What Do You Get When You Cross A Baby, A Convict, And A Thesaurus?

             Far be it for me to scrutinize those who venerate the more ostentatious calibers of the English vernacular. But when it obstructs a congregation’s ability to assimilate the true intentions of a fabrication… well, that’s just plain bad writing.

            “Raising Arizona” is the better aspects of the later works of the Cohen Brothers all lumped together in one movie proving that chocolate, bacon and Pringles- individually delicious as they may be- do not make a good casserole. In other words, too much of several good things is hardly ever great.

            Here we have all of what would later become the Cohen Brothers usual suspects: dialogue that sounds like it was scraped off the tongue of an eighteenth century Alabaman lawyer, slapstick black comedy, a bounty of colorful characters, a madcap heist plot, and John Goodman. Every one of these aspects is trying to one-up all the others and what results is a movie more confusing than even the Cohen bros. most incomprehensible con stories.

            Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage star as Hi (Cage) and Ed (Hunter). The former is a two-bit thief who falls in love with Ed, a police woman who takes his mugshots. They marry and decide to start a family but as “biology conspired to keep them childless” and Hi’s criminal record is longer than his hair, rendering them unable to adopt, they have no choice but to kidnap one of the famed “Arizona Quints” based on the logic that five babies is more than any one couple can handle.  

            At first, the movie wants to be a zany character piece, scooped from the trailer homes and convenience stores of Southern U.S. Then it switches gears and becomes a dangerously screwball comedy when Hi’s oafish (yet eloquent) prison buddies set up camp in the new family’s home. Then it wants to be an action flick with a chase scene involving a naive truck driver, a package of Huggies, and a Rottweiler in one of those gags that never fails to crop up in chase sequences that need a bit of forced comic relief. There is also a puzzling subplot that somehow manages to make its way into the limelight of the movie’s main storyline involving a grizzly bounty hunter who looks threatening enough until we hear him speak in a stuffy twang that is due to his apparent lack of nostrils.

            There is so much stuff being flung about in this movie, the fact that this bunch of folks are stupid enough to invite company over to see their newly kidnapped baby before they even think of a decent name or rid their house of bundt cake guzzling escapees… yet speak using words like “recognizance” and phrases like “ply her feminine wiles” is laughable- though not in the way intended.

            Of course, The Cohen Brothers went on to dissect the tangled mess that is “Raising Arizona” and grow films like “Fargo”, “The Big Lebowski”, and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” using the seeds of brilliance found therein, thus proving that although credulousness and inexperience may have initially deemed their work asinine, maturity and fortitude were able to play a hand in conceiving their latter works of proficiency.