H.I. Pulls the Pin

By Matt Zoller Seitz

The following is an early entry in The House Next Door's "Close-Up Blog-a-thon," which officially begins Friday, Oct. 12, and runs through Sunday, Oct. 21.

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The first time you see Nicolas Cage's beat-to-hell ex-robber turned baby-napping family man H.I. McDunnough holding the pin he pulled from a bounty hunter's grenade, peering up at his baffled adversary and whispering "I'm sorry," it plays like one more grace note in a movie filled with them. Raising Arizona's universe exists somewhere between a Sam Shepard play and Chuck Jones' "Dripalong Daffy." H.I (Nicolas Cage) and his barren, ex-cop wife, Ed (Holly Hunter), participate in wild car and foot chases, throw roundhouse punches that would have knocked John Wayne's eyeballs out, and speak in courtly sentences that mix pop psychology, cornpone aphorisms and odd, poetic rhythms. ("Biology and the prejudices of others conspired to keep us childless.")

But the McDunnoughs' feelings are as recognizable as their world is exaggerated, and their struggles connect this knockabout comedy to a century's worth of western literature and filmed entertainment. H.I.'s metamorphosis is the American creation myth internalized: slowly but surely, and not always of his own volition, he carves civilization from the wilderness inside him. A convenience-store-robbing recidivist ("re-peat of-fender") who settled down, kind of, to win his wife, H.I. has a mythologizing streak that befits his action cartoon environment. H.I.'s baby-tracking combatant, Leonard Smalls (Randall "Tex" Cobb), memorably described by Ed in the film's final battle as a "warthog from hell," first appears to H.I. in a dream, leaping out of the hero's subconscious astride a black motorcycle, his leather armor festooned with guns, blades, explosives, and itty-bitty shoes.

Simply put, for H.I., to destroy the biker is to destroy the outlaw within -- the violent, impulsive man-child who reflexively destabilizes the home that Ed keeps trying, in her awkward, even illegal way, to establish. In hindsight, the film's symbolically freighted story suggests that the McDunnoughs' fertility problem isn't just biological, but moral. It's as if Ed's body is protesting her husband's antisocial tendencies and her own weirdly materialistic desperation. (The baby-napping, a plan fueled by Ed's motherhood fixation, has an aspect of class resentment: the McDonnoughs target the wealthy Arizona family's quintuplets because, in Ed's words, "they got more than they can handle.") After the beast has been slain and little Nathan, Jr., returned to his biological parents, H.I. has another dream in which he and Ed grow old together surrounded by family.

The filmmakers, Joel and Ethan Coen, know their Freudian noodling is reductive and absurd, and they pointedly mock its obviousness (H.I. and the biker have an almost-bonding moment, mid-backbreaking-clinch, when they realize they have the same Woody Woodpecker tattoo); at same time, though, they take its implications seriously. Arizona is a slapstick fantasy about the eternal war between domesticity and savagery -- a suburbanized western that ends with a brawl between a man and his id. The marvelous post-fight close-up -- one the finest moments in Cage's audaciously warm and silly performance -- confirms H.I.'s instinct for empathy, a quality that separates him from every other thug in the picture. He is really, truly sorry that his assailant, a vicious mercenary and a fellow human being, is about to die. But there's another type of sadness in this close-up -- subtle, inner-directed. It's as if he knows that in pulling the pin he has bid farewell to the most vibrant, prideful part of himself, and will have to find new ways to prove himself a man.

Maybe in Utah.