Film Review #112: FANTASTIC MR FOX

Film Review #112: FANTASTIC MR FOX

Wes Anderson Will Keep On Being Wes Anderson Until The End Of Time

An impossibly orange image of a field flashes. The lines are so impossibly straight and the textures are so uniform that our minds struggle to register the image as anything beyond just an abstract collage of shapes.

A film by Wes Anderson. 

We are then introduced to our dolls. Mr Fox, the family man who misses living large. His wife, who reigns him in just when he begins to wander too far. And his son, Ash, who would like to embody the same masculine stereotypes his father once did, but finds himself out of his depth. Even his father fails to live up to this idea anymore, weighed down by both the emotional demands of a more civilised era, and home loans high enough for any woodland creature to baulk at. All of this will become everyone else’s problem soon enough.

It’s shocking how well Wes Anderson’s signature style gloms onto stop-motion. Here, he can direct his actors to give their deliberately-stilted performances before transposing them into deliberately-stilted bodies, ones that sort of ratchet from pose to pose in place of moving. And if he wants to fuss over the vectors and construction of every single one of his shots, then here is a constructed environment where he can move every single building one centimetre to the left until they form a perfect 45 degree line in the shot.

Even amongst other adaptations of Roald Dahl’s work, Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox stands out because of how much the director is willing to tease out Dahl’s gleeful misanthropy while still tempering it within this tone of gleeful mischief. Mr Fox’s kid, Ash, is untalented and misanthropic to such an extent that you really do begin to understand his father’s apathy towards him, especially when overachieving-yet-endearing cousin Kristofferson visits for an extended stay.

Compare this with Danny Devito’s Matilda adaptation, which plasters over everything in a uniform coat of sickly-sweet nostalgia to paper down Dahl’s feverish desire for an utopia where all of the nice, pretty, college-educated people and all the ugly, mean, and stupid people should live together, and both of these groups should never contact each other ever again. Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox at least respects us enough to trust us to empathise with these Foxes even at their most petty moments. Ash is just plain awful to talk to thanks to his teenage angst, and his father is even worse. 

This being an Anderson film also means that it never fully reaches the fully unhinged nature of films like Mel Stuart’s 1971 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There, Stuart revels in making the Chocolate Factory feel like a barely-contained deathtrap, and you really do feel like Gene Wilder is two seconds away from biting someone at any given moment. Mr Fox, on the other hand, feels far more restrained in his performance. He obviously thinks of himself as smarter and sharper than everyone around him, but Anderson lets us feel just how annoying he is to be around as much as he lets us know how good it is to pull off a well-made plan while sporting a shit-eating grin the whole time.

Of course, all of these miss the forest for the trees: Wes Anderson is the perfect midwit director. Every element of every second of every single one of his movies is purpose-made to scream at you that yes, you are in fact watching a Wes Anderson movie. This masterclass in cinema-as-branding means that he’s extremely easy and fun for people to talk about, regardless of whether or not you love or hate him. Even complaining about how twee he is feels twee in and of itself, and just helps further cement his place in the cultural mythos as some kind of eternal waifish gnome-boy, forever jaunting in the woods with Owen Wilson and company.

This makes it easy to paint a picture of Anderson as more stereotype than man, but there is yet meat on these bones. Almost every Wes Anderson protagonist suffers from a crisis of masculinity but here it is articulated the most plainly. Mr Fox will probably keep on acting this way until the end of time, but we can find precious alleviation in knowing that the person who finds him the most annoying is himself. 

Yes, it’s great that Mr Fox reaffirms his masculine identity, but at the same time you can’t help but appreciate how he ends up making everyone’s life worse in the process. Mr Fox has his one final gloat before the credits, but he also quips about how the food they have to scavenge for now tastes worse than before. We are left to stroke our chins.

I still haven’t watched Asteroid City. I’m pretty sure it’s good, but I’m in no real hurry. I’m sure that no matter how many of his films I catch in theatres, or don’t catch in theatres, Wes Anderson will still be here, reconstructing and deconstructing his own mythos of dapper-guys-who-talk-with-flat-affects and guys-who-will-one-day-become-dapper-guys-who-talk-with-flat-affects until the heat death of our universe. And he will surely find a quirkier way to do it every time. Damn! Did you know that Wes Anderson makes his film crew get measuring tape out to make sure the camera’s exactly in the middle of his sets? Damn! And did you hear that he made the voice actors for Fantastic Mr Fox record their lines in the middle of the woods? Damn! But also, it’s crazy how…