criterion

Bottle Rocket (Director: Wes Anderson): I’ve seen Wes Anderson’s fea­ture debut three or maybe four times by now, but it’s a film I enjoy more and more with each viewing. My first exposure to Anderson was seeing Rushmore at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival and it just knocked me out. When I sought out Bottle Rocket a few months later, I was under­whelmed. It was much more subtle than Rushmore, from the char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion to the art dir­ec­tion, but over the years my estim­a­tion of the film has risen con­sid­er­ably. Criterion’s recent release of the film on DVD gave me another oppor­tunity to eval­uate it, and it was great to see all of the Wes Anderson touches there, even at the begin­ning. Critics of Anderson’s work often point out that he hasn’t really changed much as a dir­ector, and that even with bigger budgets and larger canvases with which to work, he still ends up telling the same stories. Even as a huge fan of his work, I’d have to say that there’s a lot of truth in that cri­ti­cism, espe­cially after watching Bottle Rocket again.

The film begins with Anthony (Luke Wilson) being released from a mental hos­pital where he’d been treated for “exhaus­tion.” His friend Dignan (Owen Wilson) has come to “break him out,” not real­izing that the hos­pital is vol­un­tary, and that Anthony can leave any­time he wants. In the first of many examples, Anthony plays along with the ruse to make his friend feel better. Dignan is a hyper­active guy with big plans. Although he was fired from his land­scaping job with local entre­preneur and small­time hood Mr. Henry (James Caan), he’s eager to impress him and get his old job back. He recruits Anthony into his “gang” along with their rich friend Bob (Robert Musgrave), the only one who owns a car. The plan is to pull off a daring heist to impress Mr. Henry, thus gaining them entry into his crim­inal circle (which is fronted by his land­scaping busi­ness, the Lawn Wranglers).

Their metic­u­lously planned rob­bery, of a book­store(!), goes well enough, but their plan calls for them to go “on the lam” so they drive out to the middle of nowhere to hide out in a motel. This middle sec­tion of the film is par­tic­u­larly charming, as Anthony falls com­pletely head over heels for Inez, a Paraguayan house­keeper at the motel, in spite of the fact that she speaks no English and he can’t speak Spanish. Anthony seems so des­perate to make a con­nec­tion out­side of his social class that this should feel creepy, but thanks to Luke Wilson’s win­ning per­form­ance, it actu­ally man­ages to feel romantic. A family situ­ation res­ults in Bob taking off in the middle of the night with his car, leading to one of the film’s most mem­or­able lines, from Dignan: “Bob’s gone. He stole his car!” The now-carless gang (Anthony and Dignan) try to keep their flight from the law going, but it soon turns sour and they end up returning home sep­ar­ately. Weeks go by, until Dignan turns up to invite Anthony (and more reluct­antly, Bob) into a big score with Mr. Henry’s gang.

I won’t say any­more but I was delighted to dis­cover that the film seems just as fresh as it did the first time I saw it, almost ten years ago now. I love Anderson’s by now trade­mark use of single-minded and eccentric prot­ag­on­ists, as well as his tend­ency to por­tray multi-cultural and multi-generational friend­ships. It’s a joy to see the debut of Owen Wilson, playing one of the more mem­or­able char­ac­ters in recent American cinema, and to see him acting with both of his brothers (older brother Andrew plays Bob’s bul­lying older brother, whom they oddly call “Future Man”.) The film has that feeling of being made by a small group of friends, or in this case, a family.

The only thing I was left won­dering was what happened to Robert Musgrave, whose per­form­ance as Bob was excel­lent. In the “making of” included on the DVD, he appears wistful as he revisits some of the loc­a­tions, some now torn down. I wonder if he ever feels like he was the only one left behind as the other players went on to for­tune and fame, while his career has con­sisted of playing bit parts. Speaking of the “making of”, it was filmed in Spring 2008 and Luke Wilson doesn’t look good at all. Overweight and tired-looking, he really doesn’t come across as the man whom pro­ducer James L. Brooks insisted had to “deliver the romance.” I sin­cerely hope he’s okay.

Other treas­ures on this 2-disc set I’ve yet to explore include a com­mentary track with Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, who wrote the film together, and the ori­ginal 13-minute black and white short, made in 1992, on which the fea­ture was based.

Note: This film always reminds me of another indie film that came out around the same time about a group of hap­less wan­nabe crooks. Palookaville (1995), dir­ected by Alan Taylor, and star­ring Vincent Gallo, William Forsythe and Adam Trese was another enjoy­able and eccentric film about a gang of lov­able losers who really weren’t cut out for the crim­inal life­style. I always wonder about the timing of these two films, and why dir­ector Alan Taylor never went on to any measure of cine­matic suc­cess (though he has had a lot of suc­cess as a tele­vi­sion dir­ector, win­ning an Emmy and working on acclaimed shows such as Mad Men, Lost, The Sopranos and Sex and the City). It’s a good little film and is under­ap­pre­ci­ated, I think. Try Bottle Rocket and Palookaville as a double fea­ture sometime.

Buy Bottle Rocket from Amazon.com

(9/10)

Tagged as: coming-of-age, crime, criterion, road-movie, wesanderson

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