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Fantastic Mr. Fox, Revisited

I have a blind spot in the Wes Anderson filmography, and it’s a deliberate one. It’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, though I’d have a hard time telling you why.

I saw it upon release, in theaters, and it left me cold. That’s a perfectly fair reason, I think, but the fact is that all of Anderson’s films left me at least relatively cold the first time through. The first time I saw Bottle Rocket I was bored out of my mind. While I still don’t like it very much today, subsequent viewings have revealed an awful lot of gorgeous moments and a subtle thematic resonance that I overlooked completely the first time.

The first time I saw Rushmore I slept through almost the whole thing, but when I revisited it several years later, I was in genuine awe of the sheer mastery that went into composing the film. I also slept through part of The Royal Tenenbaums the first time…but I must have been genuinely exhausted then because I went out and bought the film the next day so that I could experience it properly.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is my favorite film of all time…but I remember leaving the theater after the first time thinking it felt a little light. Now I’m writing essays about every scene for Steve Zissou Saturdays, so you can probably see clearly enough that my stance on that has changed as well.

Then there was The Darjeeling Limited, which similarly felt light to me the first time I saw it, and while it’s no Life Aquatic it sure as heck grew in my estimation. The second time I watched it I cried like baby through the entire thing.

Then there’s Moonrise Kingdom, which I admittedly liked quite a lot when I first saw it, and yet it only gets better with each new viewing, and every time it surfaces in my memory I find myself responding to and being moved by more and different things.

But then there’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. While I’ve revisted Anderson’s other films multiple times, and have felt every one of them grow on me to at least some extent, I’ve more or less written off Fantastic Mr. Fox as a failure. I didn’t buy the DVD. I never really thought about it again. In fact, when I analyzed the trailer for the upcoming Grand Budapest Hotel, I suggested that that might be Anderson’s first out-and-out comedy.

…but it’s won’t be. That’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Why I’ve never revisted it, I don’t know. I think I was just afraid that I’d sit down to watch it, and find it to be even worse than I remembered. Maybe I thought it reflected poorly on Anderson as an artist, whereas my previous disappointments reflected more on me as a viewer. I really can’t say.

But I watched it again recently. I watched it again because of how much so many other people seemed to like it. Because of the great defense of the film that my friend David Black wrote for this very site. Because of the conversations in The Wes Anderson Collection* that made me wonder if I’d overlooked what this film really had to offer.

And you know what? It takes a lot for a big bully like me to say this, but…I did.

I did overlook what this film had to offer.

And I’m the one who was poorer for it. Because while this might never stand up to Anderson’s best works in my estimation, it absolutely does belong in their company. It’s a good movie.

One thing reading The Wes Anderson Collection made clear to me was just how much of Anderson himself was in the film. For whatever reason, I had overlooked that completely. I couldn’t tell you why…maybe I was caught up on the fact that, as Royal Tenenbaum himself might have said, it was just a bunch of animals. I doubt it, considering there are at least two childrens’ films that I would put on my list of all-time favorites, but who knows?

The fact is that what I saw in the theater wasn’t what I saw at home a few nights ago. Or, rather, it is, but I saw it in a very different way.

I appreciated the little artistic flourishes that have characterized Anderson’s films…the whip-arounds, the long horizontal pans, the distant action that utilizes dialogue to guide our eyes rather than the motion of the camera. And thanks to reading Anderson’s interview in the book, I realized how much harder it was to do that with entirely artificial sets than it would have been in live action.

I don’t know why, but Fantastic Mr. Fox seemed careless to me when I first saw it. And now I see that it’s not. It’s a bit more upbeat than most of Anderson’s films, but that’s just due to its silliness. When you look at it, Mr. Fox follows the same trajectory of Anderson’s best characters. He has something, isn’t satisfied with it, believes he’s capable of more, and ends up losing nearly everything he had to begin with. Then he gets something back, learns a little more about who he is, and ends the film in a state of relative triumph that is still beneath where he started.

Don’t ask me how I missed all that, but I did. I remembered the dancing. The snarling. The silly music that played while they tunneled around like cartoon characters. I think I wanted Anderson to do for stop-motion what he did for live action, which is filter it through his incredible, inimitable artistic voice. Instead, he made a stop-motion film that just happened to have been composed by Wes Anderson.

That’s not a bad thing. And because I was seeing it as a bad thing, I missed out.

I missed out on the small moments. I missed out on that scene between Mr. and Mrs. Fox in front of the underground waterfall. I missed out on the melancholy personal journey of poor Ash. I missed out on the glorious scene with the distant wolf.

And I missed out on the humanity. These are still characters. There a moments when tears well up, but then don’t fall. There are sounds of life and a larger universe in the background of almost every scene. There’s a strange, warped camaraderie that grows between Mr. Fox and Kylie.

This time, watching it again, I was open to that. I went into it knowing more of what to expect. And because I knew what to expect, I was primed to look for things around the margins. To not get hung up on the fact that I was watching a fox in corduroy dancing around a hen house. I was prepared, instead, to engage the film for what it was, and not for what I wanted it to be.

I was wrong. It is a good movie. It’s not the movie I would have made, but that doesn’t matter, because I didn’t make it. And the fact that I didn’t frees me to appreciate what it actually is.

There’s no better feeling in the world than realizing that as wrong as you were, that particular work of art won’t hold it against you. It’s yours to have, and to appreciate, and to let yourself understand.

—–
* By the way, if you do have a Wes Anderson fan on your Christmas list, this is a brilliant, wonderful, fantastic book. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I’ll be reviewing it at some point…but in the meantime, I’ll just say right now that there’s no Wes Anderson fan in the world that could possibly be disappointed by this. It’s a thing of beauty in itself.

Connecting the Dots with Margot Tenenbaum

Well, the holidays have kind of snuck up on me, and because of that (and the fact that I’m traveling) I don’t have a Steve Zissou Saturdays installment ready to go. But I did rewatch The Royal Tenenbaums last night, and I do have something I found really interesting that I hope will make for a decent substitute.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Royal Tenenbaums. It has to be at least 30 times, and yet I’m still finding new things, every single time I watch the film. Usually it ends up being something to do with Richie, Chas or Royal, as I end up paying a little more attention to them than I do to the other characters.

This last time, however, I noticed some brilliantly subtle layering in the development of Margot, and that’s what I wanted to share here.

Each of the Tenenbaum children self-destructs in their own time, and in their own way. For Chas, it comes a year before the start of the film, when his wife is killed in a plane crash. For Richie, his meltdown occurs a good way into his professional tennis career, and then, obviously, he hits another low point after discovering Margot’s past.

Margot’s descent into self-destruction begins much, much earlier in her life. A private investigator even assembles a file documenting her descent, and it begins at age 12, with her buying a pack of cigarettes.

Her smoking — and her secrecy about it — is alluded to throughout the film as a pivotal stage in her self-destruction. The fact that it’s the first entry in her dossier would seem to support that, as would the fact that it’s brought up in the opening narration, also identifying it as beginning when she was 12.

However that in itself seems rather small in the face of the romantic, artistic, sexual and even physical self-destruction that follows. In fact, it’s so small that the significance both the film and the characters attach to it qualifies as a joke in itself.

But while it doesn’t appear in the background file montage, we do get a scene in the opening sequence of Margot one year prior: the night of her eleventh birthday.

Chronologically speaking, this is actually the first sign we get of the unraveling to come. Yet despite what the film frames as the most important moment at the party — Royal insulting the play she stages with her two brothers — there’s something else that suggests very directly the deliberate self destruction to come: the play itself.

Of course, we don’t see much of it. In fact, all we see is the curtain call, with the three Tenenbaum children on stage, in costume.

Afterward, during Royal’s dismissal of the play — and his adopted daughter — we see that it was Margot who played the zebra. In the curtain call, and again here when she stands up, we see bullet holes and fake blood on the costume. One of these wounds is directly over the heart — Margot’s heart — which implies strongly that the shooting was fatal.

Margot literally cast herself in her own play as the figure that gets destroyed. But so what, right? As Royal points out — callously — it’s just a bunch of kids in animal costumes. It can’t be worth reading any more deeply into that. Perhaps Margot cast herself as the zebra because it had the most important lines, or was the central character, or to best showcase her talent in front of her family on her birthday.

But, no. Not quite.

Earlier in the opening sequence we see Margot at a typewriter, working on a script. And what’s that on her wallpaper?

The zebras are all around her. Throughout the film we can see them from almost every angle in her room; it’s Margot’s symbol. The zebras surround her and watch over her while she writes, while she reads the works of other successful playwrights, while she dreams, and while she does anything at all. The door to her room is always closed, with many locks and KEEP OUT signs, suggesting that she spends as much time in there, alone, as she possibly can. The zebras are always there.

Therefore it’s impossible that she associates the zebras with either of her brothers, or either of her parents, or with Eli, or with Pagoda, or with anybody else in the world. She is likely, however, to have internalized their presence, and for them to have worked their way into her writing, whether consciously or not.

By writing the zebra as a tragic figure, and then by literally climbing into that role herself, she’s foreshadowed her entire path of self-destruction. She assassinated her own image of the night of her eleventh birthday, and played the role herself.

Royal denouncing her artistic efforts? Buying that pack of cigarettes? No, those weren’t triggers. They were simply manifestations of an unspoken desire to self-destruct that had been part of Margot Tenenbaum all along.

The film makes no overt reference to this. It’s one of many carefully placed breadcrumb trails that Wes Anderson trusts us enough to figure out for ourselves.

I’m still figuring them out, and none of them make me feel like I’m reaching. Everything was always right there, ready to be noticed, and if it took me 30 viewings to find them, that’s okay. Anderson’s films are patient. They wait for you. And when you finally get there, they welcome you home.

Speaking of which, in the image I used to open this article I notice that Margot’s listening to Between the Buttons, which is the Rolling Stones album she puts on when Richie comes home from the hospital later in the film.

Oh, and Royal being the only one to criticize her play here is subverted nicely by the fact that he’s the only one who enjoys her new play at the end of the film. So many layers, so many details, so many connections and mirrors and echoes.

My lord I love this movie.

Steve Zissou Saturdays #8: Let’s Have Some Teamsmanship

Well, this is supposed to post in a couple of hours, so let’s not dawdle. We’re just over a quarter of the way through the film and things are really happening now, so sit back and enjoy my analysis of the next seventeen seconds of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The next day begins with Steve using a Polaroid to take a picture of Ned, explaining that they’re used for continuity. Part of me would like to see the Polaroid camera as some more humorously outdated Team Zissou tech, but that’s only true in a photographic sense. Until very recently Polaroids were used for continuity purposes in film and television production. The reason was that picture quality didn’t matter as much as convenience; the photos would not be distributed to the press or used for promotional materials…they were instead retained so that hair and makeup artists could reconstruct a certain look days or weeks later.

It sounds a little silly, but if you have a film in which your character gets into a fight and comes out of it with a black eye and a bandage — not to mention mussed hair — you’d want a Polaroid of him in that condition, and you’d want to keep it handy. After all, films are not shot in sequence, and it might be another month before you shoot the scene that comes next in the film, in which you’ll want the hair, black eye and bandage all in the same places. You might even have to come back later on to remount a scene because it was discovered too late that the footage, for whatever reason, was unusable. That’s where continuity comes in; you need to make sure your scenes flow, and if bandages and hair styles keep jumping around, it’ll shake your audience out of the experience. In fact, it’s fully possible that in 2004, Anderson himself was using Polaroids for continuity reasons while filming The Life Aquatic.

So as long as we see the Polaroid camera as part of Steve’s production equipment rather than oceanographic equipment, it’s at least relatively current.

But, then, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves the question of why Steve is concerned with continuity? Remember, he’s a documentary filmmaker. Or, at least, he’s supposed to be. He’s not staging scenes, he’s not shooting out of sequence (how could he?), and he’s not constructing an ongoing drama. Shortly we will hear Steve explain that “Nobody knows what’s going to happen. And then we film it. That’s the whole concept.”

Yet we’ve already seen (and heard) that this is not true. Steve does demand a certain editorial control over what gets into the film. Whether it’s a looped line, a staged reconstruction, or even just a demand for the largest amount of footage possible, so that he can better shape it to his ends.

There’s something at least slightly dishonest about this, but we’d be fooling ourselves if we believed that documentaries aren’t usually given shape by their directors. Of course they are; that’s what film-making is. What’s strange here, though, is the notion of continuity.

What’s the suggestion there? The suggestion is that Ned is something right now…and he may not be that thing later. This is a photograph…a frozen moment in time. A man in one very specific state. We need the photograph now for continuity, because he may never be that person again.

It would be pretty Andersonian for the whole continuity thing to be an excuse on Steve’s part to get a picture of his son, but knowing what we know about both Steve (who isn’t sentimental about it) and Ned (who would willingly pose for one), that’s not what’s happening here. It’s just Steve Zissou, once again, controlling and giving shape to the world around him through the medium of film.

Steve offers Ned a handgun, which is hilarious to me in at least three ways. First, because Steve Zissou is the kind of guy who won’t even preface the fact that he’s about to hand you a firearm; he simply holds it out and says, “Here.” Second, Steve Zissou is the kid of guy who lets the gun point up while handing it off, instead of safely down and away from anybody. And third, in a moment that’s almost heartbreakingly adorable, Ned reaches for it out of sheer politeness before he even realizes what it is. Bless his heart.

Of course, Steve’s cavalier attitude toward deadly weapons is emblematic of the general Team Zissou approach to firearms: they don’t know what they’re doing. Nobody seems to have been trained in proper handling or safety procedures. They simply wear their guns against their legs, and while we see them use their weapons later, at no point do we get any suggestion that they’re doing anything other than firing and hoping for the best.

These things are played for laughs, but, as we know, it’s this shrugging attitude toward safety that will end up taking the life of the man politely refusing a gun.

Reinforcing this idea of lax gun safety (and safety for himself, and safety for his crew, and safety in general) while further playing it for laughs, Steve calls down to Anne-Marie, his script girl, asking if the interns get glocks. Not only does he not know if his unpaid interns are carrying firearms, but she replies that they all actually share one. Wowsers.

The image we get of Anne-Marie — in addition to being, let’s face it, pretty lovely — is once again evocative of a mermaid. We discussed this during the scene set at Loquasto’s after party, and we see it again now. I understand that this is more of a vague visual suggestion than anything hard and fast, so of course feel free to disagree. I, personally, find it hard to gaze down at Anne-Marie lying down, her hair splayed out behind her, topless, with a green dress, and not see a mermaid sunbathing.

Ned does as he’s told (was there any doubt?) and takes the gun, which causes Steve to smile. Yes, Steve Zissou smiles! I even captured the evidence above.

Ned smiles, too. He’s dressed in the clothes and he’s in possession of correspondence stock that bears the name, but now Ned really is becoming a Zissou, what with him taking the gun and therefore willingly putting himself in danger just because Steve told him to. It’s such a tiny moment, but it’s an impressively dark twist on the paternal bonding experience.

Wolodarsky appears and tells Steve to get on the echo box. He has to slap it to get it working, and the unit swings loosely from its mount. More outdated tech, and another reminder that even the most basic repairs — such as loose mounting screws — go unaddressed.

He learns that he has a call from Oseary Drakoulias, which causes him to break into an immediate sprint. It’s interesting to me just how overtly Anderson reminds us of the importance of film in Steve’s life, yet it only stands out to me when I break down scenes detail for detail. When you just watch the film, so much of this passes by unnoticed. That’s always been the thing about Anderson’s approach to detail and characterization, though: he hides everything in plain sight. It’s why you can watch just about any of his films and laugh the entire time, then rewatch them and be a sobbing mess. The film doesn’t change…we just know what to look for the second time through.

It’s not good news. Oseary is Steve’s producer, and the deal with Larry Amin for financing has fallen through. Steve’s understandably upset, but his response to Oseary throws wide open another suggestion of a past that we won’t get to explore deeply: “In other words, you fucked us.”

Oseary’s implied homosexuality is what informs the earlier scene in which we met Larry. Oseary may have been angling for funds, but he was also flirting. The suggestion now is that Oseary and Larry have not come to a financial arrangement, whether or not they came to any other kind of arrangement. Oseary could have frightened him off with his advances. Or he could have enjoyed his company and decided not to press the issue. It’s unclear. Steve’s choice of verb, however, is not. He throws it at Oseary because he knows, at least vaguely, what happened. It’s probably happened before. And he know it will hurt the man, which it does, and the conversation immediately becomes a shouting match.

What’s also worth noting is that it was Steve himself who was rude to Larry earlier on, refusing to see him as worth his time unless he had the kind of money needed to mount the next film. Oseary may have erred on the other side, looking past the money to see too much of Larry Amin.

Either way, regardless of who fucked whom, the money isn’t coming.

I also like the placement of the Belafonte model here…sitting in the window, overlooking the water, so that it could just about be mistaken for the actual ship out at sea. There’s also another set of The Life Aquatic Companion Series on the shelves, and words cannot express how much I wish those were real. If I could own any prop from the film, it would probably be one of those books.*

Ned interrupts — of course politely — and says that he just inherited $275,000. He’s not sure that that amount would make any difference, but when you’re flat broke (as Steve seems to be, though we later find out this is not true) it makes a massive difference. Oseary seems unable to decide whether or not Ned is being sarcastic, and that’s another instance of something tragic being played for a laugh. After all, we know how this story ends: Ned is bankrolling his untimely death.

He believes he’s helping his father. All he’s really doing is investing $275,000 in his own funeral service.

Steve and Ned take off for Oseary Drakoulias Productions. There’s more looming tragedy here being played as comedy; the foreshadowing is really being layered on thick…and yet, once again, if you don’t know what to look for it just glides on by. In this case it’s Steve asking Ned if he can fly a helicopter. Ned replies that he has, in a way that makes it clear he really shouldn’t, and he’s “certainly not licensed in any way, shape or form.”

Steve responds by handing him the keys and saying, “Great. Let’s go.”

Think about that. Not even within the context of what happens later in the film (though that by no means can be far from your mind). Just think about what’s happening here. Handing the keys to an aircraft to somebody who isn’t licensed to operate it. Telling him to take you up into the sky and fly somewhere he’s never been.

Can you imagine anything more dangerous than that? It’s a joke here, as was Steve’s handling of the gun. In each case, the joke is on Ned. There’s only one possible punchline, and it’s a tough one to swallow.

Later in the film, Anne-Marie (in what, if I remember correctly, is her final line) sums up her views on Steve thusly: “We’re being led on an illegal suicide mission by a selfish maniac.” And you know what? You could look up any word in that sentence, and you’d find that she’s not exaggerating. The script girl chose her words carefully, and she’s absolutely correct. Here, on a smaller scale, Steve is doing the same thing by forcing a gun and a helicopter on a man who isn’t trained to use them, and then demanding that he does.

Steve’s pretty clearly a terrible father, and a lousy captain. He’s (at least currently) an inept and destitute filmmaker. He’s a cheating husband, a demanding employer, and a bad friend. And you know what? We haven’t seen anything yet.

Some perfect, gentle foreshadowing in this screen grab, as Klaus watches Ned and Steve depart. He’s shielding his eyes from the sun, but the gesture mirrors his final salute to Ned, when the helicopter takes off for a second and final time in the film.

Yet another thing I’ve never noticed before writing this series. I cannot express how much I love this movie.

Enough foreshadowing yet? I hope not, because Steve and Ned hear some nasty grinding as the helicopter soars, and Steve reveals that he has no idea when it was last serviced. Klaus is supposed to check it every six months…then again, Klaus was supposed to pick Jane up at the airport. He’s not the most reliable crewman, and this specific lack of attention to his duties will ultimately result in Ned’s death.

As much as Steve might believe his “pack of strays” mentality to staffing his ship is a good thing — as might we; it’s a Wes Anderson film, after all — we’re surrounded by evidence that it’s not. Machines are failing, equipment stays broken, and job duties remain unfulfilled. Steve’s legacy is falling apart around him both because of his own lack carelessness, and the inherent carelessness that he finds and fosters in others.

Ned is Steve’s legacy personified. We’re reminded now of how that turns out.

In Oseary’s office, we get another nice look at the difference between Steve and Ned. While Ned stands with his hands behind his back, refusing to even approach the desk until he’s invited to sit down, Steve is behind the desk leafing through one of Oseary’s files. (Possibly one on himself.) So much in this movie just happens, and Anderson trusts us to find it eventually. He draws undue attention to literally nothing, which is almost ironic since The Life Aquatic is easily the film of his with the most visual spectacle.

The wire transfer came through successfully from Kentucky, and Ned is finally invited to sit down. There are a few “hooks on it,” however (another nice aquatic choice of words), and Oseary outlines them. While he does, we get a good view of Noah Baumbach as Philip. Baumbach co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Anderson, as well as Fantastic Mr. Fox, which means he bookends the quality spectrum for Anderson’s films as far as I’m concerned. He’s also a great director in his own right**, though I probably wouldn’t put him on quite the same plane.

The bank apparently wants a drug test for everyone on the crew. Steve looks a bit shifty, but isn’t particularly concerned about this. His ire is quietly raised, however, when Oseary also mentions that “a stooge from the bond company” will be coming along to keep them on budget. Oseary wisely cuts off any protest from Steve by telling him outright that “there’s not a damn thing you can do about that.”

The major revelation here, however, is that Steve must legally swear not to kill the Jaguar Shark. As he already announced to an assembly at Loquasto, this mission is purely one of revenge, so forbidding Steve to kill it goes clearly against his intentions. Ever the gentleman, however, Steve meets Oseary halfway: “I’m going to fight it, but I’ll let it live.” He then immediately inquires about the dynamite he requested, just in case you were willing to believe that Ahab just wants to smack Moby-Dick around a little bit.

Another interesting point comes up here: Oseary tells him he can’t kill the Jaguar Shark, “or whatever it is, if it actually exists.” Granted, Steve is already dreaming up a response that will get him off the hook, but this isn’t the first time that somebody’s questioned the existence of the Jaguar Shark. And, as before, Steve doesn’t pursue the issue.

I find this incredibly fascinating. Put yourself in Steve’s shoes. You go out diving with a friend, a very close friend, and you see that friend get devoured by some monstrous sea creature. When you come to shore and tell everyone what happened, they make comments to the passive effect that you made it up. That there was no creature.

What would your response be? Your friend is dead. You didn’t kill him. Some unknown beast did. You’d make that very clear. You might not be able to tell them what it was, but you saw it happen. You’d plead with them to believe you.

Steve, however, doesn’t do this. People question the existence of the shark, and he shrugs. That’s incredible to me, and I’m not quite sure how to interpret it. Is it because Steve sees the world through a lens, and because he dropped the camera and there’s no footage he can’t be sure that it ever did happen? He saw it happening, but he didn’t capture it happening; that’s a significant difference for Steve Zissou. That’s the difference between fantasy and reality.

Or is it more like what Jane suggested in our last segment? Does this also seem fake? This would square very nicely with the answer Steve gave Captain Hennessey when the topic was breached at Loquasto: “I don’t want to give away the ending.”

Either way, however, Esteban is dead. There was blood in the water. Steve surfaced with hydrogen psychosis.

Did the shark kill Esteban? We learn later that it at least exists, but for now the possibility that that’s not what happened is an intriguing one. Especially since it’s not the shark that kills Ned…it’s Steve, in pursuit of the shark. Another important distinction.

Oseary is off to Zurich, but before he leaves he introduces Steve to the bond company stooge, Bill Ubell. There’s one of those tiny cuts for time that Anderson employs with such tantalizing infrequency: Oseary steps out of his office and into the hallway, then we cut to him stepping out of the hallway and into the lobby area. We lose maybe five steps, and the camera comes along with us so that it feels like a continuous shot, without actually being one. I love this.

Bill Ubell stands, and there’s another lovely, understated moment when Bill glances down at Steve’s hand as though he expects he’ll be able to shake it. Steve’s hand just hangs there. We’re far enough back that we might not notice it. Anderson’s trusting us a lot with this film.

Steve’s distrust of Bill (played by Bud Cort, of Harold and Maude fame) is palpable, and Anderson does a great job of making us complicit in it. He dresses Bill in muted earth-tones, at clear odds with the bright blues and reds of the Team Zissou uniforms. He’s made to look like an interloper not only aboard the ship, but within the film. We even see the three of them squeezed into a tiny elevator, illustrating physically Steve’s inner discomfort at having to share space with the man.

Zissou outright says to Bill that he hopes he’s not going to bust their chops. Bill asks him why he would do that, and Steve responds that he’s a bond company stooge.

Bill replies, “Well, I’m also a human being.” Steve’s uniformly judgmental outlook softens, as should ours. We saw him through Zissou’s eyes, and as funny as the line is, we should also feel at least a little bit ashamed for drawing certain conclusions from Bill’s appearance. His glasses, his bald spot, his cleanly pressed wardrobe. We thought we knew what was stepping into the elevator with Steve, and we were wrong. Anderson took movie wardrobe shorthand and used it against us. We’ve been trained to see one thing, and he reveals to us another. It’s one of the more obvious slights of hand that he pulls in this film, but by no means is it the only one.

That Steve apologizes for feeling exactly what we felt is probably due to his riding high. He’s in a good mood. He has money again. He’s going to do his movie. Philip is getting him dynamite. He’s feeling good, and Devo’s rollicking “Gut Feeling” wells up on the soundtrack…but we’ll talk about that next time.

We end this recap on Steve inviting Ned and Bill to share a cheer with him, in the name of teamsmanship. What a fantastic invented word, by the way. It’s Steve expressing something that he doesn’t otherwise have a word for. It’s not friendship, it’s not companionship, and it’s not even a relationship. It’s teamsmanship. The state of being a teamsman.

That speaks volumes to me about Team Zissou. It’s not about bringing any expertise to the mission, it’s not about being a capable leader, and it’s not even about doing your job. It’s about being part of a team. That, in itself, is its own reward…at least in Steve’s mind. It’s why his interns are unpaid. (That, and the fact that he doesn’t have any money.) Being aboard the Belafonte is a privilege, and one that should be celebrated.

And so we celebrate, because the Belafonte has just found the final major addition to its crew, and everything is going to be just fine for everyone.

Next: Ned drinks a little too much water.

—–
* Christmas is coming, guys…

** His films The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg are the ones I’d recommend. But be warned: both of them will probably make you ashamed to be alive.

Analyzing the Grand Budapest Hotel Trailer

Despite my love for all things Wes Anderson (well, almost all things), I haven’t really been following the development of The Grand Budapest Hotel. That’s not down to a lack of interest; I simply didn’t expect that there would be much reason to follow it yet. Last I heard, just a few months ago, it sounded like the casting was still being finalized. Then, this past week, boom, a trailer:

Maybe it’s just me, but it felt a lot like this project went from “I have an idea” to “Here ya go, finished the movie while you weren’t looking” pretty quickly. I’m not complaining. I’m actually thrilled. It’s slated for a March release, and the trailer looks fantastic.

Anyway, since I analyzed the Moonrise Kingdom trailer what feels like only yesterday, I figured I’d do something similar here as well. Actually I hope you’ll do most of the work for me in the comments; unlike with Moonrise Kingdom, there aren’t any major themes that I feel confident picking out of the scenes on display here.

With the disclaimer that this article will therefore be terrible and worthless, let’s begin.

From the very first shot of the trailer, we know we’re squarely within Anderson territory. That’s absolutely his uniquely selective eye at work in the color, and it’s just hideously gorgeous. The starkness of the red, the flatness of the purple. It’s like minimalist art that only resolves itself into live action when somebody moves.

Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori seem to play the main characters in this film, and their relationship gets explained later on in the trailer. For now, we get some sketchy but familiar setup: a young man aspires to a position that seems to mean a lot more to him than it does to anyone else. In this case, it’s being a lobby boy at The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Fiennes, for what it’s worth, plays Gustave H., and Revolori plays Zero, which is about as on-the-nose as any Anderson name has ever been.

Zero is already wearing his lobby boy outfit, but we find out in a moment that he’s a “junior lobby boy in training.” It’s hard to imagine a more demeaning title, but something tells me Zero cherishes it.

If you somehow didn’t realize you were watching a Wes Anderson trailer before, you definitely will now. Our next shot is his signature “Eye of God” perspective, gazing fixedly down at the lobby of the Grand Budapest.

The music that kicks in here got me very excited, as it sounds a lot like the work of Mark Mothersbaugh. However it looks like Alexandre Desplat is actually composing this one again, and I should probably give up hope that Mothersbaugh will ever come back for a full score.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anderson’s films lose so much without that man on the soundtrack. I’m positive it will be good, but I’m also positive that his absence will continue to be felt.

There’s a nice little montage of the carefully composed austerity of the Grand Budapest, and I don’t have much to say about it apart from the fact that it’s fantastic. I had a hard time choosing which snatch of footage to highlight here, but ultimately I chose this one because LOOK AT THAT PAINTING MY GOD THIS MOVIE.

The hotel setting is an important one to Anderson, for whatever reason. I was going to mention this in a later installment of Steve Zissou Saturdays (probably in April, 2034) but it’s kind of a running theme for him. It’s where the budding criminals hunker down in Bottle Rocket, it’s where Mr. Blume goes after his wife kicks him out in Rushmore, it’s where Royal Tenenbaum goes after his wife kicks him out in The Royal Tenenbaums, and it’s where Team Zissou goes to rescue their bond company stooge in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Then, of course, there was Hotel Chevalier, which was the supporting feature for The Darjeeling Limited.

Anderson finally basing one of his films around a hotel — at least in terms of its title and setup — feels more than natural; it’s inevitable.

Every shot in this trailer is blocked masterfully. I just wanted to say that.

This seems to be Gustave exchanging pleasantries with his lover, though I can’t be sure if he’s romancing several elderly women throughout the trailer, or if they’re all the same one that ends up dead. They all look alike to me because I’m a big ageist bastard.

Let’s take a moment, though, to just admire Gustave here. Because my goodness. The bow tie. The mustache. The tiny shirt buttons. The lapel pins. This is why I love Anderson’s movies. This image right here. You can pause just about anywhere, and sit back, and admire.

See what I mean?

We learn that Gustave’s lover was 84 years old, but was “dynamite in the sack.” We also learn of the romance, or at least infatuation, between Zero and Agatha, played by the gorgeous Saoirse Ronan. I can’t make out the book she’s reading here, and that disappoints me for reasons I’d be ashamed to discuss any further.

Zero’s hands on the carousel horse’s face are a perfect touch. It’s so wonderfully, vaguely inappropriate, and yet disarmingly innocent.

We then get a lovely shot of Agatha from Zero’s point of view, with the carnival lights blurred behind her. However we also see her birth-mark, which taken in tandem with the joke about Gustave having sex with an old woman is slightly worrying.

I say slightly and I stand by it, because I understand that trailers are edited to make these tiny comic moments seem larger than they are; I doubt Wes Anderson made a movie that coasts on the joke of flawed people fucking.

Still, though, it’s the kind of thing I’d worry about in somebody else’s hands…that we’d get a scene that degenerates into Austin Powers “Moley moley moley” territory.

A moment later, Gustave discourages Zero from pursuing his curiosity about the birth mark. I hope it’s a lesson he learns quickly.

That little dismissive finger gesture, by the way, is the moment that cemented for me that Ralph Fiennes belongs in a Wes Anderson film. Not that I had doubted it before…it’s just nice to see it confirmed so ultimately.

Zero, narrating, discusses his relationship with Gustave: Zero was to be his pupil, and Gustave was to be his counselor and guardian. The mentor-protege relationship is another career-long Anderson theme, and I wouldn’t be surprised if “surrogate father” is the unspoken third role Gustave takes on. The mere usage of the term guardian suggests that, but of course it could be meant in another sense, considering the violence we see later in the trailer.

Gustave is informed that the police wish to speak with him, and there’s a lovely, loaded silence before he agrees to see them. I love the quiet, blank expressiveness of Zero’s face, too.

I’m so excited to see this movie…probably even more excited than I was about Moonrise Kingdom. That movie was great, but it also felt warm and comforting. The Grand Budapest Hotel already feels kinetic and dangerous, and that’s going to be a very interesting contrast.

Anderson takes a moment to prove that the titles for Saddest Crime Scene Photo and Funniest Crime Scene Photo don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

We then get the single funniest moment of the trailer, in which Gustave calmly suggests that his lover’s been murdered and that he’s a suspect. He then turns on his heels and flees the police who are standing with their hands clasped harmlessly behind them.

This is gorgeous stuff. This is so perfect that if they decided to destroy all copies of the film tomorrow, I’d still be content to just rewatch the trailer endlessly. I don’t know if I’d ever be able to pull anything of substance from it, but I’d have a heck of a lot of fun trying.

Anyone want to turn this into an enormous print to hang on my wall? Christmas is coming…

Or maybe I was wrong; the “I want some” speech by Gustave here is just hilariously, awfully, sincerely perfect. It made me look up the screenwriting credits on this film, and it looks like it’s just Anderson himself.

I think this is the first film that he wrote alone, which is surprising. The sometimes “gaggy” nature of this trailer made me wonder which co-writer was bringing that to the mix. Turns out it’s just our man Wes himself. And I kind of love him more for that. I love that one of my favorite living artists is channeling his inner Fozzie Bear.

This is another moment I just needed to pause and appreciate. Look how impeccably composed this shot of Jeff Goldblum is. No element of this scene seems compatible with any other, and yet it’s so careful and deliberate. The rounded wall with the flat picture of the pig hanging on it. The candle sticks of different heights. A piano on the left and a stuffed bear on the right. I adore this.

We also learn that the dead lover is named Madame D. So I’ll just look up who plays her and…

…Tilda Swinton? Really? That was her? I honestly didn’t know that until this very moment. That’s some makeup job.

Madame D. leaves Gustave H. a painting called Boy With Apple. This seems to be an important element of the film, and it’s possibly what sets the entire plot in motion.

Also, note the mirror there. A later moment “mirrors” this one, with a magnifying glass.

Adrien Brody plays a man called Dmitri, but you’d never know it from his accent. I’m not complaining, but there you go.

He gets into a spat with Gustave H. that devolves into a slapsticky sequence of knock-outs. The Grand Budapest Hotel may turn out to be Anderson’s silliest film yet, but it feels so much like Anderson that I’m more thrilled by the possibility than wary of it. By all means, let the man make his comedy.

At the end of the sequence we get a chilling turn toward the camera from Willem Dafoe, which sort of complicates the humor of the sequence we just witnessed. Yes please.

There’s that magnifying glass. Agatha seems to be in danger, or could potentially be. It’s something to do with the whereabouts of Boy With Apple, so Zero gives her a note written in code that tells her where to find it.

She expresses some understandable reluctance to be dragged into the affair, and then we see Zero and Gustave replacing Boy With Apple with this:

Yep. This’ll be his silliest movie yet.

Some more fantastic blocking, and I especially love the way the policeman points in just such a way to the men on his right, and then shifts and points in exactly the same way to the men on his left.

And is there anything better than seeing people getting bossed around by a man they can only see from the chest up?

No. No there’s not.

We see Bill Murray shouting for someone to get into his vehicle and a few more shots of somebody on the run. No idea who is running, or why, or from whom, which leaves the manic second half of this trailer feeling a bit directionless. That’s not a problem, but it does make the trajectory of the plot feel a little unclear at this point. Unlike the relatively straight-forward Moonrise Kingdom, I think even the most obsessive fan would find it difficult to make any confident guesses about the direction this film will take.

We also see a group of prisoners tapping away at the bars on their window in unison, presumably to very gradually chisel through. The sillier it gets, the more I can’t wait for the movie to floor me, and very likely break my heart.

There’s a bunch of quick shots of the actors that hearkens back to the opening titles for The Royal Tenenbaums, and I almost wonder if we won’t get something similar at the start of this film. There are a lot of nice freeze frames here so by all means pause every one of them.

I just wanted to highlight the one above because we’re being promised that at some point we’ll see a shirtless Harvey Keitel covered in gang tattoos. If that doesn’t merit a special mention, I don’t know what does.

Oh, and this sequence reveals to me that the policeman in the floor is played by Edward Norton. YES.

Sorry, I promised analysis but I’m just gushing. So: Edward Norton played Scoutmaster Ward in Moonrise Kingdom and he was brilliant so YES.

“You can’t arrest him simply because he’s a bloody immigrant” is another of those great, backhanded lines that it seems like Gustave H. will be full of. There’s a surprisingly raw scene of physical battery that results in bloody noses for poor Gustave and his lobby boy, and then a lot of shots of…um…shots being fired.

There’s also Gustave in prison, Willem Dafoe angrily skiing, and Zero in disguise. I am more than a little happy that the trailer actually sees it fit to downplay the action, spending longer stretches on the dialogue, awkward pauses, and beautifully framed shots of doomed relationships. What should potentially be the most exciting thing in the film — the catalyst that brings all of this chaos raining down — is barely even alluded to.

Because that’s not as important as who these characters are. How they act. And what they see when they look in the mirror.

Well fucking done.

The trailer ends with a great scene of Gustave being dismissive and impatient while Zero tells him about his experience under torture. The punchline to the scene is also a lovely button on the trailer itself.

The interplay between these two characters — both of whom are played by newcomers to Anderson’s world — looks like it’s going to be some standout stuff. I genuinely cannot wait to see the finished product.

And so ends my analysis, devoid of analysis. With so little context I’m unable to dig very deep. But I am able to be primed absolutely for an unrivaled night out at he movies. And frankly, at the end of the day, that’s what I’d prefer.

Roll on March 2014.

RIP Kumar Pallana

Some sad but not totally unexpected Wes Anderson news: Kumar Pallana has passed away. He was 94 years old.

In films packed with wall-to-wall memorable characters and moments, he always stuck out to me. His role as Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums was his largest, but it was fun enough watching him rake leaves or cackle madly as Mr. Littlejeans in Rushmore.

He appeared in a non-speaking role in The Darjeeling Limited, but did so much with his silence that Roger Ebert gave him special mention in his review of the film, even though he didn’t know the actor’s name.

And all of this pales in comparison to his role as the safe-cracker in Bottle Rocket, which was unquestionably the highlight of the entire film.

Pallana’s son Dipak also appeared in Bottle Rocket as a book store employee, and in The Royal Tenenbaums as a doctor.

His one of a kind line-readings made the most of the smallest moments. “He has the cancer.” “There he goes.” “Best play ever, man.”

I’ll miss you, Kumar. Thanks for making some of my favorite movies that much better.