Arizona Dream

(France)

Constellation/UGC/Hachette Premiere. Director Emir Kusturica; Producer Claudie Ossard; Writer David Atkins, Emir Kusturica; Camera Vilko Filac Editor Andrija Zafranovic; Music Goran Bregovic Art Miljen Kljakovic

Johnny Depp
Jerry Lewis
Faye Dunaway
Lili Taylor
Vincent Gallo
Paulina Porizkova

Despite gorgeous, sometimes surreal visuals and the valiant efforts of an interesting cast, Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream is heavy going. Award-winning Sarajevo-born helmer's first English-lingo pic tackles dreams and flight only to alternately soar and crash.

Johnny Depp anchors the overlong pic as an unambitious 23-year-old fish and game warden summoned from Manhattan to Arizona. Depp's uncle (Jerry Lewis) is about to take a bride three decades his junior (Paulina Porizkova) and wants Depp to be his best man and stay on to work at his Cadillac dealership.

Depp finds himself torn between seductive, half-mad widow Faye Dunaway and Dunaway's equally unstable stepdaughter, heiress Lili Taylor. Vincent Gallo plays a womanizing aspiring actor who sells cars between auditions.

Kusturica grafts his sometimes unwieldy Europe-inflected concerns onto brash American landscapes with mixed results. Much is made of dreams that, either spoken of at length or illustrated, are offered in lieu of character development.

Impeccably lensed in Alaska, New York and Douglas, Ariz, pic remains stuck in an awkward netherworld between slapstick and pathos.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1992. Running time: 142 MIN.

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