FANTASTIC MR. FOX

The animated film, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – starring George Clooney and Meryl Streep – is, at least in part, a caper movie, but not the kind in which expensively-dressed slicksters steal fortunes from shady Las Vegas casino owners (as in Clooney’s “Ocean’s 11″ movies, for example). No, the capers here involve chickens, smoked meat, and cider – that is, everything a trio of evil, greedy farmers-slash-businessmen have stashed away on their properties, and that Clooney’s Mr. Fox – as a reformed chicken-thief-turned underpaid-newspaper-columnist-turned-chickenthief again – longs to get his hands, er, paws on. (He’s been feeling so stifled lately, struggling to make ends meet in a small, modestly-furnished tree hole with his patient wife, Meryl Streep, and unathletic pipsqueak of a son, Jason Schwartzman, that he’s decided to take one last stab at greatness by looting the nearby farms and bringing his ill-gotten gains home to feed his family.)

His thieving escapades – and what the farmers do in retaliation (think: guns, explosives, and bulldozers) are what the action sequences in the movie are all about, and eventually the Fox family – along with a bunch of their furry forest friends – abandon their homes, flee the farmers’ reign of terror, and set up a refugee camp deep within the sewers of the neighboring town.

You could argue, then, that “FMF” is about the survival of our forests and the creatures who dwell in them – that director Wes Anderson has made a gritty tale (far grittier than the average animated movie) about what man has done, and continues to do, to drive woodland creatures from their habitats. That he seems to come down squarely on the side of the animals is surely no accident.

But the film is also about family, and the problems that beset fathers, mothers, and children every day. Mr. Fox, the breadwinner, wishes he could afford to provide a better home for his wife and son, and put more and better food on the table; frustrated by his lot in life, he yearns for the good old days, when he was young, carefree, and ripping the heads off chickens every chance he got; he and his wife (like all spouses) have their occasional spats, sometimes with claws flashing; and he doesn’t know WHAT to do about his kid, who wants to measure up to the one-time athletic prowess of his old man, but knows that he probably never will.

“FMF” isn’t a laugh riot. Nor does it have the bright, vibrant look of the typical Disney or Pixar flick. It’s earthy-looking, dark (a lot of scenes are set in the sewer) and – because Anderson has chosen to use a stop-motion animation technique – the character’s movements aren’t even particularly fluid. Still, bewhiskered faces appear so much more alive than they would have appeared otherwise, and the care that Anderson and Co. have put into the film is apparent in every frame.

Is “Fantastic Mr. Fox” fantastic? Hardly. It’s well worth seeing, though – with or without your own little fox in tow.

Film Reviews by Stuart R. Brynien