Arizona Dream is a
1993The year 1993 in film involved many significant films. -Events:...
film directed by
Emir KusturicaEmir Kusturica, OF Emir Kusturica, OF Emir Kusturica, OF (Serbian Cyrillic: Емир Кустурица; (born 24 November 1954 in Sarajevo, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia) is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician with a string of internationally acclaimed features...
and starring
Johnny DeppJohn Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor and musician known for his portrayals of offbeat, eccentric characters such as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Sam in Benny & Joon.Depp rose to prominence in a lead...
,
Jerry LewisJerry Lewis is an American comedian, actor, film producer, writer, film director, singer and humanitarian. He is best-known for his slapstick humor in stage, screen, television, radio, recording and is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the...
and
Faye DunawayFaye Dunaway is an American actress.Dunaway won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Network after receiving previous nominations for the critically acclaimed films Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown...
.
Axel (
Johnny DeppJohn Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor and musician known for his portrayals of offbeat, eccentric characters such as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Sam in Benny & Joon.Depp rose to prominence in a lead...
) sees a dream about an Eskimo who caught a rare
halibutA halibut is a type of flatfish from the family of the right-eye flounders . This name is derived from haly and butt , alleged to be called so from being commonly eaten on holy-days...
and brings it back to his family in the igloo. Axel's actor dreaming cousin Paul (
Vincent GalloVincent Gallo is an American film actor, director, producer, screenwriter, singer-songwriter, and painter. Although he has had minor roles in mainstream films such as Goodfellas, he is most associated with independent movies...
), coaxes Axel, from his job tagging fish in New York City to Arizona to attend his Uncle Leo's (
Jerry LewisJerry Lewis is an American comedian, actor, film producer, writer, film director, singer and humanitarian. He is best-known for his slapstick humor in stage, screen, television, radio, recording and is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the...
) trophy wedding to a much younger woman (
Paulina PorizkovaPaulina Porizkova is a Czech model and actress.-Early life:Born in Prostějov, Czechoslovakia, she was still a toddler when her father and mother left Czechoslovakia, fleeing the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, and moved to Lund in southern Sweden...
). His uncle tries to persuade him to stay permanently and take over the family business of selling Cadillacs.
Arizona Dream is a
1993The year 1993 in film involved many significant films. -Events:...
film directed by
Emir KusturicaEmir Kusturica, OF Emir Kusturica, OF Emir Kusturica, OF (Serbian Cyrillic: Емир Кустурица; (born 24 November 1954 in Sarajevo, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia) is a Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician with a string of internationally acclaimed features...
and starring
Johnny DeppJohn Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor and musician known for his portrayals of offbeat, eccentric characters such as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Sam in Benny & Joon.Depp rose to prominence in a lead...
,
Jerry LewisJerry Lewis is an American comedian, actor, film producer, writer, film director, singer and humanitarian. He is best-known for his slapstick humor in stage, screen, television, radio, recording and is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the...
and
Faye DunawayFaye Dunaway is an American actress.Dunaway won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Network after receiving previous nominations for the critically acclaimed films Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown...
.
Plot
Axel (
Johnny DeppJohn Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor and musician known for his portrayals of offbeat, eccentric characters such as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Sam in Benny & Joon.Depp rose to prominence in a lead...
) sees a dream about an Eskimo who caught a rare
halibutA halibut is a type of flatfish from the family of the right-eye flounders . This name is derived from haly and butt , alleged to be called so from being commonly eaten on holy-days...
and brings it back to his family in the igloo. Axel's actor dreaming cousin Paul (
Vincent GalloVincent Gallo is an American film actor, director, producer, screenwriter, singer-songwriter, and painter. Although he has had minor roles in mainstream films such as Goodfellas, he is most associated with independent movies...
), coaxes Axel, from his job tagging fish in New York City to Arizona to attend his Uncle Leo's (
Jerry LewisJerry Lewis is an American comedian, actor, film producer, writer, film director, singer and humanitarian. He is best-known for his slapstick humor in stage, screen, television, radio, recording and is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the...
) trophy wedding to a much younger woman (
Paulina PorizkovaPaulina Porizkova is a Czech model and actress.-Early life:Born in Prostějov, Czechoslovakia, she was still a toddler when her father and mother left Czechoslovakia, fleeing the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, and moved to Lund in southern Sweden...
). His uncle tries to persuade him to stay permanently and take over the family business of selling Cadillacs. Axel resists at first, but he decides to give it a try. There he ecounters two strange women: Elaine (
Faye DunawayFaye Dunaway is an American actress.Dunaway won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Network after receiving previous nominations for the critically acclaimed films Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown...
), a woman who always had a dream of building a flying machine, and Grace (
Lili TaylorLili Anne Taylor is an American actress.-Personal life:Taylor, the fifth of six children, was born in Glencoe, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Marie, a professional babysitter, and Park Taylor, a folk artist and hardware store operator...
), Elaine's stepdaughter who is jealous of Elaine and dreams to kill herself and be reincarnated as a turtle. Axel starts lusting after Elaine and decides to help make her dreams come true. As he and Elaine build the machine day by day, Grace starts destroying the contraption. Axel then rebuilds. Leo and Paul arrive at Elaine and Grace's house to encourage Axel to come back, but Elaine threatens them with a shotgun. Axel and Elaine complete the machine and test it, but it crashes in a tree. Axel then decides to put both Elaine and Grace out of their misery. He starts with Grace but can't do it. Grace then has the idea to play Russian Roulette with him. Axel is scared at first, but when it his turn comes for the second time, he pulls the trigger multiple times. The gun doesn't fire. Axel, Elaine, and Grace come to Paul's talent show. He decides to play Cary Grant's role from
North by NorthwestNorth by Northwest is a 1959 American suspense film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason, and featuring Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau...
with the famous crop duster scene. Paul receives the score of 1. Uncle Leo's fiancee then approaches them to say there's something wrong with Leo. Axel realizes that Uncle Leo is dying and calls an ambulance. Uncle Leo passes away. Few months later, the day before Elaine's birthday Axel and Paul finally comes back to Elaine and Grace's house. Elaine is mad at Axel for not contacting her, but she forgives him. The next day on Elaine's birthday, Elaine is given an airplane as a present. The four celebrate Elaine's birthday by beating a piñata, but a storm soon begins. As the others dry off inside, Grace remains outside to free her turtles, telling them to "Go play," Axel goes upstairs with Grace to wrap the presents and gives Axel a globe, telling him that she wants him to have the world. Alex tells Grace that Elaine has changed and that he is not in love with her any more. He makes a promise with Grace to go to Alaska. Axel, Elaine, Grace, and Paul talk about how they want to die. Grace says she's going to sleep and walks upstairs, dressing herself in a white shift and a hat with a veil. As she walks outside, Axel and Elaine see her through the window and run outside in an attempt to stop her. Grace shoots herself, and a lightning bolt destroys Elaine's airplane. Sometime after Grace's death Alex breaks into Uncle Leo's abandoned Cadillac store at night and goes to sleep on top of a Cadillac with a cat that has just had her litter. The film ends with Axel and Uncle Leo as Eskimos in Axel's dream. They catch the halibut and discuss it. It flies from their hands into the sunrise.
Box office
Although filmed in 1991 and released throughout Europe in
1993The year 1993 in film involved many significant films. -Events:...
,
Arizona Dream was not released in the U.S. until September 9, 1994. Its total U.S. gross, in three theaters, was $112,547 in limited release.
Censorship
Although shown theatrically in the U.S. at its full length, the TV prints and VHS versions run 119 minutes.
DVD and HD DVD Releases
This film has yet to be released on any format other than
VHSVideo Home System, better known by its abbreviation VHS, was a video tape recording standard developed during the 1970s. It was released to the public during the latter half of the decade. During the late part of the 1970s and the early 1980s it formed one-half of the VHS vs Betamax war, which it...
in the U.S., although Studio Canal has released the film in Europe on both
DVDDVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc,is an optical disc storage media format, and was founded in 1995. Its main uses are video and data storage...
and
HD DVDHD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisaged to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
.
Other
- It features a recreation of the Sherman & Sherman song, "Doll On A Music Box
"Doll on a Music Box" is a song originally from the 1968 musical film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was subsequently performed in the 2002/2005 stage musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as well. It is both a musical and lyrical counterpoint to the more free flowing, legato song, "Truly Scrumptious"...
" originally from Chitty Chitty Bang BangChitty Chitty Bang Bang is a 1968 feature film with a script by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes, and songs by the Sherman Brothers, based on Ian Fleming's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car. It starred Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts and Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious. The film was...
.
- In an angry February 2006 voice mail message to the producer of a documentary of her life, which was widely circulated on the Internet, Faye Dunaway
Faye Dunaway is an American actress.Dunaway won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Network after receiving previous nominations for the critically acclaimed films Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown...
complained that she "was brilliant in" Arizona Dream (which in the message she refers to as "the Kusturica film") and that the film was "not well sold in this country" despite that it was "the hit of all Europe and CannesCannes France, is one of the best-known cities of the French Riviera, a busy tourist destination and host of the annual Cannes Film Festival. The population was 70,400 as of the 2007 census. Cannes is the home of numerous luxurious houses and mansions as well as many high-end gated communities...
." She was unhappy that the documentary made no mention of her work in this film or in Don Juan DeMarcoDon Juan DeMarco is a 1995 film starring Johnny Depp as John R. DeMarco, a man who believes himself to be Don Juan, the greatest lover in the world. Clad in a cape and domino mask, DeMarco undergoes psychiatric treatment with Marlon Brando's character, Dr. Jack Mickler, to cure him of his apparent...
, which also co-starred Johnny DeppJohn Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor and musician known for his portrayals of offbeat, eccentric characters such as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Sam in Benny & Joon.Depp rose to prominence in a lead...
.