, played by Holly Hunter. . It’s like the Coens’ stepped up to bat, and hit a home run at 4 minutes 45 seconds, and then you spend the next 90 minutes watching the ball go out of the park.

Seeing for once that there may be something more to life, H.I. resolves to go straight, asks Ed to marry him and she accepts. He takes a job in a machine shop, and settles contented into life in a trailer in the beautiful Arizona desert. Their happiness is ruined when it is discovered she cannot bear children, and hope only appears when a local unpainted furniture magnate and his wife have quintuplets. They are inspired to kidnap one of the couples’ babies, because “they really have more than they could handle.” All of this happens in the first few minutes.

This movie is to quirky what water is to hydrogen. When you have a film in which a screaming John Goodman is birthed from the muddy ground in sight of the state penitentiary, you know you have something special. H.I. is tempted, and led astray, from the good life he had hoped to lead. The harsh realities of fatherhood, and his own feelings of inadequacy gnaw at him. But at the core he is an honorable man, and his conflicted mind conjures dreams of the fires of hell, and a man on a motorcycle come to exact punishment.

There is a strong moral streak in this film, muddied though it is by good people made desperate by harsh reality. For a movie that makes no real mention of spirituality, it carries a theme of redemption with deceptive ease. When H.I. waves away the offer of fried chicken right before spurning an offer to assist in a bank heist, he is symbolically showing that he while he may resort to crime to make ends meet he will not internalize the heedless criminality of his prison buddies. And even their deviant morality is relatively brightened by the bounty hunter Leonard Smalls. Did I mention this is a comedy?

The Coens’ know these unique back roads of the American psyche well. They have used these characters since, and they return to these archetypes not because this is all they can do, but because there are so many good stories to tell. The Cowboy in “The Big Lebowski”, played by Sam Elliot and his moustache, has a little H.I. Their current film, “No Country for Old Men”, was based on a book by Cormac McCarthy, but Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Ed-Tom is H.I. after a much different life. I can see the brothers optioning that book based on his character alone.

Besides Holly Hunter and John Goodman, other Coen regulars include a bag of money, vivid dream sequences, trailer homes, crime, the desert, and pomade. The soundtrack is by longtime Coen-collaborator Carter Burwell, but relies heavily on Pete Seegers’ banjo classic “Goofing-Off Suite.” I have had his version of “Ode to Joy” stuck in my head for getting on 20 years now, and I am not quite sick of it yet.

Thanks for stopping by. I always enjoy the opportunity to talk about one subject or another. And if you want an easy laugh that may just be suitable for the whole family, or want to check out one of the early films by a couple of the modern masters, check this one out.

Excelsior!