Fantastic Mr. Fox

Dir. Wes Anderson
2009
6.3


For what it could have been, anyone might have assumed Wes Anderson was the perfect director for a film adaptation of the Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson has a history of channeling the repressed trauma of childhood and chronicling the misplaced desires of patriarchs while still being lovingly committed to traditional familial values and affection. However, while Dahl presented a knowing and gentle sympathy for children, Anderson's Mr. Fox appears mysteriously callous toward kids and adults alike. In the last decade, the director's profound empathy for his characters has receded leaving in its wake a shallow, superficially delightful circus of fantastic auteurist signifiers (the “Anderson trademarks”: slow motion sequences over 60s pop music, perfectionist refinement of costume and set detail, banal quirkiness, etc.). What makes Anderson's films fun to watch used to be meticulously balanced with what made them difficult to watch. His archetypes (the unholy trinity of The Loser, The Stoic Wife and The Bastard) though recognizable throughout his filmography have been systematically reduced from flawed but beautiful statues to infantile water color portraits. Much as Mr. Fox delights in lateral movement over depth of field (see the film's opening sequence) so too has Wes Anderson come to delight in fanciful vision over rigorous realization.

Perhaps the question really is: why the high standards for Anderson? While he is certainly of the American school of auteurism, beyond The Royal Tenenbaums it is arguable that Anderson has done little that is anywhere near as complete. Rushmore is the pretentious purist's favorite while The Life Aquatic was perhaps his most accessible film (or at least most widely seen) before Fantastic Mr. Fox. Darjeeling Limited was a failure on almost every level and one is hard pressed to find a casual viewer whose actually seen Bottle Rocket. However, this lack of obviousness, the vague sense of the occult, is what brings viewers back to Anderson's films even if they themselves don't realize it. While Anderson's most important elements and themes came together with exquisite empathy in The Royal Tenebaums, it has largely been left up to the viewer to discern the importance (or lack thereof) in the remainder of his oeuvre.

And for the most part it has been there: the psychological portraits of the aforementioned archetypes and their patient and sympathetic dissection, the non-linear transgressions into bizarre, idiosyncratic worlds, and the strangely updated sign posts of classic cinema. Anderson has always represented an intentional and thus self-aware digression from the norms of Hollywood. Despite his big name rosters he has never been an actor's director. His films are alternatingly cathartic and not with narrative structures that air on the side of nomadic and ephemeral. Though his art direction is compulsively organized, the films themselves appear loose, capable of going in one direction or another; shifting their weight distractedly while making plot decisions on the fly. There are no real surprises in Anderson's filmography because everything is some kind of a surprise.

So, where does Fantastic Mr. Fox fit into all this cerebral cinephilia? It doesn't. The trend one could identify as early as The Life Aquatic has been fully realized. With Mr. Fox, Anderson has largely abandoned his early earnest efforts to portray unrealized characters. He opts instead for the venue of children's film and uses it as an excuse for lazy and hopelessly disappointing workmanship. Mr. Fox, (here The Bastard becomes not a “son-of-a-bitch” but a “Wild Animal”) is worse than his predecessors, who recited self-prepared speeches about their obvious short comings without really believing in them, by knowingly betraying the one's who care about him all the while celebrating for them their fortune at having such a “fantastic” presence in their lives. This difference is naturally thin and difficult to nail down in writing but painfully obvious on screen. It is also greatly aided by an important inter-oeuvre thematic transgression: constant character (and thus viewer) empathy for The Bastard. Compare the way Mr. Fox's family (with the exception of his son Ash who plays the alienated and hopelessly self-deluded Loser) and friends treat his selfish actions throughout the film with the coldness Royal Tenenbaum is met with upon his return to his family home. Despite the seemingly great lengths that Mr. Fox goes to win back the respect and adoration of everyone (ironic yet expected given that this has always been his intention) they are physical not emotional hurdles. The 85 minute adventure narrative condenses all Anderson's once carefully detailed themes into visual tropes and dull exposition.

Anderson has always loved The Bastard, the one who turned his back on everyone who ever gave a damn about him in order to satisfy some internal, animalistic and deeply (although never too deeply) repressed desire. Mr. Fox is Anderson's most simplified and fully-realized Bastard. A self declared Wild Animal, Anderson embraces this default persona and calls for all the film's animals to all become “Wild,” which, if we follow the analogy, means they should all become slaves to their respective primal instincts. Which, especially at the point during which this action is called for by Mr. Fox, should not involve working together to help the the bastard who has, of course, single-handedly gotten them into their current predicament. The Bastard used to be a loner in Anderson's films: the guy no one wanted to see, much less help. In Fantastic Mr. Fox he becomes the down-and-out self-sacrificing character who all other characters eventually come to pity despite that he has not truly changed nor attempted to. Which, for anyone dedicated to the subtly of Anderson's films, is even more disappointing than the film's deplorable deus ex machina finale. In the end, despite Fantastic Mr. Fox being the ill-fitting puzzle piece of Wes Anderson's authentic puzzle of modern relationships, the film is best summarized by the simple platitude (which is also Anderson's uncomfortable, obvious and contradictory self-reference) Mrs. Fox expresses at the film's cavernous mid-point: this story is just too predictable.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Dir. Wes Anderson
2001
9.1

Here's how it goes: you sit down to watch a Wes Anderson movie. You are immediately apprehended by the personality of it. The silliness and childish nature of his cinematography and his relentlessly creative mind. Between the epic goofiness, the vintage music (and apparel), the recognizable faces (there's usually plenty of them), and the smart but unpretentious banter of his characters you begin to think that the name Wes Anderson might be synonymous with pop culture. And you wouldn't be totally wrong in this supposition. In 13 years Anderson has produced six full length feature films (his most recent, Mr. Fox, is slated to premier in November of this year), each more memorable and quirky than the one before. As I was saying though you'll get about 90% of the way through whichever Anderson flick you're watching and start thinking “OK, I've giggled enough for one night, when am I going to get something other than charming wit?” And then BAM! Emotion! Out of nowhere, Anderson proves that he can still hit you in the gut and get an honest reaction out of you. Not only that, he's been building you up to this moment for the length of the film. Wes Anderson has punked you.

I can't believe I just wrote that. Moving on, The Royal Tenenbaums is probably the penultimate example of Anderson's greatness in writing and filming. He manages to pack every good idea he's every written down on a cocktail napkin at a boring house party into a single film with a cast list that alone probably costs the studio more than it cost to make the majority of French New-Wave films, combined. That's Anderson's style. If you're like me you run down the ensemble cast list of any film and chances are after you get past the first two or three names you stop recognizing and stop reading. Not so with Anderson's films. The Royal Tenenbaums sports not one or two but all of the following: Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller, Anjelica Huston and Gene Hackman. You know...just to name a few...The miracle is that Anderson makes it work. I mean, what a nightmare, all that ego and talent in one place. The cast is essentially split in two between actors who are consistently or at least some-what consistently great (Murray, Hackman, Owen Wilson) and actors who when given a great script perform to its standards and when given a terrible script take it because they are shameless (Ben Stiller). Still, every actor in the cast steps up to the challenge of making a quirky (there's that word again, sorry) family drama into a remarkable tale of love and forgiveness, and the stupid things we do for our family.

Speaking of family, Anderson's films are a bit of a family affair in and of themselves. With none of the actors he's consistently worked with (Murray, both Wilsons, Huston) has he managed to form a John Ford-John Wayne type of inseparable bond, but for a man with a lot on his mind during filming it does make things easier to know who you're dealing with, especially when those people you're dealing with are ingrained in the subconscious of Hollywood. It also makes for a pleasant experience for the viewer, having a certain set of expectations for each of Anderson's films and having those expectations fulfilled and exceeded. In The Royal Tenenbaums Anderson extricates intimate performances from Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow while balancing, on the other end of the spectrum, the human (by way of bastard) Gene Hackman and the irresponsible-drugged out-Western writing Owen Wilson. With the exception of Huston's character (Mrs. Tenenbaum) no one really gets left behind in the film. Each character exhibits the kind of growth that's expected from a major motion picture. The miracle is not that it happens. The miracle is that it happens to almost everybody and in a fashion that is clean and uncomplicated, if not slightly unrealistic. However, this is excusable as Anderson clearly seeks to eschew realism in favor of fun and overall visual and emotional impact. With The Royal Tenenbaums Anderson has drawn a vivid caricature of the modern family unit and shown how the only way it functions is by not functioning at all.

This review is pretty superfluous. I don't need to tell you to go see The Royal Tenenbaums or any of Anderson's movies for that matter (especially since this one came out 8 years ago). I don't need to tell you how the film unfolds like a 19th century Russian novel, only funny instead of depressing. And I certainly don't need to tell you that Anderson pays an almost compulsive amount of attention to the details of his film. The angles, the sets, the background stories that allow you to connect with, or at least vaguely understand, these larger than life characters. What should be pointed out though is the level of sophistication behind this film. Anderson is a young, eager director. He hasn't even broke 40 yet and he's already made several highly acclaimed films and shows no sign of slowing down. It makes sense. Some people are restlessly creative. They need to be constantly inventing things in order to satisfy themselves. That's not all Anderson has, though. He's a visionary. The way his films elegantly glide along, with a perfect synchronization of comedic and dramatic timing, shows that he has organized the crazy amount of detail in his films very precisely. They are pleasurable to the eye and to the id. They reinforce cultural values while simultaneously introducing new means of thinking about those values. The Royal Tenenbaums takes a lot of pretense and boils it down to a dense, pleasurable, and colorful cinematic experience.