Directed By: Wes Anderson
Written By: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach
Starring: George Clooney as Mr Fox, Meryl Streep as Felicity, Jason Schwartzman as Ash, Wallace Wolodarsky as Kylie Sven Opossum
Like Taylor Swift before me, I will preface my incoherent ramblings with an extravagantly irrelevant summary of my thought progression:
What a nice sepia tint, very O Brother, Where Art Thou? —> What a folksy song for the introductory act, very O Brother, Where Art Thou? —> OMG this is a stop-motion picture, that’s so rare —> Oh hey, it’s George Clooney, very O Brother, Where Art Thou? —> Oh wow Mr Fox is such a dark character, that’s so rare —> Hey it’s that Beach Boys cut from Smile —> Awesomeness overload —> *Too busy laughing to think* —> Oh. It’s over? *Eats a box of chocolates* Oh 😦 *Eats another box of chocolates*
From the very start, it’s really clear that this is a Wes Anderson film. Stylistically, it feels very much like a successor of sorts to Anderson’s magnum opus The Royal Tenenbaums. It is saturated in primary colours, divided deliberately into individual acts, and the dialogue is uniformly executed with deadpan incisiveness. Most characteristically, there is a certain insidious darkness that belies the film’s flashy aesthetics. In The Royal Tenenbaums, loss and existential aimlessness are the two of the darker undercurrents that pervade the film; here, the themes explored are not nearly as ambitious, and mostly the darkness is psychological rather than philosophical. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Anderson employed the help of long-time collaborator Noah Baumbach, who more powerfully than any other screenwriter, arguably, since Bergman, can craft dark, complex, tortured characters. The magic of the film is that the two balance each other out quite perfectly; Anderson filters Baumbach’s startling truths through his stylistic excess and in-your-face aestheticism, and as a result the film is appropriately nonchalant about its own twistedness, and cleverly allows itself to be great entertainment with psychological depth — rather than a psychological drama with comedic depth. The film opens with two instances of Mr Fox giving Felicity two choices (“the shortcut or the scenic route”, “the hole under the horse fence or… the rail over the bridal path”), and in each instance he abusively supplants her decision with his own, indicating his compulsive need for control. His son, Ash, is a bitterly jealous character who basically embodies adolescent angst; he actively seeks his dad’s approval, he tries (quite fruitlessly) to become the adored ‘athlete’ he wishes he was, he harbours a cutely misanthropic worldview and he possessively needs to be cynosure of all eyes. We are so often invited to laugh at him for his petulant humorlessness (“It’s because you think I’m no good at anything.Well maybe you’re right. Thanks a lot”, “Oh you’re gonna pout about it? Cause I’ve had it up to HERE with the sad house guest routine”) that we don’t realize that our laughter is the very thing that inspires his self-hating polemic. In many ways, this film is about Ash’s self-awakening (“I’m grumpy. I spit. I wake up on the wrong side of the bed”) as he tries to accept the person that he is and not the person he wishes he was (who is embodied in Kristofferson, a Yoga practitioner with cute ears), and the two writers do a great job at getting this point across despite Ash not having much screentime at all.
It’s almost like there isn’t anything worth talking about in this film, because everything about it is so perfect. George Clooney’s lead performance. The Owen Wilson cameo. Mr Fox’s corny signature whistle thing. The opossum sidekick. The gloriously ridiculous farmers. The soundtrack. The conspicuous use of the word “cuss”. The way the animals devour their food. I haven’t watched a film this fun since 2004’s The Incredibles. And that film had Edna. So when I say Fantastic Mr Fox is good, I mean it’s really cussing good.
KevinScale Rating: 5/5