Archive for December, 2009

More Fun and Money: The Hangover, Next Day Air (2009)

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

the-hangoverTodd Phillips’ movies – including Road Trip and Old School – are smug, unoriginal and tone deaf (he’s particularly awkward with profanity) but they at least used to get in and get out. Phillips’ indifference to visuals, a typical point-and-shoot mainstream comedy style that eschews any possibility for the cinematic, kept Road Trip and Old School quick and scrappy; they aren’t any good, and even their fans wouldn’t try to convince you otherwise (the admirers will give you a variation of that most half-hearted and irritating of cop-outs “I just like to have fun at the movies”, it baffles them that some of us might find good movies fun), but his pictures cannily flip their apathy into self-awareness, which is how most schlock gets by these days anyway (even Phillips’ now traditional cameo appearance contributes to his pictures’ “ah, fuck it” flippancy). Phillips has made several movies now though, and he’s acquired the basic surface mechanics of filmmaking: The Hangover, visually, is his surest and most confident movie, and that confidence chokes the life right out of it, it’s just another big comedy, the (not bad) trailer literally giving you the entire picture in two minutes.

In The Hangover, Hunk (Bradley Cooper), Dweeb (Ed Helms) and Fat Loser (Zach Galifianakis) misplace their friend, Mild-Mannered Audience Surrogate (Justin Bartha) after a night of partying and drugging in Vegas to celebrate Surrogate’s impending marriage to Concerned Gorgeous Object (Helms having already nabbed Improbably Attractive Castrating Shrew). The fellas wake up remembering nothing, and scramble about the city in a series of misadventures to put everything back together again. There’s a nugget of a great idea here: a comedy concerned with, for once, the ramifications of all the hedonistic destruction that most party movies mindlessly celebrate, but Phillips can’t get anything to come together, his pace sags, and every scene feels disconnected from every other – the movie is literally pointless – and the happy ending would be a cheat if you hadn’t seen coming as you initially sat down.

Mike Epps has a bit role as a drug dealer in The Hangover, and he delivers exactly the jokes you expect, in exactly the way you’ve seen him in a dozen movies you’ve already forgotten. But Epps’ drug dealer, and everyone around him, is allowed more in Next Day Air, director Benny Boom’s forceful, sleek and supremely enjoyable black comedy. The situation is typical: a variety of competing parties (most famously including Epps, Mos Def, and Donald Faison) get roped into, either by greed or accident, a misunderstanding of escalating violence, a cross-fired search for lost and stolen drugs. I’ve heard Next Day Air compared (unfavorably) to the Friday series, but that’s only because both feature Epps and predominately black casts. Next Day Air, in its intricately revealing dialogue and refreshing lack of fat or pretense, more closely resembles a good Elmore Leonard novel. It’s this year’s Stuck – a ridiculously overlooked genre movie more alive than most of the over-hyped crap we’re told by the Golden Globes to see.

Like good Leonard, Next Day Air establishes a convincing network of regular and periphery characters – it establishes a community – and Blair Cobbs’ script subtly and swiftly keys you into the various conflicting and contrasting loyalties and allegiances. The humor springs from a core idea that could also be taken from Leonard: that the characters are at their most ironically beautiful, their most pure, their most alive, at the height of their animal entitlement and avarice. The cast, including a number of people that I believe I’m seeing for the first time, are uniformly outstanding, particularly Yasmin Deliz (her timing is so crack she transcends being cast as “the sassy girl”) and Omari Hardwick as the amusingly named, misleadingly cunning Shavoo.

The picture gets you in on its one-day-in-the-life, one-thing-after-another brainwave; so much so that the climax is authentically jarring, especially as it corkscrews into a somewhat happy ending. The most interesting thing going on in Next Day Air though is that the condescending faux-morality of most money chase movies is pointedly missing (its even satirized) and replaced by the more practical/vicious survival instincts of those in need (or at least in need of more); and Boom’s staging is, particularly for a first picture, unusually spry, spare and energetic; that it somehow manages to be all those things at once is testament to the picture’s appeal. This is also, wouldn’t you know it, fun. The recklessness of The Hangover is a put-on while the recklessness of Next Day Air is human.

Posted in 2009, Action, Comedy, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Avatar (2009)

Monday, December 21st, 2009

avatar-poster-neytiri2James Cameron’s best movies – The Terminator, Aliens, the director’s cut of The Abyss – bring to the sci-fi action picture what Stephen King brought to the horror novel: working class grit, a contrast to the fantastic that eventually arrives. People, even fans, commonly accept that Cameron is a good director limited by his inability to write, but that’s a generalization that needs to be put to rest. His bad dialogue brings you into his best movies; Cameron’s jokes are bad in that way that a co-worker’s jokes are bad over coffee in the early morning after being up all night with a bad cold or in a fight with a girlfriend. Cameron’s dialogue used to be bad in that good country music way – it had tang. And a screenplay, of course, isn’t just dialogue, it’s, more importantly, structure – and Cameron has an instinctual understanding of structure, setting you up for beats you didn’t even know you were being set up for.

I had a number of problems with Avatar, but my most nagging is that it’s being marketed as a “revolution” towards something I’m not remotely interested in seeing realized, and that might be because I’m tired of overlong sci-fi fantasies with animated hoozywhatsits spouting nonsensical jargon. There’s nothing in Avatar that rivals the claustrophobic intensity of Aliens, nothing here that rivals the wonder of the water snake in The Abyss, because there’s no contrast. It’s a three-hour animated video game with 3D that imprisons you; you can’t look beyond a narrow tunnel, and the image, despite the hype, is still blurry. Champions of the picture are brushing aside issues with script and story, implying that people stuck on these points are those who don’t understand the pure, primal visual nature of cinema. For one, Cameron clearly values this story, and for two, I’ve supported that kind of argument for better movies, but Cameron’s cinematic game isn’t on that level, Avatar isn’t a consistent vision, it’s a hodge-podge constrained by its, yes, stupid, scenario.

Cameron is really tossing his hat into the Lord of the Rings sweepstakes: a computer generated battle ground of his own creation, in 3D because we’re currently in another cycle of that fad (it resurfaces about every twenty years, the only difference this time being that real directors seem to be falling for it). Cameron’s world, Pandora, is a mixture of rain forests and underwater plant life brought to land populated by creatures that remind one quite a bit of those to be found in Jackson’s King Kong. There are poetic flourishes worth seeing the picture for: a glowing jelly-fish tree that sets the stage for the consummation of the leads’ love, mountains that float majestically in the sky, and, of course, Pandora’s most prominent dwellers: a tall, slender, blue humanoid species called the Na’vi, which stand in for all the good qualities white people project onto others.

Let’s put the Vietnam/Iraq/Native American stuff away, that’s so obvious it speaks for itself. There are also the other typical contradictions: Avatar is a tech-heavy movie decrying technology, an anti-war movie that comes most to life during long scenes of savage, tragic destruction and carnage. The baddie is a typical (and the weakest) Cameron villain: the military hard-on indifferent to the culture he seeks to plunder. In this case, its Stephen Lang playing, pathetically, Michael Biehn in The Abyss led by Giovanni Ribisi playing, amusingly, Paul Reiser in Aliens. The military outfit, thrillingly laid out in quick shorthand by Cameron in Aliens, is reduced to laughably inadequate war-mongering clichés in Avatar, and that’s purposefully in the service of a larger, almost offensive, laziness: so we can see them slaughtered by the Na’vi at the end with no contradiction or guilt. It’s the V for Vendetta trick over again: photogenic, glamorous revolt for the young and fashionably disillusioned.

Avatar is said to be a Cameron dream project and I can believe it: it’s static and overstuffed in that way that so many recent dream projects are. Peter Jackson always wanted to make King Kong, and his go at it was occasionally wonderful but more than occasionally tedious and stupid and overly explicit. Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, on the back burner for decades, emerged an interesting failure, all over the place, sometimes great, sometimes bad, never boring, but never the movie its maker so clearly wanted it to be. Spielberg’s shot at Peter Pan, a theoretical sure thing, is bloated and devoid of the director’s even most-taken-for-granted gifts. There are dozens more examples, and its no coincidence that Cameron’s dream project suffers from similar issues and lapses in common sense: it’s because these directors already made these movies; their dream movie, the best parts, the drive, the point, was also the driving force of the better movies with which they thought they were settling. Cameron has made Avatar: it’s called The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic. And all the toys and money in the world can’t change that. Literally realizing their dream, these filmmakers discover that all they have left is a skeleton of the great movies they already made.

Re-reading this, I find that I’m sounding harder than I care to; Avatar isn’t a masterpiece, its not even a good movie exactly, and by no means is it some D.W. Griffith-style reinvention of the form (it’s basically animated, and, as animation, its less involving that this year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox or Coraline)., but the picture is still worth seeing, Cameron is a major director with a phenomenal nuts-and-bolts grasp of filmmaking; he doesn’t have Spielberg’s elegance (no one besides De Palma does) but he uses his blunt edge to his advantage. Avatar’s reason for being, its climax, is an exhilarating mixture of Heavy Metal and the toy battle of your dreams: a collision of decidedly old-fashioned war copters and pterodactyls and monster elephants and those body-controlled bull dozer suits from Aliens. An earlier sequence, a day-ride between lovers on their pet dinosaurs, is swooning and romantic, because of Cameron’s undeniable, unbendable conviction.

There is also subtext that gives the picture a bizarre poignancy that might draw people in for more than just the first weekend talk. Avatar, particularly in 3D with the glasses and the dirt and machines jutting out in our faces, is a clear metaphor for gamers and movie-addicts, for troubled lonely people longing to join a pretend world. This is why the lead, hunky marine Sam Worthington, is crippled in the beginning: he’s stuck, he needs something to be liberated from. Worthington has caught flack from even admirers of the picture, but I found him, as I did in Terminator Salvation, a convincing, appealing, of course idealized, avatar for the every man. Worthington doesn’t try too hard, and he has a way of looking diminished by his surroundings (understandable given these surroundings) that draws your empathy, most prominently as his body seems to shrink from more and more time spent in his Na’vi stand-in.

Zoe Saldana, the beautiful Na’vi warrior woman who converts Worthington to the right cause, is considerably better. In Star Trek and Guess Who, Saldana was a gorgeous babe with enough delivery to get her by; in Avatar – under layers of animation – she has a break-out role. The role, Neytiri, a daughter of the head of the tribe of whatever, is typical – but Cameron’s faith in his hokum is intense and infectious, and Saldana has the presence to give his fantasies the beyond-life grandeur they need; you understand why a man would waste away in a huge metal coffin to get back to her (and this also recalls Somewhere in Time). I won’t reveal the ending, but it’s as canny as Titanic’s in audience wish fulfillment, and it sends Avatar out on a high note. For a few moments a wizard of working-class action-fantasy returns, and you damn near forgive him of everything else.

Posted in 2009, Action, Fantasy, Reviews | 3 Comments »

Fall Down Dead @ Slant.

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Fall Down Dead @ SlantMagazine.com

Posted in Elsewhere | No Comments »

Art Genre: Public Enemies, The Limits of Control (2009)

Monday, December 14th, 2009

public-enemies-poster-deppMichael Mann is up to a few of his usual tricks in Public Enemies, his go at the John Dillinger story. The biggest trick, traditional to Mann’s recent movies, is the self-conscious denial of several of the basic pleasures we take for granted in the various genres with which he has chosen to work. In his last picture, his (underrated) movie of his 1980s staple Miami Vice, Mann pointedly removed expected first or third act set-ups: starting with the (minimal) story already in progress and ending on a half-beat of resignation. Mann has, of course, been experimenting with digital photography and with staging unconventional action scenes that still satisfy conventional cravings for blood and momentum. That’s the real heat of many of Mann’s pictures: his urge to get conventional pleasures out of the unconventional. Mann isn’t the filmmaker he’s sometimes made out to be (some of the most reaching, laughably earnest movie writing of the last decade has concerned Mann) but his pictures do bear the mark of a strong, obsessive personality usually too concerned with hard-boiled banal macho-existentialism: and that mark is tedious and, if you’re in the right mood, kind of a turn-on. Mann is too guarded, too in the middle – you want him to make a conventional melodrama or an art film, as the two tend to cancel one another out.

Public Enemies plops us in the middle of things too. Mann strips the picture of almost any context, relying on the cars and neat suits to remind us that we’re watching a picture set in the 1930s. Public Enemies (in this case mercifully) omits the traditional intro of the crooks rising to fame amongst traditional societal oppressions. Dillinger, fully formed, (Johnny Depp) breaks a bunch of cohorts out of prison (most of them played, as usual with Mann, by somewhat recognizable character actors) and hits the road, drawing the attention and wrath of J. Edgar Hoover (an amusing Billy Crudup) and especially the legendary-in-his-own-right lawman Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, working his pinched-ass shtick to poignant effect), who we first see popping a cap in Pretty Boy Floyd’s stomach. We see what Mann is after: not a pretty, consciously blocked, expensively lit biography, not a hot gangster movie, but a picture where we’re put squarely in the day-to-day shoes of a legend whose story we’ve heard countless times…that’s still somehow hot. Mann wants to shake us out of obligatory expectations. The staples of the Dillinger story (such as the prison break with fake gun) are made vague to the point of being commonplace…just one more thing that happened. Mann, as usual, wants his cake both ways: he revels in the milieu, the tough guys, the women-as-defined-solely-by-how-they-affect-the-tough guys, but he also wants a truer something that distrusts those taken-for-granted notions.

Mann’s posturing can be a dodge (he’s basically a self-hating genre man) but this high-minded blurriness also gives Public Enemies a surprisingly human dimension. I love the gangster genre, but the subtext is almost always indefensible. These pictures, particularly the newer ones, which are mostly parables of being movie stars (the lifestyle is identical, only periodically accented with gunplay) are usually contemptuous of middle-class life, which is equated with cowardice. The gangsters, usually taken from true stories of less than admirable people, are seen as heroes for refusing minimum wage, and are excused for sex appeal rarely afforded them in real life. The physical grotesqueries are reserved for the fat, clueless cops who doggedly pursue them. Mann relishes the movie-movie culture but doubts his hunger for iconography. Public Enemies is uneven: the sex is harlequin; the violence (which is smashingly effective) is dark and dreary and jarring in a hyper-masculine variation of the killings in Altman westerns. The usual points are scored on cops, with the exception of Purvis (exempt because he’s played by a movie star) but the gangsters are less idealized: they’re largely despicable and wild-dog dangerous. (A few of the killings are authentic jolts.)

Depp’s Dillinger, his best performance in years, helps tie everything together. Depp reflects and deepens Mann’s ambivalence, he loves the scars, the sunglasses, the gun fetish (the close ups of guns being reloaded and taken apart are more loving than those of Marion Cotillard’s night-gown draped derriere), but he resists glamming up Dillinger any more than his participation already does. Depp’s eyes are hard and uninviting, and his come-on to The Girl (Cotillard) is shockingly nasty and childish: curt, monstrously self-involved and more closely resembling someone who might be arrested for domestic abuse …yet mysterious and physically compelling. Dillinger and Depp get away with what we never would because they’re charismatic and famous – and it’s to the picture’s credit that it’s aware of this hypocrisy.

Public Enemies basically boils down to being another quest for fame parable, a slight evolution from the old gangster movies (which just, half-heartedly, chastised the crooks) now that Warhol’s 15 minutes quip has gone from snark to prophecy. The picture says, simplistically, that the FBI (and, by extension, the country) was formed by corrupt, self-glorifying impulses in response to the corrupt, self-glorifying impulses of the more obviously mercenary bad guys. The big problem is that most of us, particularly the audience Mann is courting, already wrestled with that. Mann’s biggest triumph is the picture’s ending, which is upsetting despite its inevitability because we’re given no convenient moral life boat to grab on to: a cold-blooded killer is brutally shot down, the product of multiple organizations competing for fame – the most immediate route to power. The Dark Knight tried all of this with Batman, and was too silly and overbearing. Public Enemies is silly and overbearing too – but its self-conflict gives it juice; it’s not the masterpiece Mann is always so clearly after, but his stewed conflictions occasionally rattle conventions that can always stand to be rattled.

Long-time indie darling Jim Jarmusch could stand to be rattled a bit himself; he’s critic proof because he almost always makes the same non-movie. I’m guessing a few groups will strongly respond to Jarmusch’s newest, The Limits of Control: a. formalist critics who think Last Year at Marienbad is the best movie of all time and that every Clint Eastwood movie is the best movie of the year; b. Jarmusch fans content to collect the clues and assemble a better movie in their heads, c. audiences intensely resentful of the traditional pleasures of the medium, who usually pronounce idiocies such as “I don’t consider film as an art”.

For the rest of us, The Limits of Control is the most mannered, tedious movie released by a respected director this year; Jarmusch having become, by now, the filmmaking equivalent of that alterna-band everyone in their 20s is terrified to admit they can’t stand. In theory, the picture is another existential-assassin movie where a lone-wolf killer embodies the essential pointlessness, fragility and ironic beauty of life. But The Limits of Control is really another Jarmusch sensory deprivation picture where silences are stretched so ridiculously far you begin to wonder if you’re being had. In early pictures like Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, you were – the sluggishness had (a little) satiric pulse. Jarmusch seems to mean it this time though: Limits of Control has inherited the earnestness that surfaced in his (far superior) Broken Flowers.

For about twenty minutes, Limits of Control is hypnotic in its resolute dullness; I assumed, in spite of my best instincts, that Jarmusch was getting to something. No, it’s literally the same scene over and over, an exchange of codes, each delivered by a chic character actor, taking Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) closer to what we’re meant to take as just another disconnected episode in a life of disconnection. Christopher Doyle’s frequently brilliant cinematography and pointless nudity courtesy co-star Paz de la Huerta occasionally perk things up, but this picture is suffocating and inescapable – anyone who buys it deserves it.

Posted in 2009, Action, Crime, Drama, Reviews | 6 Comments »

Revenge with a Dash of History: Five Minutes of Heaven, Flame and Citron (2009)

Friday, December 11th, 2009

five_minutes_of_heavenI’ve just about had my fill of well-meaning movies preoccupied with the futility of revenge, and I generally find pictures on the conflicts in Northern Ireland earnest to the point of not existing, but Five Minutes of Heaven is surprisingly tense and personal. After some opening text that cues you for a movie you’ve seen fifty times, the picture opens on the planning of a murder of an Irish-Catholic by a teenage Irish-Protestant in 1975. The protestant, Alistair Little, prepares for the killing, his first, in a manner chillingly associated with any kid grooming himself to perhaps get laid for the first time. Typical 1970s references abound: Alistair inspects himself in his mirror like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (even if this picture is set a few years before) and a Bruce Lee poster adorns the wall. Alistair then tucks a gun in his pants, and the break from the banal to the dangerous is jarring – that gun might as well be a tube sock.

The first act, ending in the killing of the Catholic, whom we barely meet, is taken from a real murder. The rest, a televised meeting thirty years later between Alistair and the only witness to the murder, the Catholic’s brother Joe, is fictional. The television special is clearly one of those shallow heart-tuggers meant to give us false affirmation for history’s various atrocities, and this device gives Five Minutes of Heaven a friction unusual for a typical “sins of the past” melodrama. Alistair, the killer, played by Liam Neeson at his most assured and commanding, is more charismatic and appealing than Joe, the victim, played by James Nesbitt, who is haunted and self-absorbed, hunched and resentfully chattering away while chain-smoking and occasionally barking at an attractive assistant helping him prepare for the show. Joe’s teeth appear to be pointed, and Nesbitt uses every bit of his everyman physicality to give us a victim who is also an embodiment of more typical disappointments associated with class. Joe could hate the polished, successful, smooth Alistair whether they were linked by a murder or not. We instinctively offer Alistair our sympathy and then recoil from ourselves for our reaction, and this unsettling realization on our part charges the picture. Five Minutes of Heaven doesn’t exclude other, more casual, concerns solely to revel in the heartbreak of a murder, as many movies would, this picture sees these men as fundamentally different, fundamentally prone to snap at each other, and that nugget – a truth – gets at the Troubles in a way that’s unforced and that feels authentic.

The central ambiguity of the second act is whether Alistair is actually sorry for his murder. His grief is, at first, too photogenic and healthy and correct. Alistair’s solo interview for the TV special, meant as a precursor to the climactic meeting, which we hear a portion of in the opening and then later about half-way through the picture, is soulful and compelling in that grand depths-of-the-human-heart fashion that anyone who loves Neeson will immediately recognize. Neeson, one of our best actors, can give something like Batman Begins or Taken operatic heft, and Five Minutes of Heaven uses that charm cleverly. Joe, who looks more like most of us, and who handles tragedy like most of us, is kind of tedious, but we sympathize with his universality and with his clear, unguarded expression of his pain. Joe is human. Alistair is a human who also happens to be a natural born actor. Alistair’s pain, as intense as Joe’s in a different fashion, partially comes from his awareness that people only see the actor. Which is why Alistair must be so clear in motivation: his empathy is so straight-forward because he knows we will suspect him, and it’s that straight-forwardness that encourages that suspicion.

I won’t give the depth of Alistair’s remorse away except to say that the picture answers the question without going soft. The third act is more conventional tear-jerker stuff but its earned and powerful, and the one spot of action – two men tumbling out a window – has surprising, direct force. The director, Oliver Hirschbiegel (of Downfall and, somewhat inexplicably, The Invasion) manages a tone and pace that’s empathetic and brutal in equal measure – his grasp of this material is so sure and unfussy it’s in danger of being taken for granted. We wait and dread Joe’s inevitable reprisal, but find that Joe – broken, engorged with anger – isn’t quite up to that; and its that realization that gives Joe the closest he’ll probably ever come to catharsis. The final image is one of the most moving of this year.

I haven’t actually read much to this effect, but I’m assuming there’s at least one glib individual out there who called Flame and Citron the “serious Inglourious Basterds“. Both pictures are about underground missions to execute various members of the Nazi party during their occupation, but that’s a superficial commonality. Flame and Citron, if we must bring more famous pictures into the party (and its clear that I want to for some reason) more closely resembles Munich in tone and intent: both of these pictures are concerned with, yes, the futility of obsession and revenge. Tarantino’s picture on the other hand, is taken with revenge as masturbatory pop orgy (meant as a compliment)

Flame and Citron is beautiful to look at, well-paced, well-cut and well-performed; I enjoyed it every step of the way and am glad I watched it and wouldn’t try to talk you out of it. Why can’t I summon more enthusiasm for it now? Because – with the usual sketchy love interests on opposite sides of enemy lines stuff and the usual moments of mission plotting alternated with bits of domestic strife, etc, etc – I never had the feeling I was watching more than another pretty good history adventure movie. This picture needs an obsessive personality; it needs a director eaten away with it (like Spielberg with Munich).

More specifically, Flame and Citron is part of the story of a pair of prominent fighters in the Holger Danske resistance group during World War II; and, indeed, the real reasons to see the picture are the vivid, restrained lead performances of Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen in the title roles. Lindhardt gives a part that usually bores me (the cocky charmer with little man’s syndrome and daddy issues bedding the wrong girl) a confident egotistical neediness – it’s a Tom Cruise performance if Tom Cruise were subtle. Mikkelsen, the memorable blood weeping villain of Casino Royale, has a terrifically wormy-yet-poignant Peter Lorre quality; he’s good in his stock scenes with his ignored family and really good in the picture’s best moment: Citron robbing a Nazi storekeeper to feed his family. I wanted more scenes like this one, where we’re tied up in knots with conflicting loyalties both large and small. Five Minutes of Heaven has a number of those moments.

Posted in 2009, Drama, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

fantastic-mr-fox-posterStop motion might complete Wes Anderson; watching Fantastic Mr. Fox, one understands that missing quality that haunted his prior pictures, even the ones that didn’t totally work (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic): they’re accessible yet not-quite-tangibly remote. The intentionally intrusive horizontal pans, the intentionally flat overhead compositions, usually of objects, the stylized odds and ends that always threaten to swallow the pictures (Anderson’s mise en scène could sometimes be termed “cluttered attic”), all point toward some kind of frustration, a desperation for simplicity that always seems to get gummed up in the process of living with…things. Anderson’s people are pack rats out of a need to compensate, usually for a remote parent figure. The uniting theme of Anderson’s movies having something to do with people’s use of possessions to establish a false sense of control over life, particularly the passage of time (and we all do this – to varying extents). Anderson arrived at a promising simplicity in The Darjeeling Limited – his best movie – he trusted his images to do most of the talking and pared the picture of most of the sets and subplots and showily intelligent wordplay. Now there’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson’s most purely enjoyable picture, a picture that takes him to that supreme stylization with which he’s always yearned, and he now has the discipline and craftsmanship to make the most of it.

The Darjeeling Limited seemed to point toward an evolution in Anderson’s attitude toward his parent figures; that picture was, particularly when compared to the numbing tidying-up of Tenenbaums, bracingly open. The mother fled as she must always, and the sons are correctly seen as being just as loony as her to expect any different. There was catharsis in Darjeeling’s absence of catharsis, it pushed beyond self-pity and absorption to a new self-responsibility (something alien to many of our current domestic pity-parties); and Fantastic Mr. Fox, which has similar issues among its clan of foxes, benefits from Anderson’s steadier, more amused perspective – he’s swifter and wittier.

The little fox, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), threatened by his more talented cousin, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) for his (of course, preoccupied) father’s affection, is touchingly obvious yet contained – we get what we need in Anderson’s framing and in his bric-a-brac, which is more than just neat, it’s now fully expressive of his material. Anderson has one of the most instantly identifiable frames in American movies, and that frame is now authentically emotionally charged – it tells a third of the story for him in the kind of shorthand we applaud of directors classically labeled as auteurs (its barely a coincidence that Anderson’s best movies – Bottle Rocket, Darjeeling, Fox – are his shortest). In one of the more memorable moments, as the Foxes’ house crumples to their feet from above, Mr. and Mrs. Fox (George Clooney and Meryl Streep) exchange just a few words, Mrs. Fox’s lightening storm painting hanging askew in the background – a clean, funny, beautiful shorthand for chaos. Anderson’s close-ups, once a little too consciously anachronistic, are succinct, moving, near freeze-frames of each character’s roiling anxieties and resentments – this refined mise en scène, far from cluttered attic, is how Anderson tells essentially an adult comedy in a children’s movie context. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a refreshingly personal, tough movie, telling kids what Darjeeling told adults: for inner peace, your personal barometer for satisfaction has to tick within you, not your parents or anyone else; no matter how qualified they may be for the job (though they almost certainly aren’t).

I’m afraid I’m making Fantastic Mr. Fox sound labored, a disservice to such a wonderful movie, a movie with which no one, sadly, seems to give much of a damn. The structure of the picture, taken from a Roald Dahl book, is essentially a spoof of the chic amorality of heist movies. I’m not sure I’ve read this particular story, so I can’t comment confidently, but it appears that Anderson has inherited from the author a distrust of the privileged, spiritually rolly-polly fat cats who rule everyone else with a mercilessly entitled fist. Anderson’s ambiguity towards his heroes compliments Dahl’s resentment of upper-crust society, giving us a picture in which no one is entirely sympathetic – much of the comedy springing from the surprising acknowledgement of a dog-eat-dog world (I hate to keep qualifying this as a children’s picture, its that sort of thinking that contributes to so many bad movies for children, but the sensibility here is surprising enough for an adult picture much less one aimed at pre-teens). Anderson takes his first adaptation of other source material (he wrote the script with filmmaker Noah Baumbach, his collaborator on Life Aquatic) as an opportunity to lightly parody himself. The killing of a bad guy, a rat voiced by Willem Dafoe, at first appears as if it’s going to play as ironically beautiful, like the climax of Life Aquatic, only to be brutally dismissed by Fox with the picture’s most mercenary line.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is the most beautiful animated movie I’ve seen in years; and the cast -Clooney/Streep/Schwartzman/Murray/Anderson/Dafoe – give us heightened movie star personalities that mesh into Anderson’s surreal dream world of toys and animals without anything overpowering anything else. Clooney parodies the smugness under his “who me?” faux-humility and still gives one of his best performances – his timing is crack without asking for any needy, unearned pathos. Streep’s unmistakable, soothing voice tells us why Fox would seek her out, try to come clean to please her, and then fail anyway. They take us beyond the usual structures and expectations, and give the clichés intensity. On its terms, Fantastic Mr. Fox is about perfect.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Reviews | 1 Comment »