Cinephiliac :: MOVIE REVIEW: Arizona Dream (1993, d. Emir Kusturica)

The Grand Canyon State
of High Weirdness

"I remember my father once said that if you ever wanted to look at someone's soul, you'd have to look at their dreams. And that would allow you to have mercy for those who swim in bigger shit than your own." -- Axel Blackmar, Arizona Dream

The original 142-minute cut of Bosnian auteur Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream (1993) goes relatively unseen in the U.S. these days, and Warner Bros. can be blamed for butchering this absurdist comedy into a shoddy straight-to-VHS release with reshuffled scenes and clocked under two hours. Winner of a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and dedicated to Kusturica's father, this wild ode to strange love, chasing dreams, and letting one's freak flag fly is a cold scoop of magic realism in the desert that aesthetically melts like a mirage in the mind.

Arizona Dream (1993, d. Emir Kusturica) Please tell me the tailor's name isn't Pagoda.

Opening credits for Arizona Dream don't roll over the 48th state but the 49th, as a dogsledding Alaskan fisherman stands-off against a mysterious white wolf, who ultimately saves him from the harsh blizzards by dragging his body onto the sled and running the dogs. The native man recovers and makes love to his wife, then a red balloon floats all the way to New York City and pops on the sleeping head of fish-and-game employee Axel Blackmar (Johnny Depp). Everyone in this movie dreams, but the Innuit man's journey is literally part of Axel's "movie dream" (as someone describes it), a Lynchian or at least early Van Zant-ish vision of an orphaned wanderer who sees his life contemplatively reflected in the eyes of fish. ("Most people think I count fish, but I don't... I look at their souls and read their dreams," Depp narrates.)

'You got the mouth, Johnny, but you don't have the rack for BROWN BUNNY II.' That's Jerry Lewis razing Arizona (har har) with a broom.

Axel's slick-haired chum Paul Leger (Vincent Gallo, channelling Crispin Glover) carries Broadway pipe dreams of becoming the next De Niro, but can't even catch a break at an amateur stage competition with his best Cary Grant from North by Northwest (Gallo re-enacts the whole crop-duster scene as hilariously as Andy Kaufman "sang" the Mighty Mouse theme.) When the two reconnect after a few years, the wanna-be thespian gets Axel passed-out drunk and drives him cross-country to Tucson as summoned by his uncle Leo (Jerry Lewis, channelling Jerry Lewis). Leo Sweetie thinks he has found the American dream as a successful Cadillac salesman, but even marrying a gorgeous young thing (Paulina Porizkova) can't blind him from having achieved only goals of soulless materialism. Leo convinces Axel to hang out in 'Zona for a spell, but auto huckstering won't fit the young fish-lover's peculiar ideals. A true eccentric seeks love and adventure, though Axel probably couldn't articulate either concept.

A little-known breed called the Tucson Dryheat Halibut. Depp plots his runaway with Dunaway.

Axel soon meets wealthy copper miner's widow Elaine Stalker (a fantastically feisty, fleighty Faye Dunaway) and her suicidal step-daughter Grace (Lili Taylor), and a confused leap of curiousity brings him semi-permanently to their nearby ranch home. Hot bang-bang with mother and sexually tense clashes with accordion-playing daughter seems much better to Axel than selling cars, and it allows him to vicariously aspire through Elaine's wishes of building a fully functional, foot-powered flying machine in the yard. Even if he can't dream while he's awake, his ongoing night visions become stranger and more prophetic, which allows Kusturica to go nuts with the hallucinatory imagery... piles of turtles, ambulances flying to the moon, rows of pink Cadillacs on stilts -- and of course -- fish, glorious fish that float around to mingle with reality. But what constitutes the line crossed between real and surreal? Perception can always be frustratingly intangible in the eyes of another, especially under the synth-addled trance of Goran Bregovic's marching turbofolk score.

A flying machine? That's crazy talk! Jerry Lewis does his Jerry Lewis impression.

Arizona Dream thrives on its own lush unpredictability (do you honestly expect Gallo to unzip his fly and pull out a banana? Okay, nevermind), forging unlikely new rules of attraction between unusual characters who comfortably slide their emotions and demeanors from slapstick (the all-pink chateau of Jerry Lewis) to psychodrama (Russian Roulette played during a thunderstorm) without a blink of notice. While Kusturica's more well-known and fully-realized fare -- including Underground (1995) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998) -- stand on steadier structures and act friendlier to festival crowds, Arizona Dream is an endearingly flawed, overstimulated randomizer filled with near-constant surprises behind every dinner-table anecdote of cannibalistic Papua New Guinean rituals (and there's more than one).

BEST CLOSING CREDIT: "Any reference to Cadillac dealerships or dealers is purely fictional. The Cadillac automobile was selected for the film because it has and continues to represent the epitomy [sic] of American automobile design."