FILM OF THE WEEK: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's sixth feature and third to be pre-judged as a "Wes Anderson" film—a calcified pejorative often bearing little relation to what the movies are actually like. A "Wes Anderson movie," we're given to understand, is a series of candy-colored rectangular sets and frames boxing in little more than statically quirky characters. It's true that Anderson's thematic concerns have been consistent: dysfunctional families, absent/negligent paterfamiliases, '60s pop and rock songs, hermetically detailed mise-en-scène. But there are also meaningful differences between each one, rarely noted in negative reviews convinced Anderson has outstayed his welcome. After The Royal Tenenbaums—in which Rushmore's occasional cuteness thickened into an emotional mausoleum, with only Luke Wilson's suicide attempt breaking through—Anderson made two transitional films entering new terrain. Anderson's detractors didn't notice: two movies about bad fathers and tragic sons with suicidal impulses were two too many. Yet as Michael Sicinski simply noted of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, "Anderson moves the camera"; that is, in fact, a meaningful progression for the former king of tableaux and elaborate tracking shots. There are more narrative longueurs in Life Aquatic than any of Anderson's other movies—it's practically inert—but Anderson couldn't take his stand-up cardboard picture-book-shots any further and began looking for a way out. Even more woefully misunderstood was The Darjeeling Limited, largely jeered at as quirk embalmed within quirk unwisely backdropped by a fantasy India—even though the 15-minute double-funeral sequence in the middle was straight-up tragedy, the most emotionally direct and devastating thing he'd ever tried.

Fantastic Mr. Fox shows meaningful change both technically and thematically in a way that should be hard to ignore: it's Anderson's first non-widescreen movie since Bottle Rocket, and his first fully functional, non-divorced family. There's a prototypically irresponsible, egotistical father, sure, but by film's end he's changed his ways. Punishing an irresponsible dad and integrating him back into contented domesticity is a convention of the family film—which Fantastic Mr. Fox, despite its totally adult dialogue, functions as, thanks to spangly stop-motion and zippy chases—but it's a possibility denied in Anderson's other films, and he seems to mean it. More importantly, Life Aquatic andDarjeeling had their moments of tedium, while Fantastic Mr. Fox does not. Working in stop-motion, with visuals pre-timed to sound, has forced compression upon Anderson, ironing out his pacing problems: this is vintage screwball-comedy speed with no repose. It may be too much for some people, but it's relentlessly inventive. The verbal wit only stops for physical gags (everyone should enjoy Willem Dafoe's "psychotic rat," a mix of finger-snapping West Side Story gang member and out-of-place Western gunslinger), and there's zero downtime. The movie is never not clever, and its verbal digressions and jokes are more moment-to-moment surface hilarious than any of Anderson's past work.

That does not, however, mean that the film "lacks the heart of the director's best work" or, as Sight & Sound's Ben Walters charges, that Anderson's failed "to address the tension between living as a wild animal and shouldering responsibility for others." It's hard to get any clearer than Mr. Fox saying, straight-up, that he sometimes is tempted to be a wild animal rather than a father and husband, but it's true that the total time of expressly signaled deep emotion is pretty brief. Anderson hasn't just compressed his narrative, but his signifiers as well: apparently realizing that, yes, his obsessions do repeat themselves, he trusts you to follow the slightly changed pattern. The inappropriately (and, more importantly, ineptly) expressed sexual urges of the past—Max Fisher's impossible crush on Miss Cross, Bill Murray's off-key flirting in The Life Aquatic, Jason Schwartzman's hilariously unsexy copulation skills in Darjeeling—are sublimated into an obsession with food (more tellingly, stealing it before ravaging the plate).

Meanwhile, the ever-present fear of aging and death receives its own shorthand. Mortality tends to enter Anderson movies with the sudden unexpected use of contemporary songs rather than the usual '60s mixtape fare: Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" in Tenenbaums, Sigur Rós in Aquatic. Here, Anderson switches off the Beach Boys and leans on Alexandre Desplat's score as Mr. Fox—after winning all the important battles of the plot—sees his biggest fear, a wolf, and makes his peace with it. It's essentially the same as Murray seeing the Jaguar Shark in Life Aquatic—a man staring at the deadly thing he fears and implicitly coming to terms with death—but expressed in a far more compacted manner that's all the more affective for how little time you're given to take it in.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is as exhaustively, cinematically cross-indexed as any of Anderson's past work, complete with other people's repurposed soundtracks (there's quite a few Georges Delerue bits from Truffaut films here), which suggests the usual charges that Anderson's essentially a sterile cinephile rather than an original thinker; it's also tempting to suggest that Anderson's movies—with their deceptively bright palettes and emotionally stunted characters—have always been a bit child-like, so him making a kids' movie is the logical end-point.

And sure, I sympathize: I can get frustrated with Anderson's too-easy insistence on signifying fun with old songs and serious moments with new music, with the intense emphasis on fashion for even the most minor character, and with what's been lost from his first two films (the possibility of raw awkwardness and need). But Fantastic Mr. Fox isn't just his most fully realized movie in a decade; it's the logical progression of his consistently misunderstood maudits, with man-children reconciling themselves to maturity sooner rather than later and childhood traumas resolved rather than festering permanently. It's also his funniest, most exuberantly inventive movie. It is, in fact, a Wes Anderson movie, which now means exactly what it did a decade ago: a major American comedy.

Posted by ahillis at November 12, 2009 4:37 PM