 FURRIES!: Mr. Fox (George Clooney) examines a genealogy of badgers. |
Mr. Fox has it all—a beautiful spouse, a precocious son, a handsome if moderately priced treehouse, and an eminently respectable job as a newspaper columnist—but he is dissatisfied, and longs for the lost vivacity of his days as a poultry thief. Brooding in the branches of his new domicile, the hero (voiced by George Clooney) grouses to his acolyte Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky), a handyman opossum prone to anxiety attacks. “Who am I?” he asks. “What is a fox without, if you’ll pardon the expression, a chicken in his teeth?” Whatever Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) may think, he’s going to do one last job in the barns of the evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The fox can’t change its stripes—even if it’s wearing a very natty corduroy blazer.
The consensus on Wes Anderson before Fantastic Mr. Fox was that he, too, had burrowed himself into a rut. It was hard to find a review of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or The Darjeeling Limited that did not make some reference to the director constructing elaborate dollhouses. Now that Anderson has in fact begun playing with dolls—adapting Roald Dahl’s children’s book into a stop-motion feature—the notices are laudatory (well, except from the chief animator and cinematographer, who have publicly aired some grudges). This is odd, because Fantastic Mr. Fox is hardly a departure—it is, if anything, even more distinctively Andersonian than anything he’s made before. Every time we expect him to zig, he zigs even further.
At the risk of betraying myself as the slightly unbalanced Anderson obsessive I am, I’d ask you to consider the elements in Fantastic Mr. Fox that directly recall his earlier work. A casually selfish patriarch who nearly destroys his family, and the artistic wife who holds them together (The Royal Tenenbaums). Warehouse heists performed by collaborators wearing stocking caps and announcing themselves with trademark whistles (Bottle Rocket). A climactic community dance, and pine cones used as weapons (Rushmore). Pajamas, Rolling Stones montages and the color yellow (everything). About the only items missing are slow-motion walking scenes—these have been replaced with fast-motion digging scenes, which are much funnier and better suited to miniature models.
I’m not complaining. Any time you get George Clooney as a fox arguing with Bill Murray as a badger, it is a mistake to look that Thanksgiving gift in the toothy, feral mouth. Transplanted to the habitat of animation—especially the archaic medium of a stop-motion that rejects any use of computers—Anderson’s meticulous costume and set design gain an ecstatic polish. Meanwhile, Wes’ writing partnership with Noah Baumbach continues to pay dividends: Fantastic Mr. Fox’s envisioning of animals as extremely mannered human types owes a debt to Baumbach’s New Yorker squibs about boozing mice and honeybees. In fact, the movie feels in tune with another New Yorker scribe, E.B. White—the melancholy woodland sophisticates dressed in tiny suits are right out of Stuart Little. The mannerism is never more delightful than in a running joke that allows the characters to mutter obscenities as much as in the R-rated Rushmore, but replaces the adult language with the word “cuss.” (“Are you cussing with me?” “The cuss you are.”)
Fantastic Mr. Fox deserves to be embraced—it’s great—but there’s something sad about it, too. At the close of the picture, as Mr. Fox and his band of outsiders race on motorbikes away from a final tangle with the farmers, he stops them to speak—in French—with an imposing black wolf. The fearsome animal (like the tiger shark in The Life Aquatic) is Anderson’s stand-in for something sublime and wild that he will never be able to grasp. None of the contemporaries that adore and bash him has been able to reach it either, and his movies’ continued celebrations of slight sweetness awaken the panic that our generation is fragile and insubstantial. With this cartoon, however, Anderson reminds us again that he has accepted his gentle, fussy nature. We’ll never catch him, ’cause he’s cussin’ innocent.
SEE IT: Fantastic Mr. Fox is rated PG. It opens Wednesday at Cedar Hills, Eastport, Bridgeport, City Center, Cornelius, Division, Evergreen, Fox Tower, Hilltop, Lloyd Center, Movies on TV, Oak Grove, Sherwood, Tigard and Wilsonville.
