The Coen brothers movie Roger Ebert hated: “A film shot down by its own forced and mannered style”
The Coen brothers are undoubtedly a pair of modern cinema’s greatest and most fertile creative minds. Between them, they’ve crafted some of the finest movies of the last four decades. Of course, that doesn’t mean every single one of them will be showered with unanimous acclaim, even if Roger Ebert was firmly in the minority when he resoundingly panned one of their best films.
It’s not as if the legendary critic had a problem with the siblings or their singular – and often twisted – visions of life in middle America. After all, he named Fargo one of his favourites from the 1990s and described the off-kilter crime story as “the kind of movie that makes us hug ourselves with the way it pulls off one improbable scene after another.” Hammering home his adoration, Ebert said, “Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.”
That might make him sound like a dyed-in-the-wool Coen fanboy, but he tended to be hot and cold on Joel and Ethan. He gave their feature debut Blood Simple maximum stars and celebrated it as “a story in which every individual detail seems to make sense,” only to greet their follow-up with nothing but apathy in his review.
An ode to classic screwball comedies shot through with their own distinctive visual and stylistic sensibilities and bolstered by a bravura performance from Nicolas Cage in prime scenery-devouring form, Raising Arizona is generally regarded as residing in the upper echelons of the Coen brothers’ filmography and for many it’s the best bar none.
However, Ebert was not one of them, and he awarded the eccentric and blackly hilarious farce a measly 1.5 stars out of a possible four. Cage’s Tex Avery-inspired HI McDunnough and Holly Hunter’s Ed going to extreme lengths to have a child of their own by stealing a quintuplet and trying to stay one step ahead of the bounty hunters dispatched by the child’s wealthy father didn’t appeal to his tastes as either a critic or audience member.
Ebert didn’t care for the script or how the dialogue was delivered, denouncing it as being written and performed to an “arch and artificial level that’s distracting and unconvincing and slows down the progress of the film.” He didn’t care for the tone, either, lamenting how “it cannot decide if it is about real people or comic exaggerations,” resulting in a movie that “moves so uneasily from one level of reality to another that, finally, we’re left baffled.”
He could at least concede that “the basic idea of the movie is a good one, and there are talented people in the cast,” which still wasn’t enough to paper over Raising Arizona‘s perceived cracks. Summing up his distaste, Ebert suggested that placing style over substance was the breaking point in summarising the Coens’ sophomore effort as “a film shot down by its own forced and mannered style.”
