RAISING ARIZONA at Urban Chestnut September 5th – ‘Strange Brew’

“Give me that baby, you warthog from hell!”

Webster University’s Award-Winning Strange Brew Film Series has moved! The new location is Urban Chestnut in the Grove (4465 Manchester Avenue, St. Louis 63110). This month’s film is RAISING ARIZONA. It’s this Wednesday, September 5th. The movie starts at 8pm and admission is $5.

Joel and Ethan Coen followed up their noir breakthrough, BLOOD SIMPLE with an entirely different but no less satisfying, RAISING ARIZONA , which plays out like a somewhat broad and inherently silly farce, but with a drop of sweetness and caring for its nincompoop characters underneath that elevates it to another level.

Nicolas Cage stars as H.I. (aka, “Hi”) McDonnough, a longtime two-bit criminal who gets nabbed heisting so often, he eventually gets to know and romance the booking police officer, Edwina (aka, “Ed” – Holly Hunter), who has snapped his many mug shots over the years.  The couple on both sides of the law end up marrying, and the two move together out to a trailer in the desert brush, as Hi tries to make a legitimate buck and prepare for raising a family.  That is, until it is discovered that Ed is unable to have children (“Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase”), and with Hi’s criminal record, adoption is far out of the question.  Ed is despondent, to the point where, when it is highly publicized that a man named Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), the wealthy owner of a chain of unfinished-furniture stores, has just fathered quintuplets, she and Hi decide that a man who has more children than he can handle could surely do without one.  They hatch a scheme to steal an Arizona baby, but find that caring for a child is more than they bargained for, especially when there are so many bad influences around.

The sweetness at the core of RAISING ARIZONA stems mostly from how folks on the fringes of society can still desire desperately for normalcy, and a way to be a good person, good husband, good father or mother, for the sake and sacrifice of another.  The affection for the characters is somewhat counterintuitive, as an exaggeratedly scruffy Nicolas Cage intentionally exhibits little emotion throughout, with face perpetually fixed in a hangdog expression of a life that has completely worn him down.  Contrasting him well is Holly Hunter, who is all spitfire and nerves that make her look like she’s bursting with emotions trying to get out, and the catalyst that spurs Hi to try to be a good person, even if what they end up doing is very, very wrong.  The banjo-tinged, yodel-infused score by Carter Burwell, his second of many for the Coens, perfectly punctuates not only the rustic feel of this back-country tale, but it is especially effective at embodying the underlying warmth of what runs most of the time as an outlandish and action-oriented farce.

A Facebook invite for the screening can be found HERE
https://www.facebook.com/events/2152547018300192/

The movie starts at 8pm and admission is $5. There will be food to order and plenty of pints of Urban Chestnut’s famous home-brewed beer.