Like I mentioned last month, this year I’m going over the Coen brothers’ amazing body of work and recommending further films and comics for fans of each of their masterpieces. This time around, let’s focus on their outlandish follow-up to Blood Simple…
Raising Arizona (1987) is a surrealist comedy about an infertile couple (Nicholas Cage as a hilariously incompetent convenience store robber, Holly Hunter as a stiff police officer) who kidnap one of the quintuplet babies of a local furniture magnate. Wacky complications ensue, especially involving a duo of hysterical escaped convicts (John Goodman makes the first of his many appearances in the Coens’ filmography) and a cartoonish bounty hunter who may also be a vicious biker from Hell… or maybe a nightmare come to life… or perhaps the embodiment of Reagan-era fears of nuclear apocalypse! The result is a roller coaster of slapstick chase scenes, grotesque characters, and charmingly goofy gags accompanied by the sound of banjo and yodeling, all tied together by an oddly poetic voice-over, not to mention Barry Sonnenfeld’s virtuoso cinematography. Viewers who only knew the Coen brothers from the sober, understated crime thriller Blood Simple must’ve been flabbergasted by this madcap take on the genre (in turn, those familiar with Sam Raimi’s Crimewave, co-written by the Coens, were probably less shocked). And yet, for all the shouting and shooting and the unforgettable sight of Goodman bursting from the muddy ground as if from a grave – or a womb – the movie is surprisingly tender, closing on a whimsical note.
(It was also a pretty blatant inspiration for the NBC sitcom My Name Is Earl.)
If you’re into this kind of stylized extravaganza, an obvious next stop are the deadpan tragicomedies of Wes Anderson, whose lunacy also tends to be drenched in bittersweet melancholia. My pick would be The Grand Budapest Hotel, an explosive farce, painted in psychedelic colors, that follows the misadventures of a 1930s’ hotel concierge in Zubrowka (one of those fictional Central European states where everyone speaks with a different accent). Sure, the setting couldn’t be more different from Arizona and the movie owes a greater debt to the sophisticated works of Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, and Max Ophüls than to the Coens’ gonzo Americana… but they nevertheless share a breakneck pace, visual imagination, and the ability to constantly extract humor from the clash between elaborate speeches and sudden bursts of violence and rudeness. (Plus, Willem Defoe plays a possible ancestor of Raising Arizona’s demonic biker.) While all of Anderson’s movies are funny and bizarre, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the one where he fully unleashed his comedic id (and his subsequent works – Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch – have been even more manic!).
What if the overblown aesthetics and magic-like absurdity aren’t the main things drawing you to Raising Arizona, but rather its lighthearted, western-tinged, twisty tale of a likable, if inept, lowlife biting off more than he can chew, much to his companion’s chagrin? In Gore Verbinski’s The Mexican, the MacGuffin is an antique pistol rather than a baby – and the wild card is now James Gandolfini, whose professional killer can go from menace to warmth in a heartbeat (‘I’m just here to regulate funkiness’), but at the core of the movie is once again a troubled relationship between two lovers screwed by the system/fate/their own misguided decisions. And while the final product is way less zany than any of the abovementioned films, The Mexican is nevertheless a fun romp that doesn’t skimp on the frantic chases and gunfights.
In terms of comics, my recommendation this time around is one of the most Coen-like crime comedies in recent memories: The Fix.
With twelve uproarious issues – collected in three books – out since 2016 (and sadly on hiatus since 2018), The Fix also focuses on a couple of fuck-ups involved in a frenetic string of amusing armed robberies gone wrong, often resulting in rollicking moments of physical comedy. Hell, even though Nick Spencer writes the protagonist with a much more cynical personality than Nicholas Cage’s heartfelt, well-meaning outlaw, I cannot help hearing his droll, unreliable first-person narration in Cage’s voice, with the actor’s characteristic cadence. Plus, Steve Lieber’s artwork, combined with Ironbark’s and Marshall Dillon’s letters/design, matches the Coens’ comic timing and formal inventiveness, conveying the humor not just by clearly depicting the situations themselves, but through original ways of framing them. That said, be warned: The Fix is way more mean-spirited – and raunchier! – than Raising Arizona, so this is a comic for those who appreciate the film’s exuberant sense of folly more than its sentimentality…