CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 11/13/09

Fantastic

By Adam stovall

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Screenplay by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach (former also directed)
Based on the novel by Roald Dahl

On its face, the story of Fantastic Mr. Fox is a simple one. Mr. Fox (George Clooney) was a thief, but his wife, and the "family way," put him on the straight-and-narrow. Now he writes a newspaper column that everyone knows they should read, but don't. He's happy and healthy, but hungry for those halcyon days of his youth. He secretly (read: without telling Mrs. Fox, voiced by Meryl Streep) enlists a friend to help him in a couple of heists, but you know how it goes when someone tries to have it both ways. On its face, the story is this—but seeing names like Anderson, Baumbach, and Dahl in the credits, it's safe to assume there is more here than just a face.
 
The story and characters began with Dahl, and it bears his stamp of doom-wrapped-in-whimsy. The theme of a community banding together against those whose greed would destroy it was in the book, as well. Anderson and Baumbach saw great potential in this element of the story—that often we bring our greatest nightmares upon ourselves by simply acting in accordance with our nature—and used it as an in-road for making this story their own.
 
Take, for instance, the relationship between Mr. Fox and his lawyer/advisor Badger (Bill Murray). These two have known each other long enough to know exactly how a conversation will end the moment it begins, and yet will still bare their fangs—quite literally—at each other. The adult words may be replaced with the word "cuss," but there's no disguising the fact that these are wild animals who, despite the nice, human clothes they wear, still have a lot of wild left in them. This sort of self-awareness isn't often found in children's literature or film, but then, Anderson isn't your typical maker of children's films.

This is Anderson's sixth film, and his familiarity with the medium manifests itself as an incredible confidence that allows him to always go a step further than maybe he is comfortable. This is his first animated film, and in an era where computer animation can replicate any world down to the smallest detail, he has gone with stop-motion animation. That he is able to tackle this new process and yet still keep the aesthetic and sensibilities of his previous work is no small feat. One suspects this new approach has given him the total control of image for which he has longed. While new and completely different from how he filmed his prior works, there is a feeling of inevitability here.
 
Similarly, there is Mr. Fox's insistence on following a protocol during his nightly adventures. Is it absolutely necessary that everyone have a special bandit hat? Are there other ways of drugging dogs other than spiking blueberries? Isn't there a way around the electric fence? Sure, but why have less fun when you can have more? It's not enough to just do something, you've got to do it with style. One senses that in Mr. Fox, a character created by someone else, Anderson has found an alter ego that fits like a glove. 
 
Rat's employers, Boggus (Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guinness), and Bean (Michael Gambon), are crude and crass and benignly evil, until their avarice is threatened by the cunning of another. Fox's heists awake in them something primal—it is not enough to catch Fox, he must be made to suffer for what he has done. The characters are designed as grotesques, something that even the youngest audience member will recognize as evil, but written as cold, amoral men who care about nothing other than their own wealth. Tell me a child growing up with this movie isn't learning an important lesson.   And then there is the matter of Fox's children; four in the book, but only one in the film. Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is a scrawny young fox who desperately wishes he were an athlete who excelled at Whackbat so the girls would notice him. An only child, Ash is threatened when his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson)—an athlete who excels at Whackbat and draws the attention of the girls at school—comes to visit. The tragedy of Ash is that he's a sensitive, articulate soul who yearns to be anything but, and yet it is that nature that inevitably leads him to put aside petty differences when action must be taken. The dialogue in this film, as in all of Anderson's work, is wonderfully subtle and nuanced, and this is never more true than in the Ash character.

Speaking of dialogue, this script crackles with lines that will reward viewers for years to come. While crafting the film, Anderson and Baumbach thought back to their own childhoods. When you're a child and something happens on screen that you don't understand, you take it at face value and forget about it a minute later. But as you grow, you catch more of what is happening on- and off-screen. This is a mark of maturity, and one that they wanted to reward, just as writers like Dahl had done for them. So when Mrs. Fox looks at Mr. Fox and says, "I love you, too, but I shouldn't have married you," rest assured that while your eight-year-old might not get it now, they will soon—and that will mark their growth as a person.
 
That's the point of this film: personal growth. Many will tell you that being adult means acting like one; no more pillow fights in museums, no more wearing costumes out of the house on nights other than Halloween, and No More Banditry! Fantastic Mr. Fox, however, says that being adult means that you can still be frivolous from time to time and enjoy life, because truly being an adult means knowing when to put others ahead of yourself. Not bad for a kids' movie, eh?

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Twentieth Century Fox
Rated PG; 88 min.

Adam Stovall spends his time watching the movies that are in theaters, and writing the ones he wishes were.



Fantastic Mr. Fox courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

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