Cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Eric Chase Anderson
Plot: Based on the Roald Dahl childrens book of the same name, Mr. Fox and his prairie animal companions deal with a group of farmers hell bent on rooting them out after Mr. Fox steals their hard-made goods; or, the anarchic fecundity of all living things vs. industrial capitalism.
Despite the fact that I'm now joining the ranks of movie reviewers, I usually avoid reading reviews. Unless, that is, I don't like a movie. When I see a movie that makes me want my time and money back, I love to see someone put to words all my feelings of frustration, and trash the shit out of it. Now it's my turn, and I hope in this inaugural post I do justice to the feelings of those of you who are disappointed by Fantastic Mr. Fox.
I didn't hate it, and it had some great highs. There were moments where it was so cute I almost cried. There were some beautiful shots that made me watch them again, and there were shots that worked perfectly with the stop-motion format. I just didn't get it. From the first few scenes, Anderson laid out a clear aesthetic point of view, and then in the next smashed it to pieces. Then went back to that comfortable, appealing first vision only to smash it to pieces again later. One of my biggest complaints is that Anderson could not completely commit to one stylistic approach to stop motion, and moving between the various styles was jarring and unpleasant.
The first version that made up most of the movie sought to go the route of movies like "Chicken Run" and make the characters as human and three dimensional as possible, only more. Complete with clothes, business interests, blinking, pancakes, and all sorts of humanesque attributes, the original style was all about making the characters lovable and cute by exploring the "what if animals lived like us?" angle. It's a similar idea that drives people to dress up their pets: it's kitsch but it's cute as hell sometimes. But during action sequences, he portrayed them so cartoonishly that it could have been an episode of Coyote and Roadrunner. When Mr. and Mrs. Fox go stealing squab in the beginning, they change from humans in fox form to fucking Tom and Jerry, bounding over farm buildings in one leap while doing cartwheels. Or worse, they loose all semblance of either. In one sequence where the animals are flushed out of their underground dwellings into the sewer system by a flood of hard apple cider, the images are reduced to paper cut-outs against two dimensional pictures of sewer pipes.
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of these. They just don't work together. Juxtaposition of opposites is funny (think about Ron Jeremy Standing next to Shaq, and don't laugh) but that doesn't work with cinematography and style. If in the middle of "District 9" the camera work and feel suddenly changed to that of "The Wedding Singer" would it work? That kind of graceless shift doesn't work because it just doesn't make sense to your brain. It pulls you out of that comfortable world we create, in which the movie and it's characters are real, and we care about what happens as if it were actually happening.
But then, in all honesty, there wasn't that much to care about anyway. Wes Anderson may have fallen victim to that same obsessive syndrome that produced three of the worst movies, in terms of content, of the past decade. That's right: that god damn Hayden Christenson, Jar-Jar Binks laden, miticlorian-what-the-fuck, Natile Portman-is-a-space-whore-zionist-bitch of a travisty, the Star Wars Prequels. George Lucas was so concerned with mastering wholly digital environments and the CGI effects, that he forgot to tell a story. I think Anderson was afflicted by the same syndrome, directed this time at the stop motion technology, while filming Mr. Fox.
He is known for being abrupt and emotionally subdued, even flat, but this movie took that way, way to far. I don't like when people say this, but, I didn't care about anyone in the film. In the penultimate scene, when Jason Schwartzman's character Ash, Mr. Fox's son, tries to rescue his cousin who he's spurned throughout the film for being better liked than him, but now realizes he cares about, we're supposed to care. Or, we're supposed to understand the emotional developments behind this change. Instead, it just kind of happens, because somebody wrote it in a script. A lot of the movie is just kind of there, and there aren't connections between the events and characters that make us care about what happens to them. They're just, there. Moreover, 70% of the movie is George Clooney, Mr. Fox, rambling and acting sly. Other people show up occasionally to say there lines, but it's mostly just him and he doesn't carry the burden well. Even Meryl Streep has only about 10 lines in the whole movie, and they're said so quietly, you kind of forget she's there.
Then, the last quarter of the movie suddenly makes the battle between the animals and the farmers about animal nature vs. repressive civilization. The double-breasted Fox suits, the mole-sized walkmans, the pancakes, they're all just artifice, and in the end animals can't help but be animals. All that crap imposed by society is masking their real selves and abilities. It is only when they employ their innate animal traits that they beat the hard-nosed, capitalist bastard farmers. This move is so out of step with the rest of the film, that you realize, it's just there to resolve the narrative, so Anderson can wrap up with a song and dance number.
I think that Fantastic Mr. Fox is 80-85% there, and it needed a final rework to make it a film. Right now, it's just one of those movies that pulls you in, only to leave you asking, "why did that just happen?"
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