Cinema
Radio Days ('15', Odeon Haymarket) Raising Arizona ('15', selected cinemas)
Lands of lost content
Hilary Mantel
Growing up in New York, before the war . . . Jewish, incidentally . . . there's a lot of it about. It's only weeks since the film version of Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs was released. Ever since Portnoy days the mixture has been famil- iar: hypochondria, mother-love, chopped liver, sexual embarrassments. We are be- ginning to feel that it is a part of all our pasts; all mothers are Jewish now.
It would be a pity if this deterred anyone from seeing Woody Allen's Radio Days. Opinion seems sharply divided about whether it is his best film or his worst. It seems silly to draw comparisons, to set the frothy comedies against the deep dark Nordic gloom of Interiors. And it's easy to underestimate it; the lightweight, good- natured comedy almost hides the director's self-confidence and skill. Which is just as it should be, since nothing kills laughter more quickly than the spectacle of some- one trying too hard.
Woody Allen's alter ego, Joe Needle- man, is a put-upon little youth, who is constantly slapped over the head by his over-anxious parents. A knowing child's eye informs the series of vignettes of family and friends: the neighbour with 'a steel plate in her head . . . it was said she couldn't walk near magnets', and Aunt Bea, always in pursuit of a marriage partner, with her ever-hopeful dictum, 'You can meet very interesting men in a conga line.'
The whole family are radio freaks; they live vicariously, to the sound of champagne corks popping over the airwaves. Unseen ventriloquists, 'Name That Tune', row- fomenting quiz shows and an agony uncle of the airwaves punctuate their daily lives, and bring into their household the absurdi- ties of a wider world. Those lives are eventful enough in themselves — for this family is beyond embarrassment, and cher- ishes its eccentrics. They are a shabby and unlovely lot, but there's no bitterness in the film, hardly a hint of sadness that isn't quickly undermined by a glancing, half- apologetic irony.
There are appearances from Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton; this is so much a Personal history that it would seem strange to be without them. There is really no story, only a series of episodes, cleverly linked. The one sustained thread is the tory of Sally, squeaky-voiced cigarette girl in search of stardom, whose irresistible rise begins when she witnesses a Mafia killing. The news of Pearl Harbor breaks just in time to prevent her disastrous radio debut as a Chekhovian actress; when we see her singing commercials for laxatives, we know her career will come good. A much darker kind of comedy is offered by Raising Arizona. It is written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, who made that successful and peculiar film Blood Simple. H. I McDonough is a habitual criminal who wishes to reform: 'it "wasn't easy with that sonofabitch Reagan in the White House.' Eventually he settles to married life with a police officer, but they cannot have a child. A local mil- lionaire, who has made his money in unpainted furniture and bathroom acces- sories', has just sired quins; reasoning that he wouldn't miss one of them, they kidnap Nathan Junior.
The brothers Coen live in a world where Texas isn't really Texas and Arizona is more like Texas than it ought to be; any fairly empty bit of the USA will do for a Parade of redneck grotesques and national myths and nightmares. There is a slag-heap landscape, spiked by cacti, broken by trailer parks, wet black freeways, super- markets open-all-hours. It is a terrain to raise, expectations. The acting is splendid — Nicholas Cage with his indolent, humor- ous sheep's face, Holly Hunter with her gr.Int maternal monomania, a madonna With a voice like a chainsaw.
If the comic set-pieces don't always take ff, the script is a minefield of lunatic ingenuity, and the writer's ear is especially sharp for the jargon of the interfering Professions filtered through mass- Consciousness. 'We felt the institution had nothing to offer us any more,' says one of the crumpled, jowly, jailbreaking slobs Who turn up to wreck the domestic dream. Another solemnly assures the abducting mother: 'If you don't breast-feed him he hates you for it later . . . that's why we ended up in prison.' H. I. McDonough is conducting his own little nature/nurture debate, and mean-
while he dreams, and what he dreams comes true: he dreams the Lone Bikeman of the Apocalypse, a snarling slaughterer draped with an armoury of knives and high explosives. 'I myself had unleashed him,' he says. He is America's punishment for having invented Rambo. Occasionally, swathes of awesome violence are scythed through the running gags. The land of lost content is elsewhere; maybe, the script conjectures, in Ohio.
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