Arizona Dream

Arizona Dream

Accordion music always satisfies me. If there’s a choice, I would want an Italian restaurant with an outdoor patio in heaven shaded by a grape arbor beneath which big plates of spaghetti are served while somebody anybody plays “Arrivederci Roma” on an accordion at twilight.

There is too much accordion music in “Arizona Dream,” I think, especially since it’s always the same song, “Besame Mucho,” and sometimes they play it to turtles. But I forgive them because the accordionist is Lili Taylor; she has a cigarette stuck in her mouth most of the time and probably doesn’t care.

This movie has some wonderful sights. Ambulances to the moon. Suicide by bungee cord. Johnny Depp. A dog saves a man from death in the Arctic Circle. Faye Dunaway. Turtles crawl through meatballs. Jerry Lewis. A man counts fish. Paulina Porizkova. Airplanes that look like they were borrowed from “Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines” Michael J. Pollard.

Thunderstorms.

“Arizona Dream” is one of those movies that slips through the cracks; Hollywood bureaucracy exists precisely to prevent films like this from being made, and yet it was made, and it’s goofier than hell and you can’t stop watching because nobody on either side of the screen knows what’s going to happen next

It was directed by Emir Kusturica, a Yugoslavian (if such a place still exists), whose “Time Of The Gypsies” (1989) won him the best director award at Cannes; he sees a world where strange magic happens people want to fly, and sometimes they can eccentricity is prized .That film followed a gypsy family around Yugoslavia and Italy as it took its occult knowledge with it .

Now Kusturica comes to Arizona , which he sees as another such enchanted land .

The story involves Johnny Depp as a fish-counter who works in New York harbor, and says: “Most people think I count fish, but I don’t. I listen to their dreams.” He is summoned west by an uncle (Jerry Lewis), who runs a Cadillac dealership near Tucson and wants his nephew to continue the family business. Depp arrives reluctantly, uninterested in cars, fascinated by the dreams of fish to find his uncle preparing to wed a young girl (Candyce Mason). “He’s trying to teach me to stop crying,” she helpfully explains to Depp, during a fitting for a wedding gown.

Depp has never much liked his uncle (“He reminded me of the smell of car dealers’ cheap cologne; he always looked like a 10-year old boy whose sleeves were too long”). But he decides to stay for a time, and one day an exotic sight appears at the car lot: Faye Dunaway, widow of a rich miner with her stepdaughter played by Lili Taylor. Depp and Dunaway immediately feel a deep gravitational pull ,and soon Depp is out at their ranch house engaged in torrid lust while Taylor wanders in the yard playing an accordion.

What happens next with airplanes and ambulances turtles and yo-yo suicides, I dare not say . There is a talent show at which someone does Cary Grant during the crop-dusting scene from “North By Northwest”, Strange rooftops scenes involving turtle shells.. Or scenes on treetops involving patient-loving doctors.

Warner Bros. will likely not release this film since they made it, so it can only be shown on the circuit for specialized movies. The director’s cut is premiering tonight at the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am told it runs about 20 minutes longer than the version I saw in September at the Telluride Film Festival. I couldn’t guess which 20 minutes have been added; but when a movie is 142 minutes long, one doesn’t feel that it needs to be longer.

What we have here is a filmmaker who sees the world through his own very particular lens, and that’s not a lens that corresponds with tired paint-by-numbers formulas for standard screenplays. If he has an inspiration, maybe it’s his fellow Yugoslav Dusan Makavejev, whose films also tend to blend weird people with strange inventions. This movie is nutty as a fruitcake and probably would have played better to a stoned audience in the ’60s than to today’s somber seekers after value for money at the cinema.

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