Hidden Gems: 'Arizona Dream' Destroys An Out-Dated American Concept With Ecstatic Joy & Humor

Ever have a dream so vivid that you’d swear it was real? Ever seen your dream spring to life from your frontal lobe and collide with another person’s dream? Most folks wistfully sigh about following their dreams with an inert yearning, as if they’re hoping somebody else will do it on their behalf; the characters in Emir Kusturica’s “Arizona Dream” literalize the search, chasing after their dreams starting in their sleep and continuing on to their waking hours. 

Fish and flying machines, turtles and death, levitating tables, wild sex, and “North by Northwest” reenactments: Kusturica snatches the surrealist undercurrents of a Terry Gilliam film, plucks them out of their subconscious confines, and airdrops them into a world recognizable as our own. “Arizona Dream” opens not in the Grand Canyon State, but in Alaska, where an indigenous person yanks a halibut from frozen waters while risking life and limb; he carts the fish to his igloo, gives his son the stomach balloon, and then, when the kid runs outside to play, has sex with his wife. From Alaska, Kusturica moves to New York City, where Axel (Johnny Depp), an employee at New York’s Department of Fish and Game, is whisked off by his cousin, Paul (Vincent Gallo), through the Lincoln Tunnel straight to the desert, where Axel’s greeted by a vision of his uncle Leo (Jerry Lewis) sweeping a broom beneath bygone Cadillacs mounted on stilts. All of this happens within the opening minutes of “Arizona Dream.”

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Leo’s getting married, and he wants Axel to be his best man. Paul is just the driver and also a minor hanger-on afflicted with an insufferable habit of imitating great New York actors, a’la Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, for no reason other than to apparently claim their esteem as his own. Even in these, the movie’s most grounded scenes, Kusturica infuses a lulling, hypnotic aesthetic to a story about a young man rebelling against destiny: Leo, wracked with guilt for causing the accident that killed Axel’s parents, offers his nephew a job at his Cadillac dealership. Axel bristles at the idea but relents until he runs into two women, a mother and daughter, falls in love with the former, in hate with the latter, and becomes entangled with both through their incongruous dreams.

The mom is Elaine (Faye Dunaway). Her daughter is Grace (Lili Taylor). Axel’s lust for Elaine mirrors the age dynamic Leo has with his own bride to be, Millie (Paulina Porizkova); Grace being the jealous type, she responds to Elain’s attraction to Axel in anger, but most anything Elaine does sets her off anyways, so take Grace’s outburst with a couple grains of salt. Axel sees them as an ejection seat out of Leo’s Cadillac dealership empire and moves into their farmhouse, where he divides his time between making love to Elaine, trading murderous glances with Grace, and building one flying machine after another to help Elaine realize her dream of flying. Peppered throughout these pursuits he waxes poetic on the nature of dreams, and mankind, and life itself. 

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His existential monologues have all the finesse of a stoner’s bong-fueled musings, but Kusturica’s dissecting the myth and logic of the American dream; he’s determined to use every part of the animal here. For context, Kusturica shot “Arizona Dream” in 1991, then released it in 1993 and won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, and then watched as Warner Bros. gave the picture a 23-minute trim. Blaming its commercial stumbles on that studio hack job would be satisfying, but frankly, even with Dunaway on the marquee, nobody but devoted arthouse attendees would’ve bought a ticket anyway. The cuts still didn’t do Kusturica any justice in his first American movie, or his first movie shot on an American landscape, staffed with an American cast, spoken in American dialects. Americans know best how to pick apart the idiosyncrasies of their home, but Kusturica’s observations as a stranger in a strange land give the film’s anti-reality buoyancy a surprising heft.

The American dream is fiction. That dream’s failures are evident wherever Kusturica aims his cinematographer and longtime collaborator Vilko Filač’s camera. Paul clothes his dreams in Broadway and Hollywood, doomed by his mediocrity; Elaine dreams of the skies, doomed to plummet from them; Axel dreams of fish, which frankly feels like an agent of chaos. Only Grace’s dreams of suicide read as attainable. She has a control over her life and death that the others don’t have over their own aspirations. She also has a pistol, which, given that Axel references Chekhov’s gun in voiceover, lends her arc bitter inevitability. “Arizona Dream” characterizes America as a land of lofty ambitions all left to molder in its arid bosom. Here, dreams don’t usually come true, and when they do they either prove disastrous, unfulfilling, too damn odd for words, or in Grace’s case, tragic.

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Kusturica stages Grace’s final passage as a cacophony: She dons a white shift against a storm-shaken backdrop, stealing out into the night under Axel and Elaine’s nose to die via revolver blast to the head. (That Chekhov fellow knew what he was talking about.) Despite the friction between her and Elaine, between her and Axel (who, in a moment that in 1994 might’ve read as harsh but today reads as deeply uncomfortable, hauls off and slugs her in anger at her impertinence), the scene communicates an emotion not unlike defiance, as if rejecting the preceding 100 minutes’ lighthearted whimsy. Here, the dream dissolves. Here, reality strikes hard in the form of a violent lightning bolt that smashes Elaine’s airplane to smithereens. 

Dunaway plays the moment with poise while Depp looks on in slack-jawed shock, but if the point of “Arizona Dream” is to shatter the dream, it’s the film’s ecstatic joy and daffy humor that lingers. Kusturica forces these characters to wake up, and his audience with them, but much as we all dream, not all of us get to see our dreams come true, if only for a short while. Such is the soul of the movie, and Kusturica’s work.

“Arizona Dream” is coming to The Criterion Channel on July 30.