|
 (112009) Back in 1999, a pair of filmmakers went off their
hard-R-rated paths to deliver a pair of G-rated features. The two Davids, Mamet
and Lynch, weren't necessarily making children's pictures. Few parents have
plunked down their children for a double feature of The Straight Story and The
Winslow Boy, but family fables they were about reconciliation and theft. The
same year, another pair of filmmakers were at the beginning of their careers and
achieving near-unanimous acclaim for their films, Rushmore and Being John
Malkovich. Flash-forward ten years to the present. Spike Jonze is wowing astute
critics with his adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic,
Where the Wild
Things Are and Wes Anderson is now dabbling in stop-motion animation
adapting Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Both are not your typical
children's tales and Jonze has been equally praised and criticized for making a
children's film for adults. Anderson is liable to face the same criticism, but
dutifully more so for making a kid's film for him more than anyone else.
Like
Wild Things,
Mr. Fox has been expanded upon its initially simple story. Dahl's 81-page yarn
had significantly more sentences than Sendak's work but could still be broken
down into a one-line description of a dastardly fox trying to save his family
from the wrath of a trio of farmers. Anderson's Mr. Fox is a sly one indeed. As
voiced by George Clooney, he knows the ins-and-outs of marauding chickens from
the neighboring farms. When Mr. and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) are caught during
one mission and she tells him she's with cub, he makes a vow to go respectable
if they get away. (How they get away is never visualized, though one could see
their slender frames going right in-between the far-apart bars.)
Some fox years later, Mr. Fox is now a newspaperman, the Mrs. is a happy
homemaker and their son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is going through his awkward
phase. Mr. Fox wants better for his family and looks into buying a tree, one out
of his price range according to his lawyer, Badger (Bill Murray). He goes about
it anyway but is still unsatisfied, feeling the urge to pull one last
three-phase job to loot the farms of Boggis, Bunce and Bean "one fat, one short,
one lean." When the farmers catch on to their fox problem they team up to
eliminate the poacher for good, camping outside their tree with shotguns and
when all else fails, digs into it until there's nothing left. Meanwhile, Mr. Fox
and family escape with their lives, meeting up with all the other displaced
animals to try to survive the farmers as well as Fox's sworn enemy, The Rat
(Willem Dafoe) and finding a home for all to co-exist.
That's the bare bones of Dahl's yarn. Maybe not enough to sustain a 90-minute
feature but a reasonable jumping off point best represented in the early scenes
while we become accustomed to the animation style and delight in the bridging of
the animal characters with the everyday customs of the human world. Breaking
with the casual behavior to act out their animal natures provide the film with
some of its best throwaway moments. Punctuated by Anderson's classic rock
standards, anyone familiar with the director's style of title cards and the
recurring themes that has permeated all of his films may be inclined to believe
that Fantastic Mr. Fox is parodying those very conventions. Instead, the film
slowly bogs itself down in becoming another permutation on family dysfunction.
Aided by Noah Baumbach on script duties, he of such touchy-feely family dramas,
The Squid and the Whale and Margot At The Wedding, open up Mr. Fox's world to
drop a couple of new characters into the mix. The super of his tree, opossum
Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky) gives Foxy a willing, if naive, conspirator in his
crimes. But its the presence of visiting nephew/cousin, Kristofferson (Eric
Anderson), that sparks any number of daddy issues and teenage angst that come
off more as self-serving commitments to themes exponentially-explored in
Anderson's work than fresh lessons for children too young to see The Royal
Tenenbaums, which remains his magnum opus. Again, a winking nod to the adults
appreciative of his spotty portfolio could have been a fun, if consciously
self-aware exercise. Mr. Fox has had its roots in the thieving brothers of
Bottle Rocket and the uneasy father figure relationships of Rushmore, Tenenbaums
and The Life Aquatic. Anderson has never been much to provide an ebb and flow
from one scene to the next, a trait that helped suffocate the inexplicably,
overpraised Rushmore. Animation, especially one that begs to be unique like Mr.
Fox, depends on its storytelling to invite audiences into a world without rules.
So once the animals are driven into hiding, the plotting begins to wear thin and
we're left underground while Fox's family either seeks his or their own approval
while neglecting ours.
It's hard to criticize Fantastic Mr. Fox for adding one too-many knowing winks
when you have Bill Murray voicing a rodent burrowing through the dirt and never
make a Caddyshack reference - even when they are being flushed out with hoses of
cider. There is a lot of good stuff in Anderson's films. There always is. The
animation, while not as aesthetically pleasing as the norms of Pixar and other
multi-dimensions, is still wondrous in its old-school audacity, reminding one
more of the original King Kong than
Wallace & Gromit. We get big laughs out of the putdown of an impromptu
musician and the eulogy of another character. Not far into its middle act though
the film never finds a footing as either an animated adventure tale or a deeper
mediation on family bonding and interspecies relations. Wishing it was Chicken
Run and never achieving the depth of
Where the Wild
Things Are, Anderson and Baumbach create a half-fun, half-humdrum affair
that I'm sure they will enjoy watching over and over.
|
