Film review

  • Fantastic Mr Fox

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Breathe In

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Drake Doremus (2013)

    Breathe In opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival:  Drake Doremus, Felicity Jones and Dustin O’Halloran, who wrote the score, were all there for the screening.  It was a really enjoyable occasion – because it was Edinburgh and an opportunity to applaud the people behind Like Crazy – but this latest from Doremus is a disappointment after its predecessor.  Felicity Jones again plays an English girl on a period of study in America; good actress though she is, Jones is less persuasive here than in the earlier film.  More than two years after Like Crazy, she’s playing someone younger – a high school rather than a college student.  It’s true that Jones, who’s now nearly thirty, is petite enough to pass for someone younger and innocent but the naivete of Sophie in Breathe In is wafer thin.   It’s clear almost as soon as she arrives to stay with the Reynolds family in a small town in upstate New York that Sophie has her eye on the paterfamilias Keith (Guy Pearce), a high-school music teacher who’s still not given up hopes of a career as a cellist in an orchestra.   As Jones plays her, there’s no mistaking Sophie’s intent – or, at least, her fantasy – and Keith must see it in her eyes.   Doremus and his actors are good at social details.  When Sophie has her first meal with the Reynolds – Keith, his wife Megan (Amy Ryan) and their teenage daughter Lauren (Mackenzie Davis) – the scene expresses how a newcomer can feel all the more excluded by hosts who are welcoming and whose affability reinforces, to an outsider, their easy familiarity with each other.  For the first half hour or so the central story is strong too.  Their shared interest in, and talent for, performing classical music give Sophie and Keith a kinship that sets them apart from the homebody Megan, with her collection of cookie jars, and Lauren, who’s a swimming champ and, by implication, a philistine.  For as long as it’s not obvious that Sophie’s interest in Keith is reciprocated, the film is absorbing.

    Although it’s hardly an original idea, the passion in the music does function as a sublimation of sexual feelings that Sophie and Keith know shouldn’t be expressed – particularly a piece of Chopin that Sophie plays for the rest of the high-school class when Keith asks her to introduce herself to them.  Guy Pearce’s reaction to this is very striking.  Keith seems discomfited by Sophie’s playing:   Pearce suggests this is something he hadn’t bargained for either as a fellow musician (and one who feels thwarted – and vulnerable to younger competitors) or in terms of its emotional effect on him (as someone whose family life is unfulfilling too).  But what follow-up there is to this powerful moment is artificially delayed.  We have to wait until Megan, Lauren and Sophie go to a concert at which Keith is playing and, when they meet him afterwards, he introduces Sophie to his orchestra colleague as a ‘fantastic pianist’.  (This moment plays out simply as a crude exclusion of Lauren.)  As Keith’s and Sophie’s feelings for each other start to register in the real world outside their heads (although it’s not clear that the relationship is ever fully consummated), Breathe In becomes conventional and melodramatic in a rather mechanical way, and the screenplay turns lazy and absent-minded.  Lauren happens to be walking just where she can see her father and Sophie lying together by a lake; the serial humiliations for her that follow aren’t sequenced convincingly – it’s as if all that matters is that they climax in the car crash Lauren’s in.  There’s a lack of clarity too about how much Keith’s professional fortunes matter to him relative to his new preoccupation with Sophie.

    Of course Sophie is meant to expose the fissures of family life that routine and evasion have kept hidden but Doremus and his co-writer Ben York Jones (who also worked with him on Like Crazy) supply that family life only with qualities that make it vulnerable.  They fail to suggest enough of what kept it going until now (and there’s no suggestion of earlier ruptures having occurred).  You actually get a better sense – in one short scene – of how an imperfect marriage survives when the Reynolds, with Sophie, visit their friends Peter (Kyle McLachlan) and Wendy (Alexandra Wentworth).  You get it in what Peter confides to Keith over the barbecue, in Wendy’s vivid chatter about interior decorating and freezing food.   Guy Pearce, like Felicity Jones, is good at creating edge and tension but he also makes it too evident too soon what lies beneath the surface.   The film starts and ends with Keith, Megan and Lauren posing for a family photo:  these bookend sequences are very well played (even though by the end we know just how forced the smiles for the camera are) but Keith’s capacity for dissimulation doesn’t go beyond this momentary and obvious example.   Pearce makes him too remote and pissed off.

    Amy Ryan has a pretty wretched role – the cookie jars are too obviously symbolic and, of course, get shattered in due course – but Ryan plays it empathically.  You can just about believe in Megan’s jolly determination to hold on to her happy family, or the idea of one.  The moments of credibility that Amy Ryan achieves tend, however, to reveal the implausibility of other elements of Breathe In.  Although she’s been playing piano since she was five years old, Sophie is now undecided about a musical career:  she reveals this to Keith when they’re alone in the house together, after an old-fashioned Hollywood rainstorm that requires a change of clothes, but you know that Megan would have been cheerfully inquisitive enough (and sufficiently effective as an inquisitor) to get this sort of information out of Sophie in less meteorologically heightened circumstances.  (The rainstorm is such a cliché you feel almost surprised that neither of these clever, cultured people comments on it.)

    Breathe In, for all its faults, is much better than A Late Quartet but it gradually sinks into the same misapprehension that the classical music context necessarily confers depth on the material, when the effect of the music is, for the most part, merely melodramatic.  And the sexual dimension is disappointingly tame – Felicity Jones’s actual age blurs the potentially controversial generation gap between Keith and Sophie (she is presumably a minor).  By the end, the movie has become so predictable that I hoped Keith would ignore the crucial phone call, informing him that Lauren’s in hospital, and go ahead with eloping with Sophie – just so as to defy the requirements of this kind of story.  (He doesn’t.)  Whereas the music often seems too loud, it’s sometimes hard to make out what the voices are saying – even when everything else about an exchange between characters is telling you that their words are full of significance.

    19 June 2013

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