His working methods may be controversial, and his recent form patchy, but we’ve been excited to see what Wes Anderson would do with Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr Fox” for a while now, particularly since the final trailer for the movie debuted. The film finally premieres tonight, as the opening night gala of the 53rd Times BFI London Film Festival, and we caught up with it this morning.
After barely escaping with his life, and that of his pregnant wife, during a raid on a squab farm, Mr. Fox (George Clooney) has promised to give up his poultry-thieving life, and become a newspaperman. As he moves into middle age, he becomes itchy, frustrated by his place in life, and returns for one final heist. His theft enrages the local farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, and brings their vengeance crashing down on his furry neighbors. The plot is surprisingly faithful to Roald Dahl’s children’s book, but Anderson’s brought his inimitable style to it, and the combination proves a surprisingly good fit – both Dahl and Anderson’s voices are present and correct, but never clash, and you feel that the writer would approve, certainly more so than, for instance, Tim Burton’s garish and crude “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
Visually, the film is totally unique. The animation style, which has divided so many people in trailers and pictures, jars for the first five minutes or so, but settles quickly, and the use of real fur for the characters, and Gondry-style tricks like cotton wool being used for explosions, gives it a charming, handmade quality, nodding to 70s British animations like “Bagpuss,” but still unlike anything else you’ve seen. The production and costume design are, as ever, top notch (Fox’s outfit, a brown corduroy suit, seems modelled on Anderson himself), and the gorgeous, autumnal photography by Aardman DoP Tristan Oliver is terrific, despite the differences in opinion between him and Anderson. We complained yesterday that Anderson is at risk of getting stuck making the same film over and over again, but by melding the stop-motion medium to his own aesthetics, it feels like Anderson is moving on, stylistically at least. Not everything’s successful – there’s an early tracking shot following the Foxes breaking into a farm that’s framed like a early 90s SNES platform game, which is a little uninvolving, but on the whole, the form is mostly a triumph.
It’s the content of the film that’s less successful, unfortunately. The film is more of an out-and-out comedy than anything in Anderson’s career so far, and the script retains his usual dry wit, but is lacking in the killer lines found in “Rushmore” or “Tenenbaums”, and even the stand-out supporting performances like Willem Dafoe in “The Life Aquatic” – it’s consistently amusing, but never really laugh-out-loud funny. But it also lacks the heart of the director’s best work. Mr. Fox is closer to the aspirational working-class likes of Max Fischer, a refreshing change from the spoilt protagonists of “The Darjeeling Limited,” but the film pulls its punches — the script dwelled much more closely on Fox’s split between his desire to provide for his family, and his nature as a wild animal, but it’s rushed through in the finished product, leaving the central arc feeling rather thin.
Similarly, the ever-present daddy issues are present and correct, with Ash (Jason Schwartzman)’s need to please his former-champion-athlete father, but it fails to connect properly. It’s nice to see Anderson returning to a warmer feel than the callous, cruel tone of the key deaths in Aquatic and Darjeeling, and there are handful of moments with real weight – Meryl Streep does a sterling job with Mrs. Fox (although she, like much of the cast, is underused), and there’s a lovely scene where Fox converses with a silent wolf on a snowy landscape that has a strangely spiritual quality to it. But overall, the film feels rather lightweight – a brisk, enjoyable 90 minutes, but one we feel ourselves forgetting, only a few hours after the screening.
Alexandre Desplat’s score is good, but not as knock-down brilliant as some of the composer’s best work, although there are a few great cues, the Morricone-infused “Great Harrowsford Square” in particular. Elsewhere, Anderson continues to demonstrate that, working with music supervisor Randall Poster, there’s no one, Scorsese excepted, who can apply pop songs in a better way, particularly with the stirring use of “Street Fighting Man,” and the Beach Boys “Ol’ Man River”. Anderson was compared to Scorsese frequently in the early part of his career, but he’s probably closer to a more visually skilled Woody Allen in the long run, and we’re fine with that. It’s undeniably a minor work, but it’s more consistently entertaining and cohesive than either “The Life Aquatic” or “The Darjeeling Limited,” despite its inability to compete with the likes of Pixar in emotional terms. Hopefully, he’ll deliver something more substantial next time out (our dream project for Anderson would be an adaptation of “The Seagull” – seriously, Chekov’s self-absorbed characters would be a perfect match for the director’s sensibility, and Jason Schwartzmann would nail Konstantin), but taken on its own terms, “Fantastic Mr Fox” is a perfectly enjoyable diversion. And, as talking fox movies go, we definitely preferred it to “Antichrist”… [B-]