THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX

Drawing by John Maurer.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, William DeFoe, Michael Gambon, Jarvis Cocker, Helen McCrory
Year: 2009

Bumper: John Maurer

“No. Don’t talk!”

This my 2.61-year-old exclaimed to me with fanned hands outraised to help illustrate the point. The point being, simply, that I should shut up and stop tarnishing the piece of beauty we were co-witnessing. My talk was cheap; and sacrilegious; in such a context; obviously. Let the movie speak for itself, my intrepid young son was exasperating—whether he could read the textual cues or not was beside the point. Equal to this scenario, do you bring a dance aficionado to the ballet to help label each new step and twirl for you? No—you soak in the pirouette and arabesque penchée anonymously, and it does nothing to diminish their sublime appeal.

And now that I mention it, Fantastic Mr. Fox flashes across the screen as nimble and lithe as a prima ballerina… or, well, a fox. The edges might be a little rough—slightly crude, sort of choppy stop-motion puppet animation—but intentionally so. Lends a healthy dose of grit and spit to the film’s hilariously deadpan and yet dapper dialogue. Like those M&M’s and chocolate chips you sometimes find cavorting in an otherwise au naturel trail mix at Trader Joe’s. Ingredients you would expect in any Wes Anderson opus, of whose collection I would honor this one with the dub of “magnum.”

At this point, I will interject that my son obliged us to watch the first half twice before allowing the film to mosey onwards. It’s so unlike his usual fair—the charming yet predictable Disney Pixar flick—that this animation had him scratching his head at first and longing to savor its many quips and quirks. Maybe that’s not exactly what was going through Dezi’s toddler-mind, but him not being thick in vocab yet, that’s my take on it. As proof, he did ask at several points, “What’s going on, Daddy??” It’s a little hard to get across that two well-dressed foxes and a scatter-brained opossum are attempting to steal fine cider from the cellar of the local (human) farmer, a crass and wealthy marksman, but I say as much and Dezi nods in understanding (it seems) and returns his unblinking, laser gaze on the ensuing scene. As do I.

This was a boys’ night home alone, Mommy having departed earlier in the day for a business sojourn depositing her halfway around the planet. We were sad and lonely and the box of Hot Wheels I had bought him earlier had already lost its charm. After having spent the last three hours picking through sticks and rocks and other 2-year-old curios around our apartment complex while Daddy covered all the bases to prevent unexpected mishaps from the world’s numerous threats to those of short stature and spurious attention—oncoming cars, freakishly high curbs, hills with steep slopes, and sharp winds that might blow his ball away—it was a much invited change in pace to relax with a local microbrew (Dad) and Horizon organic chocolate milk (Dez) in front of the latest Netflix arrival, who’s timing could not have been staged more appropriately. I merrily unperforate its contents and slip it into our 9”-screen travel-DVD player set atop a child’s play-table and position ourselves on the couch. (We normally watch flix on our laptop, but that’s presently airborne along with my wife.)

Dezi was immediately enamored in a world of clothed animals and a jaunty soundtrack. I, hanging on to their every expression and spoken word and smiling helplessly along the way, relish zealously in what I knew far in advance was the most absurd and best movie I may ever see.

But wait. Oh yeah. You want some actual details? Not just dribble about me and my son? I get it. OK. Onward, then…

Thesis (or one of them, anyways):

“At the end of the day, we’re all just wild animals.”

Outside the obvious irony that foxes and beavers are wild animals, this message hits plenty home in human circles, too, I think. Another irony being that these animals act more civilized than many of my own neighbors.

It’s an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book. I haven’t read it yet, curiously, but I intend to rectify that omission from my library immediately. I’ve loved all his other stuff, so this decision is an easy one. (On a sidenote, Dahl didn’t just write “children’s” books and I highly recommend reading his more “serious” literature: his Collected Stories being a personal all-time fave.)

Dahl being a bloke himself, the farmers all have British accents in the film. But it’s otherwise obviously set in Americana Tennessee (or vicinity), with plenty of banjo-twang overtones and even a speakeasy scene with a badger in a suit-and-tie playing Prohibition Era Art Tatum at the piano that very much spoke to me (Tatum is a god in my book).

Expect plenty of intentional hodgepodge, sharp wit, intelligent humor, camaraderie, an appreciation for detail, and characters struggling to balance their strengths and weaknesses for the better good of their community/pack. As with other Wes Anderson works, his penchant for glorifying the little things and trivializing mainstream/Hollywood sensibilities is used as a springboard for both underhanded satire and slyly revealing deeper meanings.

There are other details abounding, of course, and rather than filofax (filo-fox?) them here, I heartily invite you to discover them for yourself. Suffice it to say, despite what it may seem on the surface (an animated kid’s flick), this foxhole is sophisticated as Guggenheim’s interior; or even the abstract architecture of… who’s that guy again?—oh yeah: Frank Gehry (sidenote: also queue-bump Sketches of Frank Gehry).

So, for those of you with little rugrats of your own, did it hold Dezi’s attention through to the end? As many questions require, the answer is yes-and-no. There was a spell about ½ to ¾ of the way through where admittedly his attention was diverted to scribbling in my notepad with pens in a variety of colors that I fetched (at his vociferous becking) from various nooks and crannies of our rapidly encroaching bachelor-pad-squalor. The very notepad I wrote this review in along the way, actually. He had so many curly-Q’s and scribbles on each page, I could barely make out many parts of it later on. He did come back to it, though. And when the credits rolled, he summarily blurted, “Yey!” And coming from a critic of his age, I’d say that’s pretty tall praise. He then managed to knock over the table and spill the few sips left of my beer in his mania to exit the couch, but so you have it: we’re just wild animals, afterall. And (to borrow the film’s favorite word) cuss the rest of it!