The Travolta/Cage Project #16 Raising Arizona (1987)

Early in his film career Nicolas Cage was a more or less perfect physical specimen and an intensely physical actor blessed with the raw sexuality of a young Marlon Brando. He was all rippling muscles, impossibly soulful eyes and pummeling intensity, a virile stud who specialized in playing troubled bruisers with well-developed abs and complicated inner lives. 

In his heartbreaking and hilarious breakthrough performance as H.I. "Hi" McDunnough, a lovestruck career criminal with a heart of gold in 1987’s Raising Arizona Cage is still an unmistakably physical performer but the physicality has been reversed. The rippling muscles and brute strength that characterized his earliest film performances have disappeared completely. 

Cage purposefully lost his muscles to play someone powerless before the randomness and cruelty of fate and the criminal justice system, a skinny little nobody trying and failing to steal the American dream. In an existential sense at least Cage never really got those muscles back. Sure, Cage would get jacked for some of his big action roles but after his revelatory turn here he would never again be defined overwhelmingly, or exclusively, by his devastating good looks the way he is in The Boy in Blue, where there’s nothing to him but a ripped body and gorgeous face. 

For Raising Arizona Cage lost his muscles and with them a lot of his brawny sexuality. Cage is still cute here. He’s adorable. He’s more than adorable and cute: he’s downright beautiful, inside and out. But he’s not almost annoyingly, distractingly sexy the way he is in the movies that led up to his breakthrough turn here. He’s not blisteringly intense, either. Instead, Cage’s iconic ex-convict is laconic and casually philosophical, a pinball forever being spun in one direction or another by life’s randomness and his infertile wife’s all-consuming, life-defining NEED to have a child of her own even if her body refuses to acquiesce. 

I’ve fallen in love repeatedly with Nicolas Cage over the course of this column, beginning with Valley Girl. I fell in love with him all over again watching Raising Arizona. The Coen Brothers may be exquisitely cynical motherfuckers, real sadistic-like sons of bitches when it comes right down to it, but Cage imbues this joyous comedy with sweetness, soul and cornpone charm. 

We don’t just laugh at Cage here. We believe in him. We root for him. We identify with him. We want him to be happy. We want him to achieve his dream of going straight, with a wife and a child and a home of his own. We feel for him on a soul-deep level and at the film’s shattering conclusion we weep for him because he wants so desperately to be happy and true contentment seems forever outside his grasp. 

If Cage seems positively shrunken here, a wisp of a man compared to the mountains of muscle he played earlier, that’s partially a matter of proportion. Yes, Cage seems to have somehow willed himself into being three or four inches shorter solely for the sake of the role but he also benefits from acting opposite the likes of John Goodman, William Forsythe and particularly Randall “Tex” Cobb rather than the slight, ethereal likes of Matthew Modine in Birdy. 

Different filmmakers have seen different things when they’ve looked at Cage. Where filmmakers before the Coen Brothers looked at Cage and overwhelmingly saw a sex god positively vibrating with unstoppable energy and enthusiasm, the Coen Brothers, god bless them, looked at the young actor and saw a human Wile E. Coyote forever out-witted and out-maneuvered by the Road Runners of the world. 

Cage doesn’t just act like the ironically named Wile. E. Coyote here; he looks like him as well. Cage captures his hangdog, underdog essence on a physical as well as spiritual level. Cage’s radiant beauty has been tamed, if not entirely hidden by a series of singularly unflattering hairstyles and equally awful facial hair that collectively downgrade the actor’s handsomeness level from “intimidatingly hot” to “cute in a goofy way.” 

Cage’s pokey-prone true romantic doesn’t just commit crimes; he’s a criminal on an existential level. Crime isn’t something he does; it’s who he is. It’s all that he knows so despite being a good man in an insane world H.I can’t leave criminality behind even after getting married to Edwina "Ed" McDunnough (Holly Hunter), a police officer whose soul angrily cries out for the spiritual satisfaction of motherhood. 

Ed and H.I fall in love over the course of a montage of Cage’s lovable criminal getting arrested and photographed. In another movie that might register as a cheat but Cage and Hunter have such explosive, natural chemistry and are both written and performed so beautifully that we do not need to actually see them fall in love in order to completely accept that the reason these two lost souls were put on earth was to be together. 

The other reason they were put on earth, of course, is to be parents. As H.I tenderly conveys via narration, “We figured there was too much happiness here for just the two of us, so we figured the next logical step was to have us a critter.” 

Like the characters in old Warner Brothers cartoons, the live-action cartoon characters of Raising Arizona have simple, primal, overwhelming motivations. H.I wants love and a world beyond prison and recidivism so he pursues Ed and the straight life. Ed wants children and H.I lives to make her happy so that becomes his overwhelming motivation as well. 

When H.I and Ed discover that brash unpainted furniture magnate Nathan Detroit (Trey Wilson) and his wife have produced quintuplets they reckon that the millionaire and his wife will be able to withstand the loss of one of their children better than less abundantly blessed parents. 

Almost as soon as H.I has succeeded in kidnapping Nathan Jr, the finest of the quints, his bouncing baby boy is purloined by a pair of associates from his prison days: Gayle (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe). 

Gayle and Evelle are bad men who escape from prison by tunneling out in the rain, emerging from the ground like golems or zombies rising up out of the grave to put the hurt on humanity. But exposure to the big-eyed innocence and irresistible sweetness of a baby like Nathan Jr. has a transformative effect on the men. It brings out a nurturing side they have otherwise violently repressed. 

Just as Cage looks like a not so wily coyote here, Goodman has the aura of a big, dumb cartoon sheepdog. Evelle is a blunt instrument of a man but Goodman brings a disarming sweetness to the character; as with everyone else, babies simultaneously bring out the best and the worst in him. 

H.I has more to worry about than the forces of law and lawlessness; there’s a wild card on the horizon in the form of Leonard Smalls (Cobb), a bounty hunter and figure of mythic evil H.I has been having nightmares about as an ominous creature of destiny he will not be able to avoid. 

Raising Arizona is an uproarious live-action cartoon, equal parts Frank Tashlin and Chuck Jones, but it’s also a shockingly, staggeringly powerful exploration of the human need for happiness and fulfillment and the central role parenthood often plays in that quest. 

This marked the first time I’ve seen Raising Arizona since becoming a father so it affected me in a deeper and more profound way than it did before. 

Because Raising Arizona is fundamentally about the joy of parenthood, the sense of meaning and purpose and connection that you experience not just with one tiny little human being but with the universe as a whole, and all the other mothers and fathers that came before you, with the entirety of parenthood. 

But Raising Arizona is also about the ache of wanting to create life in your image, that you can mold and shape and love above all things, and not being able to do so.

That almost unbearable pain of not being able to conceive is dramatized most unforgettably and emotionally in a devastating final monologue from Cage after he and Ed, being good people, give Nathan Jr. back to his mother and father, seemingly dooming themselves to a child-less existence in the process. 

In a sequence that made me weep uncontrollably for minutes at a time like a damn baby, Cage as H.I relays, in the most loving manner imaginable, a dream he had of an impossibly kind, just plain impossible future where he and Ed remain a ghostly but unmistakably positive presence in Nathan Jr’s life, benevolently overseeing his development from afar. 

Finally, H.I sees an image of himself and Ed in a future too beautiful and kind to be anything but a gorgeous fantasy where they preside over a large and loving family of children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews. It is a heartbreaking picture of abundance, of true happiness, of real fulfillment. Yet it’s destined to remain nothing more than a mirage, to be glimpsed and envied but never attained.  

Raising Arizona empowered Cage to do arguably the best work of his career. Cage could be a crazy X factor in movies like Peggy Sue Got Married and The Boy in Blue, where he seems to be aggressively pursuing his own weird agenda in active defiance of the will of the filmmakers. In Raising Arizona, however, Cage is putty in the Coen Brothers’ skillful hands. He’s clay for them to mold. His job is not to steal scenes or pursue his own glory as an actor but to help them realize their creative vision. 

It’s a shame the Coen Brothers have not cast Cage in subsequent films the way they did Goodman but it would be impossible to improve upon the perfection of Cage’s hilarious, profound and unforgettable performance here and foolish to try. 

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