Holy cuss!

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2011)

Wes Anderson's films are about mid life crises, castration anxieties, emasculated man-children, self doubting child-men and tweed wearing posh people who fantasise about being macho enough to wrestle big fish. Anderson's "Fantastic Mr Fox", based on a story by Roald Dahl, is no different, despite starring a stop-motion fox.
The film stars actor George Clooney – cast due to countless past roles as a thief - as Mr Fox, an ex robber who now lives a responsible life with his wife and son. They're all relatively happy, normal and peaceful, until a midlife crisis hits Fox like a ton of bricks. "I don't want to live in a hole any more!" he yells, desperate to cast aside his suburban life and sink his jaws into some larger achievement. After all, doesn't he deserve more out of life?
Fox's answer, like Edward Norton's in "Fight Club", is to embrace the feral beast within. Roping his friends into his midlife crisis he embarks on a string of dangerous heists, breaking into the factories of 3 villainous farmers and stealing their delicious loot. As Fox becomes more successful, Anderson's camera begins to focus more on his emancipated animal tail and less on the constrictions of his human neck tie. One phallic symbol – one of freedom the other of servitude - has essentially replaced the other, and when the evil farmers shoot off Fox's tail and keep it as a trophy, all sorts of interesting thematic avenues are opened up. Yes, this is literally a stop-motion kid's film about the conflict between wild, natural masculinity and the neutered alienation of the postindustrial workplace.
Like "Fight Club", Fox also sets up an underground union of sorts. In an attempt to release his friends from bondage, Fox urges all the animals in the land to revert to their scientific, Latin names, and suggests to them that they each have natural, in born talents which it is in their benefit to set free. The animals agree, and together they start a little war against the farmers, using a series of subterranean tunnel networks to undermine their human overlords. From this point onwards Fox becomes a Robin Hood figure, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
These kinds of meretricious tales were common in the works of Roald Dahl. Dahl loved tales in which the poor and dispossessed outwit the powerful and cruel and often told stories in which those who own the means of production dominate others, both physically and psychologically. What Anderson does is take things a little further. Fox may be a rebel, but it is suggested that he has the capacity to be just as evil and egotistical as those he fights. "I think I have this thing where I want everyone to think I'm the greatest," Fox says, though he does eventually learn to direct his ego toward the benefit of the animal community as a whole.
The film differs from the book in other ways. Anderson introduces Fox's son, who is your classic Wes Andersonian messed up kid. At once hating and admiring the masculinity of his constrictive father, the son is going through a psycho-sexual dilemma akin to his dad's, torn between a life of domestication and that of a wild, free animal. In other words, the head of the son's little Oedipal complex is the father, whilst the head of the father's complex are the farmers, both daddy and son itching to break free of those whom they believe to be holding them in bondage. The film simplifies very complex issues, and is wrong to localise its cast's anxieties around a series of daddy figures, but the notion that one (the father) must relinquish the ego and set free the son before first seeking freedom from The Big Other is something Anderson's other films often tangentially deal with, the artist possibly responding to the fact that the ego has been in decline now for generations. Unable to libidinize objects itself, today the libidinization of objects is accomplished for the ego by the superego in the form of mass culture, the educational system, media, technology and advertising. The ego itself is now libidinized externally, for example in the form of virtual "Yous" (the You of YouTube) and "faces" ("Face" book). Unable to unite itself with the objects libidinized from without, the ego then suffers through greed, dissatisfaction and despair, afflictions which tend to plague Anderson's heroes.
The film ends with a rather bleak ending. The farmers don't catch Fox, but he is forced to live underground, always in hiding and always in fear, allowed only to come up to the surface to take food from a huge supermarket. Fox now has the illusion of freedom, of unfettered access to product, his bourgeois aspirations met, but in reality he still has a foot over his head and is unable to actually regrow his tail. In this way, Fox's masculine impulses have condemned both his friends and family, a collective defeat which the animals assuage with acts of light rebellion- they occasionally steal the very produce the farmers sell. Throw in the fact that Fox's wife swiftly becomes pregnant (further domesticating Fox) and that Fox suddenly learns he is unable to "talk" with wild animals, and the film's ending is revealed to be something pessimistic masquerading as victory.
What makes this ending doubly bleak is the fact that Anderson genuinely doesn't understand how regressive and dark it all is (like Dahl, Anderson is firmly wedded to the ideals of the American Dream); he seems to think his heroes have won and have earned the right to party.
8.5/10 – At its best, this flick examines the risks and consequences behind Hollywood's typical "be true to yourself" message. Stylistically, like Anderson's other features, its a postmodern collage of 1960s vogue, self-conscious whimsy, much quirkiness, Euro-camp and layers of schmaltzy psychodrama. Actress Meryl Streep stands out as a stop motion fox.