General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Arizona Dream

Arizona Dream is a 1993 absurdist comedy-drama directed by Emir Kusturica, his first English-language film, in which a fish-obsessed young New Yorker named Axel Blackmar (Johnny Depp) is drawn back to his Arizona hometown, where his uncle Leo (Jerry Lewis) wants him to take over the family Cadillac dealership and he becomes entangled with a wealthy widow, Elaine Stalker (Faye Dunaway), and her stepdaughter Grace (Lili Taylor).¹ The film was a French-American co-production and won the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Emir Kusturica; story by David Atkins and Kusturica, screenplay by David Atkins²
Principal cast	Johnny Depp (Axel Blackmar), Jerry Lewis (Leo Sweetie), Faye Dunaway (Elaine Stalker), Lili Taylor (Grace Stalker), Vincent Gallo (Paul Leger), Paulina Porizkova (Millie)⁴
Runtime	142 minutes in the original cut; Warner Bros removed about 23 minutes for the 1994 US release⁵
Production	France and United States; companies included Constellation, UGC, Hachette Première, and Canal+; French premiere 6 January 1993²
Key crew	Cinematography Vilko Filač, music Goran Bregović, editing Andrija Zafranović²
Awards	Silver Bear Special Jury Prize, Berlin 1993; Golden Camera 300 for Vilko Filač; Warsaw Audience Award 1994³
Box office	Domestic gross $112,547 against a budget estimated at $19 million⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and style

Axel Blackmar works for the New York fish and game department, tagging fish and wondering when and how they dream.⁸ His cousin Paul (Vincent Gallo) coaxes him to Arizona to attend the wedding of his uncle Leo Sweetie, a Cadillac dealer who wants Axel to learn the car business and eventually take over the lot.⁴^•⁸ Axel instead falls into a romance with Elaine Stalker, the widow of a wealthy mine owner who shares his dream of flying, while her stepdaughter Grace, who plays "Besame Mucho" on the accordion to her pet turtles, also draws close to him.⁸^•⁹ The synopsis supplied by distributors ends with the three lives becoming intertwined "through romance, dreams – and death."⁴

The film mixes magical-realist imagery with slapstick. Recurring visions include an Inuit's dream of flying fish, turtles, halibut, and Axel's ambition to climb to the moon on a stack of Cadillacs.⁹ Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, described airplanes and ambulances, turtles and yo-yo suicides, a talent show with an imitation of Cary Grant in the crop-dusting scene of North by Northwest, and strange scenes on rooftops and treetops in thunderstorms.¹⁰ The film also references Raging Bull and The Godfather Part II alongside North by Northwest.⁹

Production

Kusturica, born in Sarajevo in 1954, had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and directed Time of the Gypsies before moving to New York to teach film at Columbia University; Arizona Dream followed two years later.¹¹ It was the first film by the Sarajevo-born director to take place in an American setting using American actors.⁵ The Slovenian cinematographer Vilko Filač, who had shot Kusturica's earlier films, worked on it, and the Bosnian composer Goran Bregović wrote the music.² The film was produced by Claudie Ossard and Yves Marmion for Constellation, UGC, Hachette Première, and Canal+.²^•¹ The dialogue is in English, with some Inuktitut and Spanish.²

Release and the two cuts

The film premiered in France on 6 January 1993.² Although it won the Silver Bear at the 1993 Berlinale, Warner Bros., its United States distributor, held back the release, then cut roughly 23 minutes before putting it into American theaters in 1994.⁵ The shortened version runs about 120 minutes; the full 142-minute cut circulated in Europe and at a few American art houses, including a five-day engagement at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995.⁸^•⁵ The film eventually reached home video in the shorter cut, and the DVD released 16 years after the theatrical run was also the trimmed version, with sequences such as Gallo's character performing both sides of a Raging Bull scene removed.⁵ In 2024 the film was released on Blu-ray in 4K for the first time.¹²

Reception

The film earned an 87% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes from 15 reviews, with a critics consensus calling it "inscrutably strange, yet undeniably compelling" and anchored by the performances of Depp and Dunaway.¹³ Reviewers were divided on Kusturica's method: Variety wrote that he grafts Europe-inflected concerns onto American landscapes with mixed results, offering dreams in lieu of character development, while TV Guide gave 3.5 of 4 stars and praised Dunaway's "particularly juicy performance" and Lili Taylor's work.¹³ Ebert called the movie "completely batty" and compared Kusturica's cheerful mix of odd people and strange inventions to the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev.¹⁰ On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.2 from about 48,000 votes.⁴

Commercially the film was a pronounced failure in the United States: its domestic gross was $112,547, with a domestic opening of $6,887, against a budget estimated at $19 million.⁶^•⁷ Box Office Mojo lists the earliest domestic release as 7 June 1995 through Kit Parker Films.⁶

Awards

At the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival Kusturica won the Silver Berlin Bear, Special Jury Prize, and was nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear.³ Vilko Filač won the Golden Camera 300 for best cinematography at the 14th Manaki Brothers festival in 1993, and the film took the Audience Award at the 1994 Warsaw International Film Festival.³^•² It was also nominated for Best Foreign Film by the Turkish Film Critics Association in 1994.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 1990 to 1994 › Titles symbols to J

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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