Following up the moody, low-budget neo-noir Blood Simple with the manic energy of Raising Arizona feels like one of the most jarring—but fascinating—turnarounds in any director’s early career. Joel and Ethan Coen showed with their debut that they could do calculated suspense and procedural dread. With Raising Arizona, released in 1987, they proved they could also do madcap absurdity with just as much confidence. It’s a wildly different film in tone and structure, but it showcases the Coens’ command of style and their range as filmmakers.
Where Blood Simple was brooding and sparse, Raising Arizona is explosive and unruly, leaning all the way into slapstick, surrealism, and exaggerated caricature. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter as H.I. and Ed McDunnough—an ex-con and a former cop who fall in love, get married, and then realize they can’t conceive a child. In the most Coen-esque solution imaginable, they decide to kidnap one of a local furniture tycoon’s newborn quintuplets. And from there, chaos follows.
It’s a ridiculous premise treated with full sincerity by Cage and Hunter, both of whom give career-highlight comedic performances. Nicolas Cage, hot off other eccentric roles like in Peggy Sue Got Married, leans fully into his bug-eyed, twitchy persona here, but also grounds H.I. in an endearing, if misguided, sense of moral conflict. Holly Hunter as Ed balances shrill panic with tender hopefulness, giving the character emotional depth that plays beautifully against the absurdity around her. It’s possibly her most outright comedic role, and she absolutely nails the balancing act of desperation and determination.
The film operates at a much faster, more kinetic pace than the Coens’ debut, and the increased budget is immediately apparent in the way they stage and shoot sequences. Take the diaper heist scene: H.I. robs a convenience store while Ed waits in the getaway car, the baby bouncing in the backseat. It’s edited like a Looney Tunes short and shot with elaborate, fluid camera work that would become one of the Coens’ trademarks. These moments of absurd, high-stakes comedy are as carefully choreographed as any action scene in their later work.
Then there’s Randall “Tex” Cobb as Leonard Smalls, a leather-clad biker and bounty hunter who rides straight out of H.I.’s nightmares. Smalls is pure Coen invention—a metaphorical and literal force of chaos—and the film’s most surreal touchpoint. His guns-blazing appearances lend Raising Arizona a strange fairy-tale quality, and further mark the Coens’ comfort with dipping into heightened, genre-fluid storytelling.
There’s still plenty of thematic overlap between Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, even if they’re expressed through opposite aesthetics. Both films deal with consequence, absurdity, and morally compromised characters trying (and failing) to outrun their decisions. But whereas Blood Simple was about misjudged suspicion and spiraling guilt, Raising Arizona is about misguided hope, and the bittersweet realization that love, no matter how deep, may not be enough to make certain dreams come true.
If there’s one critique to level at Raising Arizona, it’s that the Coens indulge a little too much in style over substance here. While the film remains emotionally resonant in key moments, it doesn’t blend their comedic and dramatic sensibilities quite as seamlessly as later efforts like Fargo or A Serious Man. But as a straight comedy, Raising Arizona might be the most unrestrained and flat-out hilarious film they’ve made.
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By their second feature, Joel and Ethan Coen had already split themselves into two distinct modes: procedural and moody (Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men), or zany and surreal (The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski). While their best work arguably emerges when they combine those tendencies, Raising Arizona shows them fully leaning into the latter with precision, confidence, and heart.
Score: 8/10
Raising Arizona (1987)
- Cast: Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, Trey Wilson, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, Frances McDormand, Randall “Tex” Cobb
- Director: Joel Coen
- Genre: Comedy, Crime
- Runtime: 94 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: April 17, 1987
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