Wes Anderson (2009)
Richard Brody’s profile of Wes Anderson in this week’s New Yorker is informative and illuminating. Anderson wonders why Slumdog Millionaire was such a hit while his ‘India movie’, The Darjeeling Limited, was anything but. He thinks that:
‘With my style, I can take a subject that you’d think would be commercial and turn it into something that not a lot of people want to see.’
The implication that there was an international audience-in-waiting for an ‘India movie’ is puzzling but Anderson’s self-assessment seems right enough. It would be wrong to assume, though, that he’s a commercial deterrent because his pictures are rigorous and make demands that a mass audience can’t be bothered with. Elsewhere in Brody’s piece, Anderson explains that:
‘In the course of doing [my] first few movies, I found a way that felt instinctively right for me and I didn’t feel constrained … The end result is that they’re very personal movies in a way that some people really connect with.’
He and Owen Wilson filled Anderson’s first feature, Bottle Rocket, with ‘things we’ve seen in movies that we like’. Anderson felt ‘free to say that the details can really be anything that feels right’.
Fantastic Mr Fox confirms Anderson’s essentially self-indulgent approach. The source material by Roald Dahl is a much-loved children’s book (which I’ve not read), first published in 1970, the year after Anderson was born. It turns out to be the first book he ever owned and is evidently close to his heart. You feel that he’s turned it into cinema as if it were his private property – not as a means of giving a treat to the kids or older generations who love the book. There’s plenty going for the film to make it a hit and I suppose for many children to enjoy – talking animals, heroes and villains, lots of action, beguiling imagery. But much of what’s distinctive about Mr Fox will go unnoticed by children, and is unlikely to resonate with their parents’ experience of the book. Of course, Anderson is entitled as an artist to make whatever film he wants to make – strictly speaking, he’s under no more obligation to adapt the Dahl book faithfully than he would be if he were making Crime and Punishment (although it’s undeniable that, emotionally speaking, you feel he is under a greater obligation because this is a children’s favourite). Mr Fox is another of his ‘personal movies in a way that some people really connect with’ – in spite of the fact that, according to Brody’s piece, Anderson is ‘acutely aware that a lot depends on the reception’ of this film.
There’s a difference too between being a personal filmmaker and a selfish one. A personal filmmaker may be putting their private obsessions on screen while still aiming to communicate them. The New Yorker piece leaves you in no doubt of Anderson’s obsession with detail but he seems to want to realise this on film principally to satisfy himself (and those close to him) that he’s achieved an extraordinary technical standard. We learn, for example, that the stitching at the edge of the collar of Mr Fox’s shirt is visible in close-up and that:
‘Another set featured a miniature piano, whose keys could be depressed individually, so that, when a figurine played, the motions matched those of the real performance being heard on the soundtrack.’
I admit that I’m visually unobservant but I’d bet very few of the audience for Mr Fox, when they watch the sequence in question (a mole playing an arrangement of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’), are impressed by what Anderson sees as crucial here.
All the above seems ungrateful because I really enjoyed Fantastic Mr Fox. Anderson’s preoccupying obliquity tends to detract from the narrative momentum of the story but this is fine by me. I rarely stopped smiling during the 84 minutes of the film and I’d started smiling from the word go, for no better reason than that it’s a Twentieth Century Fox production (and that the trailers we’d just seen had included one for another: Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 – ‘The Squeakuel’ – in which the eponymous heroes sing the Fox fanfare).
The film is mostly intriguing to look at: I sometimes wondered if reddish pinks were too dominant in the colour scheme but there’s plenty of lovely colouring. The animal figurines (this is stop-motion animation, like, for example, the Wallace and Gromit films) are an extraordinary, not entirely attractive, mixture of the natural and the anthropomorphic. They wear clothes and move on two legs but they retain their animal physiques. (Mr and Mrs Fox are so skinny in neat-fitting clothes that, in longer shots, they can suggest animated versions of Roger la Borde illustrations.) They’re also covered in real animal fur (from ‘safe sources’). This, in combination with their human expressions and attitudes, has a rather disturbing lycanthropic effect but it’s an apt way of illustrating what seems to be at the heart of the story as Anderson tells it: the fact that the foxes are wild animals. (The moments when they tear into their food animalistically are great.) Early in their marriage, when Felicity Fox had just learned she was pregnant, the couple escaped from a farmer’s trap by burrowing down into the earth. Foxy (as his wife calls him) decided there and then to give up stealing fowl and settle down into a responsible and domesticated way of life. (He’s a successful, though not well paid, writer on the local animal newspaper; Felicity is a talented artist.) The plot turns on Foxy reverting to his old, natural ways: he’s the hero of the story but is doing the things that make the fox a rural villain. His renewed marauding intensifies the determination of the three vilely rapacious farmers of the story – Boggis, Bunce and Bean – to rid their land of foxes. Once Foxy has, as he himself puts it, fallen ‘off the wagon’, I found I wasn’t just seeing these particular animal figures, in their tailored costumes, in a different light (and in a way that made sense of the discomfort their realistic features had caused from the start). The nature vs civilisation dilemma also calls up images of animals-as-humans throughout the history of animated film. If this was as far as Anderson took the theme, it would be interesting enough as an academic exercise but he develops the anthropomorphism of the story – through dialogue (which he co-wrote with Noah Baumbach) and actors’ voices – in ways which make the enterprise a good deal more interesting, and richly entertaining.
The readers are splendid and George Clooney’s voicing of Mr Fox is something special. According to the New Yorker profile, Anderson, in the autumn of 2007, laid on Methodical training for Clooney, Bill Murray and some of the others (presumably not Meryl Streep, who replaced Cate Blanchett as the voice of Mrs Fox at the eleventh hour of production):
‘In order to make the voices and the film’s soundscape realistic, Anderson had his actors perform the motions – running, digging and climbing – that the figurines would perform …’
I don’t know how necessary or valuable that proved to be, or whether the actors read blind or watching completed footage of their characters, but if the readings are an example of Anderson’s perfectionism, they’re a vindication of it. It’s as if he has insisted that the actors perform within a defined range – like singing in a particular key. Yet the results don’t sound at all constrained: the discipline and pressure of working within limits has resulted in expressive precision. Clooney is very funny, imparting to Mr Fox his own charm, wry egotism and ability to laugh at himself, and he’s perfectly complemented by Meryl Streep. The contrast between his warmth and her coolness is really effective: it chimes with the characters of the Foxes as they’re written – he’s a charismatic rogue, she’s a lady – and convinces you of their happy marriage. The readings have such a fluent balance that Clooney and Streep might be reading poetry in sprung rhythm. Some of the other voice characterisations are not much less good, particularly Michael Gambon as Farmer Bean and Willem Dafoe as a Latino rat. Owen Wilson has a droll cameo as a baseball coach (Skip) and Jason Schwartzman (Ash – the Foxes’ cub), Eric Chase Anderson (Ash’s exasperatingly accomplished cousin, Kristofferson), and Wallace Wolodarsky (a loyal opossum called Kylie) all lend good support. The only relative disappointment is Bill Murray as a badger solicitor: he’s OK but it’s a surprise that Murray doesn’t register more strongly (perhaps because the prevailing style of the readings means that others are encroaching on his preferred dry-as-a-bone territory).
These controlled yet elastic readings have a surprising emotional range. Some of the exchanges within the Fox family come over as gentle satire of Hollywood dystopian family drama – other moments have the sentimental pull of the same genre. When Meryl Streep emotes and Mrs Fox’s furry eyes fill with tears, it’s animated anthropomorphism at a pleasingly sophisticated level. American accents in a rural English setting won’t please everyone but if Fantastic Mr Fox is an example of cultural imperialism it’s an enjoyably eccentric and evocative example. Having British actors do the farmers – the villains of the piece – revives a venerable Hollywood casting tradition. And the effect of the American accents is very different from the ones in something like Disney’s Winnie the Pooh films where (if memory serves) they’re simply alien to the location of the story. The location of Mr Fox is rarely specifically English and the transatlantic facets are various. There’s the opossum and the baseball coach; Foxy’s hipster self-analysis (‘Why a fox? Why not a horse, or a beetle, or a bald eagle? I’m saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know?‘); and the year-I-became-a-man thread in the progress of Ash from zero to hero. Anderson (not unlike Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds) presents crucial encounters between the animals and their enemies like Western shootouts and there’s something essentially American about Mr Fox’s team-building talk for the final showdown, even if he addresses each contributor to the cause by the Latin name of his species. The selection of music, including the Beach Boys and Burl Ives, adds to the New World texture (although the main theme is by the ubiquitous Alexandre Desplat and there’s a song by Jarvis Cocker, who also does one of the voices).
29 October 2009