Wes Anderson: A Hero's Journeyman

Rating: 10/10 (27 November 2009)

In a movie year so vapid that I found myself debating the virtues of Michael Bay vs Roland Emmerich (two sickening panderers, the latter of whom is at least less a Hasbro salesman than a bad filmmaker), I just about gave up on going to the movies. Just about. Then Wes Anderson released the best filmed fairy tale since the invention of the zoetrope.
It may be argued that Anderson is not the most consistent director working. That attribute is better attached to Bay, who consistently insults my intelligence. But consistency, while a virtue, is not the mark an artist ought to hit. Excellence is a better target. Michael Bay thinks that excellence is measured by ticket sales, that transcendence is related to expenditure, that success is found in delivering the lowest common denominator of good time to the broadest possible spectrum of children. Every shot in a Michael Bay movie feels test-marketed. Which is why his movies tend to last exactly as long as their initial release.
So, yeah, I am a big Wes Anderson fan. I still don't like BOTTLE ROCKET all that much, but it is better than any movie I saw this year not directed by Wes Anderson. This guy is so defiantly not a populist that with every new release, I grow a little more afraid of his never getting funding again. His movies don't tend to make money. His audiences are necessarily educated, open-minded, analytical, patient, compassionate. Does this sound like your America? Anderson seems uninterested in selling a single ticket. He clearly has no desire to make a movie that will help him to make more movies. Any question remaining on this point after LIFE AQUATIC was answered by DARJEELING LIMITED. Here is a man who can only make art for himself. He will starve before he makes any other kind. So I worry, because he happens, tangentially, to be making it for me too.
And hey - this is a kids' movie. Anyway, I'm sure Fox thought so when it signed up. I mean, it's animated, it's from a kids' book, it's got talking animals. But the kids in the theater with me did not experience my ecstasy. They will not clamor for Mr Fox dolls on Black Friday. Mr Fox is in fact a scary, villainous, superficially charming ne'er-do-well. He is boorish, a dangerous egotist. A bad father. A bad husband. His excuse ("I'm a wild animal") sounds like a wifebeater's apology. The movie does not celebrate his deeds or personality. At the end of the picture, he has reduced his community to living in a sewer, eating synthetic versions of the real food they used to enjoy, with none of their former freedoms, listening to his speeches about how THIS is the good life while the rest of the world tries to kill them. (What kind of metaphor for suburban values is this? Mr Fox as Mr Bush? Am I reaching? I am not.) So this isn't a movie for kids. It isn't a movie for imperialists. It isn't a movie for 20th Century Fox, who would surely have preferred another STAR WARS-type toy delivery system.
It's a movie for me.
There's my G.I. Joe from 1975, blowing up the Fox home. There's Roald Dahl's repeated line about "little electric sparks" dancing in the characters' eyes, finally brought to life. There's the opossum that keeps invading my mother's house. What? Yes. It's a movie so god damn personal that it achieves the universal through minutiae. In doing so it achieves my dream of a fairy tale so much like a pre-Disney Grimm version that 80% of the characters behave with total self-interest and abuse everyone else.
It's a myth that performs the essential function of mythology: it reminds me of my responsibilities to my society, which are legion. I must be all I can be; I must not bring harm to my friends; I must not make bad art to buy another Lamborghini.
It's a movie from Wes Anderson, for Wes Anderson and me and you. And if Michael Bay sees it, perhaps it'll do us all some good.