Fantastic Mr. Frustrated Fanboy

25 November 2009 | 8:57 PM

Now that I’ve had an hour or two to process seeing Wes Anderson’s version of Roald Dahl’s classic, Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m still not all that sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it was a rich, entertaining hour and a half of cinema; on the other, I feel like I should get to charge Anderson an hourly rate for therapy if he’s going to work through his issues via great works of fiction.

Let me state at the outset that I’m a big Wes Anderson fan, and on a purely objective level, his Fox is a superlative bit of film-making: the script is smart; the animation is nuanced and lively without feeling precious (an achievement for the director, given that his live-action movies often tend to be sprinkled with an odd concoction of fairy dust, kitsch and treacle); the casting is first-rate, and the actors do a bang-up job (this might be one of the most subtle Bill Murray roles ever). In fact, on all aesthetic and cinematic fronts, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a rousing success.

Except on a much deeper, more elemental level, it’s a maddening film. It’s hard not to feel like Anderson has misappropriated a classic bit of storytelling to work through his daddy issues. These themes are hardly new for him: an arc of childhood inadequacy in the face of a distant, uncaring father figure runs through all of his movies, and it often makes for a thoughtful and entertaining narrative. In this case, though, Anderson has injected this subtext into somewhere it doesn’t belong. Rather than being an offbeat, quirky riff on Dahl’s beloved original, Anderson has chosen to make Mr. Fox, well, kind of a dick.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of conflicted, imperfect characters in cinema. Nothing infuriates me more than the one-dimensional, saccharine Dudley Do-Right types featured in the likes of Forrest Gump, Away We Go and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’ve long believed that the shit-heel anti-heroes in Pulp Fiction, The Sweet Hereafter and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape are far more compelling, explicitly because of their imperfections. Conflict, in the cinema, is king. That said, what Anderson has done with Fox feels so cavalierly artificial that the thematic intent of the original story gets bent out of shape entirely.

This isn’t like Spike Jonze’s (in my mind, amazing) conceptualization of Where The Wild Things Are from earlier this fall: in that film, Jonze had fifteen pages of single sentences to start with, and the crazy, sideways scaffolding he built to hang that zygote of a story upon only served to enhance the meaning and themes of Maurice Sendak’s book, even while turning it on its ear. In this case, Anderson’s just draped everyday issues like hubris, entitlement and class warfare over his characters and then stood back as if to say, “Voilà, check out Mr. Fox: he has problems just like you and me!”

I should also mention that mine isn’t the rabid fanboy reaction to someone tampering with the precious storytelling of his long lost youth. When Peter Jackson chose to cut out whole subplots and scenes from his Lord Of The Rings trilogy, I cared not a whit, and when Gurinder Chadha recast a Jane Austen classic as a Bollywood musical in Bride and Prejudice, I applauded it. A work of art doesn’t “belong” to its consumers: if J.J, Abrams wants to turn his Star Trek into a vehicle for the schmuck from Heroes or George Lucas wants to drop what amounts to an amphibious Cajun Tourette syndrome sufferer into one of his prequels, that’s their right and I’ve got no beef. But what Anderson’s done with Fox seems oilier, as if he’s using the Foxes to tell a completely different story. Never mind that the story he’s telling is compelling and fun – it still feels wrong.

Perhaps my judgment of the film is clouded by the fact that I was viewing the film wondering what my kids would take away from it. Or maybe the fact that I’d just recently read the original story to my son and daughter has given me a hysterical sense of ownership of the source material that’s way out of bounds. I realize that I’m in the minority about this – the film is getting rave reviews. And perhaps it should, as I said it’s a great movie in many respects. Whatever it is, I’ve never liked and disliked a movie simultaneously so much in my life.

(And that’s saying something – I have, after all, seen everything that Lars von Trier has directed.)

Posted by Andy in Push-Button Punditry | Comments (0)