Wes Anderson From Both Ends: Bottle Rocket and The Fantastic Mr. Fox

“They’re not going to catch me. Because I’m a fucking innocent!”

Wes Anderson is one of those directors who I don’t merely value but cherish. His unique voice, melancholy, delicate, whimsical in the best manner, and ever so slightly aloof, is one I can imagine cinema without. But its not something I like to do. Like the Coen’s his absence would leave cinema a much unhappier place.

There’s a definite divide of opinion on Anderson, between those who love the ever increasing specificity of Anderson’s persona (This is a director who makes Credit Card commercials more personal then most films) and those who wish he’d crack a window on his hermetically sealed world and let some air in. Though, after the unfair shellacking that The Darjeeling Limited received, Anderson’s warmly reviewed The Fantastic Mr. Fox, seemed to find the critics mostly back on Anderson's side.

The film that most of the detractors of his latter day work point to is Bottle Rocket. And it is beginning to look like something of an anomaly in Anderson’s career. Not so much in tone, but in a certain loose limbed spontaneity. There’s a certain sloppiness to the film, but a certain life that counter acts it.

While one could argue that Rushmore takes place in as much of a “real world” as Bottle Rocket. The key difference being that Rushmore is a film about a Wes Anderson Character colliding with the world, Bottle Rocket is a film about the world colliding with a Wes Anderson character.

Bottle Rocket sets its tone early with Luke Wilson “escaping” from the mental hospital he’s been residing in, under the supervision of the staff (“Everything about this looks bad.”). Its soon revealed that Wilson is participating in this farce to satisfy his friend Dignan, played by Owen Wilson. Dignan devised the plan and Wilson didn’t have the heart to tell him that since he checked himself in, he could go ahead and check himself out.

Dignan has a plan to get Wilson, and their friend in with a local “crew”. After robbing a bookstore for a paltry take, they go on the lamb as the start of Dingham’s sixty year plan. Like all Anderson’s protagonists, Dingham has a very specific idea of what the world should be. Unlike with most Anderson characters, the world refuses to play along.

We all know guys like Dignan. Hell I know a whole bunch. Guys who are always talking about the big plans they’ve had, and the connections they’ve made, and how it will all come together, with that same hopeful smile in their voice no matter how many times it doesn’t happen. And after you know these guys awhile you just plain stop believing them. But you never have the heart to tell them that. I mean how could you?

Because the thing is, that if you were ever to tell the Dignan’s of the world that their plans will not bear fruit, it wouldn’t be their heart you were breaking but your own. Because if someone who believes, and hustles and plans, with such faith and ferocity can’t get their dreams off the ground, well then where does that leave you and your dreams? You may not believe in Dignan, but you let him think that you do, because doing so allows you to believe in yourself again, if only for a little while.

Bottle Rocket doesn’t feel quite like any other Anderson film (No other Anderson film could star James Caan). Its looser more ramshackled, comparable to the work that Jaramusch and Linklater were doing at the time. But the filmmaker who Anderson would become is just under the surface, breaking through with Wilson’s halting romance with a hotel maid and the sequences set to The Proclaimers “Over And Done With” and The Rolling Stones “2000 Man” which showcase Anderson as one of the most arresting combiners of image and music working today.



It is true as people say that the filmmaker who made The Fantastic Mr. Fox could not have made Bottle Rocket. But it is just as important, and a great deal more ignored that the director who made Bottle Rocket could not have made The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anderson has found his particular, peculiar voice as an artist and why so many wish to penalize him for it is rather beyond me.

Its true that The Fantastic Mr. Fox took me a little longer to digest then any of his other work. I wasn’t expecting the film, its tone is singular even by Anderson standards. And Mr. Fox himself was so strangely determinedly imperfect. Don’t get me wrong I liked it enough to name it as one of my top ten films of the year. But even though I knew I liked it, I wasn’t quite so sure what I thought about it.

The answer perhaps comes in the technique. Animation would seem to be the ideal medium for an artist as meticulous as Anderson. But while some insist that the “just so-ness” of his frames, I find it downright cozy. From the opening frames, of the exact copy of the book I used to own no less, to the film’s autumnal feel, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a supremely inviting film. Filled with all sorts of agreeable digressions and animated with a lively spirit, while keeping a brisk runtime. This is a film barely over eighty minutes that still finds time for a scene like this.



Like Anderson himself everything is delightfully singular, from Michael Gambon’s deliciously nasty villain (though Gambon always seems to have a sinister edge to me no matter how nice he’s playing) to Willem Dafoe’s rat, who is played so close in vocal styling’s and mannerisms to Dafoe’s infamous Bobby Peru that I refuse to believe its accidental. It’s a film which rejoices in the odd detail (Mrs. Fox’s paintings) and the unremarked upon joke (“Love Is All There Is” the theme song for Disney’s Robin Hood continuously playing in the background) and unexpected callback (Kristopherson’s repeat of the karate scene in Bottle Rocket, this time by a character who is very Andersonian.)

Its easy to want to strip Anderson to his elements. His anglophilia, urbanity, melancholy, dry wit, impeccable ear for music and subtle poetry. But there remains something elusive and inexplicable about Anderson’s work.

Take the scene where the three greedy farmers procure their steam shovels, and we’re treated to the sight of the cackling minature Bean pulling the various pulley’s and levers in his cab like he’s Marvin the Martian prepping to blow up Earth. Set to the utterly unexpected yet somehow perfect, Street Fighting Man. How else am I to react to such a specific and wholly unexpected image, but with delight?

So too, Anderson himself.