If you know that I love puppetry, Roald Dahl’s writing, and
stop motion animation, you might
think that I’d be an easy mark for “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” But in truth, after I saw a preview and
a few commercials I wasn’t sold.
The stop-motion looked herky-jerky - disturbing. The characters, animals all, looked
scary and feral, with beady little eyes and sharp little teeth.
In addition: I’m lukewarm on Wes Anderson (scorecard to date: loved “Royal Tenanbaums,” was left cold by “Rushmore,” was annoyed by “Life Aquatic,” skipped “Darjeeling Limited.”) Still, the lure of the puppets was too strong… so I went to see it over a cold Christmas in NYC.
“What’s so good about it?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. Strap in.
- This movie looks amazing. It’s all fall colors: burnished golds and autumn reds. The sky is a pre-snow azure. The fields are dappled browns and yellows.
- The performances.
All the actors are perfectly suited for their characters – so well
suited that you almost feel their selves, their souls inhabiting those furry
little figures. Clooney, Streep, Jason
Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray… I mean, really: who else could be the
debonair, smart, sly, self-reflective Fox, if not George Clooney? And who better to be his no-nonsense,
warm-but-wild (and sexy!) Mrs., but Meryl Streep? No matter that they never appear onscreen: these actors
really act the heck out of these parts and lend voices of such humor, warmth
and tenderness to the puppets.
(Plus, there’s a great vocal cameo/sight gag, with Mario Battali, as a rabbit chef
wearing teeny orange crocs.)
- Yes, let’s talk about the puppets. In a slick Pixar world where everything glows and shines, these puppets do indeed at first seem chunky and clunky. Their movements are gawky, sometimes; sometimes, graceful. But instead of causing these characters to look awful or ugly, the medium of stop-motion only makes them more REAL, more animal… and (paradoxically) more human, too. More like us.
Let me explain. We see the characters’ twitches. We see their fur blow in the wind. They don’t look like quite like us, they don’t move quite like us – that gawkiness makes them more animalistic. It is, after all, a film in which the animals (Mr. F especially) are in an existential struggle between domesticity and innate wildness. (Aren’t we all?) The ‘almost-ness’ of the puppets (to coin a phrase) does make them seem more wild, more unpredictable – more like another species, or not-exactly-human life form.
- And yet, and yet.
They are still somehow wonderfully human – more human, surely, than the
doughy, despicable human characters in the film. Anderson lets us see ourselves in the foxes, the moles and badgers
and rats and field mice. And it’s
fitting that the puppets move the way they do: for aren’t we humans both
awkward and angelic, gawky and graceful?
I see this double vision especially on those occasions when the animals in the film burst into joyous dance, flailing their limbs in a way that only puppet limbs can move. But I thought: (a) well, yes – that’s exactly how animals would dance if they could… and (b) that must be how we humans look to the aliens that are surely watching us from space. (The dancing is always shown in big groups and long shots.) Boy, we must look funny when we dance, every wedding reception must be a dance floor full of “Seinfeld’s” Elaines. It sounds nuts, but as they celebrated so wildly, I felt such tenderness towards the faraway little figures.
- Hey, here’s another thing I loved: Wes Anderson insisted on having NO digital trickery - no camera generated effects, whatsoever. (Take that, James Cameron and your giant blue freak people.) So when smoke billows from an exhaust pipe, it’s cotton balls. When leaves blow across a field, they’re leaves, and they need to be moved (as of course do the puppets) meticulously, painstakingly, by hand. (I took a stop-motion filmmaking class once and had to withdraw. I was too fidgety, and way, way too impatient. I have some appreciation for the work that went into this.)
- Yes, there’s something beautiful and hand-wrought about this whole movie. In its way, it’s akin to the crafting of Shaker furniture, or a barn raising in Amish country. Or the sewing of a particularly intricate quilt. It’s handwork, and the care shows through even if the effort doesn’t.
Last month, the Arclight movie theater in Hollywood showcased
one of the sets and some of the puppets.
I had the chance to see it up close, under glass, in the theater’s
lobby: it was the set for the schoolroom scene, which takes up 3 minutes of
screen time (if that), and the puppets for the foxes Ash and Kristofferson. The little set itself floored me: I
couldn’t believe the amount of intricate detail that went into it - the tiny scale models of test-tubes,
specimen jars, tongs and tweezers – the biology posters, as there’d be in any
classroom. It was stuffed full of
detail, a dollhouse for a film to the nth degree.
Then I imagined multiplying the work that went into that for every frame, every scene in the film. Yup: handwork. And a true achievement.
- But don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a craft project. It’s a MOVIE. And Wes Anderson took the trouble to make a FILM. Now that seems like a prerequisite, until you remember that most filmed adaptations of kids’ books are essentially over-reverent word-for-word recapitulations of the text, a fancier version of books on tape, give or take a few million dollars. (Exhibits A and B: those first two “Harry Potter” films.)
But Anderson directed himself a real honest-to-goodness
movie – with inventive camera angles, odd quick cuts, visual gags, perfectly
timed expressions (flat faces holding just for the right length of time before
breaking into toothy grins), and unforgettable images. (Check out the strange,
not-entirely-explainable scene with the wolf towards the end.) I want to own this movie to watch at
home, sure; but I’m glad I didn’t miss seeing those characters and that world
on the big screen.
- What else? Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach’s script, with odd and memorable turns of phrase.
- The score, which wheels between elegant and humor-filled motifs by Alexandre Desplat and pop/folk hits (Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Burl Ives, and Bobby Fuller Four. (Not to mention The Wellingtons and “The Ballad of Davey Crockett.”
- Oh, and by the way: it's ostensibly a kids' film and kids are enjoying it (as I saw at both screenings). But it's that rare, magical movie that is, at the same time, a movie that transcends age. It never talks down to the kids or treats them as idiots ("The Chipmunks Squeakual"), NOR does it wink at the grownups with double entendres (the "Shrek" movies). And while I liked "Wild Things," "Wall-E" and "Up," I have the sneaking suspicion that none of the three are really movies that are equally enjoyed by all ages. "Wild Things" especially was more adult and ponderous than it should have been, and I don't think I would have enjoyed it as a pre-teen, which seems a little unfair to the audience considering the source material. "Mr. Fox" is joyfully, fully for everyone.
There is one moment I want to leave you with – and it’s one scene I had to see twice to get its subtlety. In it, Fox’s hilariously moody, broody teenaged son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) lies in his loft bed above the intricate clutter of his room. His cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) very politely asks if he can roll his bedroll out from under the train set, where Ash is insisting he sleep. (We also know that Kristofferson is really asking for some comfort. His father’s sick, and that’s why he’s come to stay with Mr. Fox and family.) But Ash, snotty, denies him either physical or emotional comfort. (From Anderson/Baumbach’s shooting script, draft June 1, 2009.)
Sleep wherever you want, pal. Here, take my bed. I'll just
crawl under the book-case. Who cares if I get splinters in my ears?
KRISTOFFERSON (sadly)
Never mind.
ASH (suddenly)
You going to pout about it? Because I've had it
up to --
(indicating a point above his eye-level)
-- here! With the sad house-guest routine.
Kristofferson stares at Ash. Ash stares back at
him. Kristofferson sighs. He says quietly:
KRISTOFFERSON
Good-night.
Kristofferson crawls under the low table. Ash
flicks off a
light-switch on the wall. Silence. Kristofferson begins
to quietly cry.
Then something remarkable happens. Ash (who’s suddenly become a very unsympathetic character), does
something wonderful to turn it all around:
Ash listens, uneasy and concerned. He climbs down
the ladder of his bunk bed. He looks under the table. He kneels in front of the
train set and presses a button. A tiny bell begins to ring. A miniature bridge
lowers. Kristofferson sadly crawls back out from under the table and kneels
next to Ash. They watch together as the train pulls out of the station and
begins to circle its tracks.
In the film, Kristofferson hears the tiny bell on the train set, sits up, and says, “huh!” or “Cool” or something like that. And suddenly Ash has made everything okay and redeemed himself as a character in that moment – and he’s done it wordlessly, and in a humanly truthful way: the way that kids apologize without apologizing, say “sorry” without ever having to say it.
And better still (and again, not in that draft of the script): the scene
in the film cuts from the two of them watching the little train… to a “real”
train going past in that brilliant blue night sky. Stunning.
It’s all there in that scene: performances (vocal and puppetry), film-making, handwork, artistry. Soul.
Look, I’ve heard the stories that it wasn’t a happy production, and that some people were disgruntled. How should I know? All I know is what I see on the screen, and that every person involved worked together to make a work of art in a medium that stretches the possibilities of storytelling and film.
You can keep your Ups, your Wall-Es and your Avatars. “Mr. Fox” is feral, funny, wild, wooly, fully human, and, in the end: quite, quite fantastic indeed.
