Hail, Caesar!

Magic Mike USN

Grade: C +

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Channing Tatum

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

One of the panoply of old Hollywood parodies in Hail, Caesar! is a high society film project directed by venerable studio hand Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). At one point, Laurentz instructs his ill-suited leading man, singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), to begin his lines by expelling “a mirthless chuckle.”

'A mirthless chuckle' is also what most merits the Coen brothers’ homage to 1950s moviemaking. The filmmakers lovingly and gorgeously—thanks to their longtime collaborator, cinematographer  Roger Deakins—skewer everything from sword-and-sandal pictures, to Westerns, to song-and-dance musicals. But the screenplay’s disparate parts and characters never coalesce, so the whole of Hail, Caesar! is strikingly less than the sum of its parts.

The film’s protagonist is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” for Capital Pictures tasked with rescuing starlets from risqué photo shoots, jousting with twin columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton) looking for a scoop, and working damage control over the impending out-of-wedlock pregnancy of DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a fussy, Esther Williams-type aquatic musical star.

A burned-out Mannix is also weighing a lucrative 9-to-5 job offer from an aeronautics corporation. But as his final decision looms, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the bankable star of the titular peplum pic—subtitled The Tale of the Christ, an obvious allusion to Ben-Hur—is kidnapped by a gaggle of Communist screenwriters holed up in an area beach house.

As Mannix frantically tries to find Whitlock before his movie implodes, he must also cope with the sundry calamities of his job, including Laurentz’s complaints about Doyle, whose aw-shucks drawl clashes with an urbane comedy named Merrily We Dance. Mannix visits a soundstage where Channing Tatum channels Gene Kelly in a Navy musical patterned after Anchors Aweigh—the dance routine to a diddy titled “No Dames” is a showstopper. Along the way, we strumble across glorified cameos by Frances McDormand as a grizzled film editor, Jonah Hill as a shadowy notary and Christopher Lambert as a lascivious movie director.

Watching Hail, Caesar! becomes an exercise in star-gazing, as any hope of an engaging, cohesive storyline vanishes sometime between Whitlock’s umpteenth humorless prattle with his blacklisted captors, and the appearance of a Soviet submarine off the coast of Malibu. The Coens’ trademark deadpan absurdism grinds along like an engine trying to find its gear. The whip-smart wit of the directors’ seminal farces is lacking, save for an uproarious scene in which clergy of disparate faiths debate the proper cinematic depiction of Jesus.

The Coens appear torn between lionizing and lampooning the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, a fine line they expertly traversed in Barton Fink. Hail, Caesar! is like Whitlock’s climatic “Speech at the Feet of the Penitent Thief”—rousing at its best, but ultimately bloated and leading nowhere.

The Monuments Men

Does anybody know when Brad Pitt's

supposed to get here?

Grade: C +

Director: George Clooney

Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Originally slated for release in the heart of the December movie awards season, The Monuments Men was suddenly pushed into the February dump zone mere weeks before its scheduled opening. Considering the pedigree of its filmmakers and cast, the change was jarring and foreboding. The good news is that writer, director and star George Clooney’s latest vanity project is not the unadulterated disaster its release date portends. The bad news? The impetus for shifting that release date is patently clear.

Adapted by Clooney and longtime collaborator Grant Heslov from a book by Robert M. Edsel, the film tells the little-known true story of an Allied task force assigned to traverse the European theatre and save millions of pieces of art and other culturally significant items from the Nazis near the end of World War II, especially before their destruction on orders from Adolf Hitler.

Frank Stokes (Clooney), the leader of the squad, recruits a band of past-their-prime art experts. However, instead of an earnest, dramatic rendering of their mission and the motives of their adversaries, the breezy screenplay pairs its protagonists off in order to conjure subplots and kill screentime. So, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin play the ugly American and sophisticated Frenchman. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban carry on a dull Mutt & Jeff routine. And, George Clooney and Brit Hugh Bonneville are full of charm and charisma. Meanwhile, Matt Damon travels to Paris to woo information out of a wary former museum curator, played by Cate Blanchett.

Yes, it’s Ocean’s WWII, except that amid the wise-cracking homage to the homespun Hollywood war pictures of yesteryear, there are deaths and other deadly serious subject matter at hand that lend the film a tonal inconsistency. Clooney and Damon are charming enough, but Murray is virtually neutered. Meanwhile, Blanchett’s role is fatally uneven—one moment she’s aiding the French resistance, the next she’s inexplicably jailed for being a Nazi collaborator; she goes to tremendous lengths (including the offscreen death of her brother) to keep artwork from being removed by the Nazis, yet she tarries when the Americans ask for her help in retrieving it (presumably to chew up even more screentime).

Indeed, there are extended sequences that exist for seemingly no reason other than eating up the nearly two hour running time—other examples include Murray and Balaban’s nocturnal encounter with a young German soldier, and the squad’s slaphappy response after Damon’s character accidently stands on a landmine.

Ultimately, the actual race to retrieve the works of Rembrandt, Rubens and Rodin before the Nazis can torch them or the Ruskies can pilfer for themselves occupies the final act of the film. By then, The Monuments Men has mustered all the heft of a History Channel docudrama. That’s not all bad, especially if it awakens viewers young and old to the importance of classical art. But, a stroll through a gallery might accomplish the same thing and be twice as exciting.

Gravity

I gotta get a better travel agent

Grade: B +

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Starring: George Clooney and Sandra Bullock

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 30 min.

A moment midway through Gravity hints as the transcendent gravitas to which Alfonso Cuarón's film aspires. Seeking shelter inside a space station, a drifting astronaut emerges from a spacesuit as if from a womb. This space baby then slowly curls into a restful fetal position.

Alas, the hope that Gravity would be a cosmic meditation floats away the instant George Clooney’s space-walking king Matt Kowalsky starts reminiscing about the time he spent carousing at Mardi Gras.

Gravity is the story of two stranded space travelers: Kowalsky and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) were part of a shuttle mission to repair the Hubble telescope. Unfortunately, the duo is left adrift after their ship is destroyed thanks to a Russkie mishap that triggers a hurtling field of space debris.

Their only chance at rescue rests in locating a place to crash—no easy task when you're drifting in low Earth orbit. Fortunately, there's the joint U.S.-Russian International Space Station and China's new venture, called Tiangong. The real peril, however, are the obstacles along the journey, from dwindling oxygen and backpack propulsion, to the logistics of grabbing ahold of an orbiter as it whizzes by, to the shrapnel that zips by every 90 minutes.

Cuarón (whose credits include Children of Men and Y Tu Mamá También) presents a breathtaking experience that eagerly embraces pressurized style over largely weightless substance. Clooney’s trademark blitheness is more suited to heist flick called Ocean’s Apollo Thirteen. That leaves Bullock to shoulder the acting payload, and she proves up for the mission. Still, even attempts at character development built around Stone’s prematurely deceased daughter pale in comparison to the more extraordinary predicament at hand.

Gravity’s true star, its most charismatic character, is the digital pallette of its terrestrial backdrop. Whether it’s storm spirals circulating over ocean blue, a continent’s craggy countenance or or the illuminated spider-web of a nighttime metropolis, the ever-changing kaleidoscope is juxtaposed against the celestial peril.

Fittingly, the most hair-raising moments are ones where words don’t matter. The audience feels Stone's helplessness as she spins off into the abyss after the initial shuttle explosion, and later her escalating hypoxia as she tries to reach an oxygenated environment. In space, no one can hear you scream, but the same can't be said for the theater.

In keeping with the airless environment, the director excises out ambient sound, even during explosions, adding to a silent eeriness unfortunately broken by a Steven Price score that should have been jettisoned altogether until the final, climactic descent.

Cuarón tosses in a few knowing allusions along the way. At one point, a Marvin the Martian bobblehead floats across the 3D projection. As the disembodied voice of Mission Control, Ed Harris apparently hasn’t left the post since Apollo 13. And with shorn dark locks and stripped down to skimpy shorts, Bullock at one point resembles conspicuously resembles Alien’s Ellen Ripley.

Parallels have also been posited between Gravity and Ray Bradbury’s short story “Kaleidoscope.” However, one is a story of survival while the other is a paean to mortality. In truth, Cuarón’s film is another entry in the catalogue of films about mankind’s precarious place in the expanse of creation, with a passing nod at the strength of the human spirit. The director handles it all with taut visual aplomb befitting the big screen. But, Gravity gravitates closer to a heady amusement park ride than the oeuvre of Kubrick and Tarkovsky.

The Descendants

Quit ridin' my tailwind!

Grade: B –

Director: Alexander Payne

Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Judy Greer and Robert Forster

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Tone does not necessarily equate tenor. The Hawaii that the characters in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants inhabit is a counterpoint to labored lives led by ordinary denizens of the idyllic archipelago. Lest there be any confusion, this irony is driven home within the first minute of the film by the intrusive voice-over of Matt King (George Clooney), a wealthy attorney who has taken up residence in the hospital room of his comatose wife, Elizabeth, critically injured in a boating accident.

Less obvious, but more germane, is the contrast between Payne’s trademark breeziness and the crippling cynicism at the core of his latest portrait of middle-aged angst. Payne is a gifted writer and filmmaker, one of American cinema’s finest purveyors of films with adults themes that are leavened with humor. His deft adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’ seriocomic 2007 novel makes for an entirely watchable, sometimes poignant film that is already garnering critical praise.

There’s the temptation to view The Descendants as a companion piece to Sideways, Payne’s last film. However, Paul Giamatti’s wine-sipping schlub was a divorcé still desperately pining for true love. In Matt King, Payne – who has personally lived through marriage and divorce since making Sideways – presents a character who enjoys redemption only once his wife is brain-dead and on a ventilator.

The wobbly plot finds Matt, his two daughters, 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), and Alex’s slacker boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) on an island-hopping tour to inform Elizabeth’s friends and family they should bid their goodbyes before her doctors pull the plug. This mission makes a detour, however, once Matt learns that Elizabeth has been cheating on him with a local real estate agent named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard).

This personal drama plays out against the backdrop of a larger family dilemma. Matt – whose grandmother was Hawaiian royalty and grandfather a white missionary – also faces a choice over the future of 25,000 acres of pristine land Kauai, passed down to Matt and his flock of cousins by their native ancestors. Matt is sole trustee of the land but posed to accede to his family’s wishes to cash out to an out-of-state developer.

The closest comparison to The Descendants in Payne’s catalogue is actually About Schmidt, another film about an aging man confronting the loss of his wife and trying to reconcile with an estranged daughter. However, Warren Schmidt’s faults were so discernible and acute that they vindicate his late wife’s infidelity and his daughter’s daffy search for emotional companionship.

On the other hand, Matt remains as unspoiled as his family’s noble acreage, a man without context whose problems are the product of strictly external sources. He remains blameless for Elizabeth’s adultery largely because no explanation is provided beyond her own selfish desires. He describes himself as “a backup parent,” but this label isn’t self-critical so much as Payne’s way to insulate Matt from fault for Alex’s misbehavior and substance abuse and Scottie’s potty mouth. Even the decision to take Elizabeth off life support isn’t a difficult decision forced upon Matt, but instead one dictated by her living will, a choice Payne contorts into her final, selfish act.

Meanwhile, the mute and vegetative Elizabeth is not given any credible advocate to speak on her behalf. Her friends were complicit in her affair, her dementia-suffering mother can’t tell the difference between her daughter and “Queen Elizabeth,” and her father (Robert Forster) is a surly cuss whose harangue against Matt for being a bad husband is undercut the moment he ignorantly refers to Elizabeth as a “faithful wife.”

Throughout, a parade of the aggrieved – from Matt to Alex to Speer’s wife (Judy Greer) – take their respective turn at Elizabeth’s bedside hurling invective at her atrophying corpse. Although their insults are tinged with genuine pain, it’s still a spectacle that witty banter and Hawaiian folk music can’t make less macabre. In The Descendants, the only thing standing in the way of domestic healing – and a family night spent snuggling on the sofa to watch movies and eat ice cream – is a dead materfamilias. Call it the House of Payne.

Neil Morris

The Ides of March

A Pretty Face in the Crowd

The Ides of March
Grade: B -
Starring: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.


Despite the implication of its title, George Clooney's new film, The Ides of March, is only obliquely connected to the mother of all tales of political skulduggery, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It does have a Brutus, however, a 30-year-old political operative named Stephen Myers, the media adviser to the presidential primary campaign of Mike Morris, ultra-liberal governor of Pennsylvania.


Buoyed by populist positions on the environment and America's oil dependency, Morris (played by Clooney) is the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination heading into the crucial Ohio primary in the month of March. Morris is also an avowed atheist, setting the film sometime around the year, I dunno, Not in My Lifetime A.D.


We're constantly told that Stephen (played by the suddenly ubiquitous Ryan Gosling) is a political wunderkind. Still, the only proof provided of his genius is a cynical national service scheme, breakable since those impacted by Morris’ failure to implement the program aren’t old enough to vote. Of course, this ignores the fact that both they and the parents left footing the bill will be able to vote in four years during President Morris’ reelection.


In the midst of the Ohio campaign, Stephen succumbs to the advances of Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), a fetching 20-year-old intern and daughter of the DNC's chairman. It is also around this time that he makes the ludicrously naive mistake of agreeing to a clandestine meeting with Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), the campaign manager for Morris' opponent, a fact Stephen fails to promptly reveal to his boss and mentor, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The series of betrayals and recriminations that follow push the film through its suspenseful paces.


The Ides of March is an adaptation of Beau Willimon's 2008 play Farragut North, loosely based on the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean. Directed by Clooney from a screenplay he wrote with his Good Night, and Good Luck collaborator Grant Heslov, the film is a polished potboiler that produces moments of brilliance—a scene in which Morris receives a call from a deceased character's cellphone during the press conference assembled to announce that person's death is a sequence that would do Hitchcock proud.


Otherwise, Clooney's films still have a tendency to lurch and discount nuance in a trite, often ham-fisted hunt for the big twist or big metaphor. Characters rendezvous at public park benches for top-secret meetings. Air turbulence during a plane flight is conjoined with the onset of trouble in the Morris campaign. At the conclusion of one scene, Clooney holds the image of Stephen's silhouette cast against the backdrop of a giant American flag a beat too long, to the point that any symbolism of the moment starts giving way to parody.


Nevertheless, Clooney's main asset as a director is his power to recruit a crackerjack cast. Hoffman and Giamatti are utterly at ease playing wily but burned-out politicos—I left wanting a movie that focused on them. Wood gives her best performance since The Wrestler, even if Molly is written as a two-note character who morphs from sassy, feckless sexpot into tortured innocent, despite the fact that the events that propel her character had already occurred when she meets Stephen. Meaty if underwritten roles are ably filled by Marisa Tomei, as a hard-bitten New York Times reporter, and Jeffrey Wright, playing an ambitious Southern senator with enough delegates in his back pocket to sway the election. Clooney himself wisely underplays his screen time, which heightens the impact of his bountiful charisma whenever he appears.


Gosling is capable as always, yet his performance is also undercut by the screenplay. Shakespeare's treatment of Julius Ceasar's trusted confidant-turned-assassin is a complex portrait of altruism tinged with naïveté. By contrast, Stephen proves an opportunist of jarring, disjointed absolutes, a loyal idealist who too easily casts aside his principles to keep his seat in the political game and, yes, further the filmmakers' agenda.


The Ides of March is part of a long lineage of behind-the-scenes political dramas, including State of the Union, All the King's Men, The Candidate and especially Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' adaptation of a roman à clef about Bill Clinton's 1992 run for the White House. However, Clooney's movie is intended for interpretation through a more contemporary prism. Three years into the Obama presidency, Clooney, long a poster child for limousine liberalism, makes a movie about a Democratic candidate whose high-minded oratory belies someone who, when pressed, surrenders his ideals for the sake of political expedience and self-preservation. It seems that leveling cynicism toward the current administration has become as fashionable for progressives as when they used to heap indignation onto the previous one. Beware The Ides of March, for scorned liberals, as Marc Antony might say, are all "honourable men."
 
Neil Morris

The American

"The rabbit runs around the tree and goes in the hole..."

Grade: C +

Director: Anton Corbijn

Starring: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Johan Leysen, Paolo Bonacelli, and Thekla Reuten

Running Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In the parlor game of listing contemporary incarnations of the classic actors of yesteryear (e.g., Tom Hanks as Jimmy Stewart), is there any doubt that George Clooney is today’s Cary Grant? Sure, there’s the suave, urbane countenance. But, Grant’s screwball beginnings are not unlike Clooney’s Coen Bros. turns, while Clooney’s darker dramas are akin to Charade and Grant’s many Hitchcock entrées.

The American sounds like the name of a Hitchcock film, and it is one of Clooney’s most brooding films to date. Spanning from snowy Sweden to bustling Rome before finally settling in sleepy Sulmona, Italy (not far from its leading man’s vacation villa), this spy (would-be) thriller rehashes the formula of the solitary hitman carrying out one last job before getting out of the game.

Under the cover-name Jack (George Clooney), the taciturn shadow-dweller is charged by his mysterious minder (Johan Leysen) with constructing a high-powered rifle for an attractive, female assassin, Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). Along the way, this American With No Name befriends a wise old priest named Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) and embarks on an affair with Clara (Violante Placido), a beautiful, routinely nude Prostitute with a Heart of Gold™.

Loosely adapted from British author Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman, erstwhile music video director Anton Corbijn proceeds at a deliberate pace, intentionally evocative of a 1970s European thriller – even the movie poster is stylishly retro. Contrasting the picturesque Italian countryside with the story’s violent overtones, the film hoists evergreen themes of good versus evil and damnation versus redemption. The butterfly tattoo etched between Jack’s shoulder blades suggests his desire for transformation. Corbijn has stated that he looks at the film and its underlying morality tale like a western – at one point, Jack conspicuously takes a moment to watch the opening scene from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West being shown on a television inside a small caffettiera.

However, there is a difference between methodical and languid, and too often The American feels like an exercise in cinematic atmosphere over substance (not unlike Clooney’s The Good German). The script filtered through at least four writers before settling onto the credited keyboard of Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later). The screenplay avoids spoon-feeding the viewer, a device that works tremendously during the taut opening scene. Eventually, however, the narrative begins to feel like a gun that never really fires. Even Jack’s relationship with Clara never reaches emotional clarity. Indeed, the most provocative byplay takes place between Jack and Father Benedetto, who somehow sees into Jack’s soul and wants to save it while hiding his own skeletons in the rectory.

Clooney’s star presence carries the film, and it is worth noting his ongoing, art-imitating-life predilection for playing star-crossed bachelors. When Jack and Mathilde meet to test Jack’s rifle, their rapid-fire tête-à-tête about aiming variances and shot suppression contrasts with the beautiful creek bank setting. Jack catches himself looking longingly at Mathilde, fully aware that they are two-of-a-kind who could never be together, much like Clooney’s Ryan Bingham and Alex in Up in the Air.

Few actors today – Clooney, Hanks, DiCaprio – both possess and exercise the star power needed to make films like The American. But, artistic appreciation does not always produce artistry…or simulacrum of Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock.

Neil Morris

Up in the Air

I've heard of cardboard cutout characters,
but this is ridiculous

Grade: A –

Director: Jason Reitman

Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Maybe Diablo Cody wasn’t really the brains behind Juno after all.

With just three feature films now under his belt, Jason Reitman has ensconced himself as a talented, unique filmmaker and torch-bearer for the seriocomic lineage. For today’s movie audiences, he is the mature antidote to the cut-rate knockoffs of Judd Apatow’s comedies of arrested development. More broadly, Reitman brings to mind such comic past masters as Ernest Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, who were all adept at depicting love in dark and cynical settings.The Reitman formula—as best it can be distilled—consists of quirky romances set within tableaus informed by weighty social topics, whether it is the tobacco industry in Thank You For Smoking, teenage pregnancy in Juno or mass unemployment wrought by corporate downsizing and Cost leadership in his latest, Up in the Air, a film that has already garnered widespread honors and Oscar buzz.

The intelligence of Up in the Air lies in its ironies. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a smooth-talking, veteran “career transition counselor,” a euphemism for being a hired gun paid to handle employee layoffs by corporate bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. Ryan and his company rely upon the misery of others for their own success. In this most impersonal of settings, the jocular Ryan specializes in providing the illusion of a human touch. Walter Kirn, from whose 2001 novel the film is loosely adapted, says in the film’s notes that “Ryan is like a masseur who comes in and sort of rubs your shoulders while rolling your desk chair into the elevator.”

Personally, however, Ryan is an isolato who embraces the nomadic lifestyle that comes with his profession. Living hub-to-hub, he has mastered the nuances of air travel, from choosing the proper luggage to the gauging the fastest check-in line, and navigates terminals with the agility of Baryshnikov. But spiritually, Ryan is as vapid as his spartanly decorated home apartment: He eschews deep personal entanglements or ambitions, his sole dream being to finally reach the rarified air of 10 million frequent flyer miles.

It is no accident, then, that romance falls his way during a layover in a hotel bar with a fellow traveler, Alex (Vera Farmiga)—one thing leads to another after they begin comparing platinum club cards. Their burgeoning relationship leads Ryan to reassess his views on love and companionship. Meanwhile, he also finds his professional life in tumult thanks to a brash neophyte, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who sells Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) on a cost-cutting method of video conferencing that will enable terminations to be handled without Ryan or his coworkers ever having to leave their Omaha, Neb., home office.

Fearing this threat to his airborne existence, Ryan takes Natalie on a cross-country firing expedition in an effort to teach her the folly of her system. At the same time, Ryan struggles to cope with his growing feelings for Alex and the pressure to attend the impending nuptials of his kid sister (Melanie Lynskey). Facing midlife, Ryan starts to wonder if it’s finally time to grow up.

Ryan’s firing sessions are the film’s most tense, affecting scenes. Reitman and screenwriter Sheldon Turner occasionally struggle to balance their populist and satirical impulses by playing too clever with the jobless zeitgeist, a deficit aggravated—not alleviated—by the fact that Reitman fills these scenes with real people who’ve recently lost their jobs. This sort of self-congratulatory casting carries an unsavory aroma similar to the search for destitute extras in Slumdog Millionaire or Joe Wright’s The Soloist. However, the film exonerates itself from the charge of exploitation by giving these extras screen time during the closing credits, where they reveal more information about their situations.

Up in the Air hearkens back to such socially conscious comic masterpieces as Wilder’s The Apartment, Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. Clooney’s retro leading-man charisma is perfect for this material, while the talented Kendrick would feel right at home in a screwball comedy and Farmiga radiates the sophisticated sexuality of classic film noir divas. And, just when you think you’ve got the film’s flight plan figured out, Reitman takes an unexpected detour toward a more open-ended, melancholy denouement that evokes the title of this timeless and timely film.

Neil Morris

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Ocean's Fourteen

Grade: B +

Director: Wes Anderson

Starring the voices of: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Wallace Wolodarsky, and Eric Anderson

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 27 minutes

In many ways, Wes Anderson is the perfect director to adapt a Roald Dahl children’s novel.

It isn’t that Anderson is slavishly faithful to The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yes, the basic premise is still about a chicken-thieving fox trying to outfox – and save his friends and family from – three evil farmers. Indeed, the film opens with the book’s familiar limerick: “Boggis and Bunce and Bean; One fat, one short, one lean; These horrible crooks; So different in looks; Were none the less equally mean.”

But, Anderson also makes room for his recurring film motifs: The comic mix of poignancy and dry humor; the use malapropism and eggcorns; the inclusion of folk and rock music; even the onscreen titles are printed using Futura Bold font. For the voices of the animal characters, the director casts several of his oft-used actors, including Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, and Jason Schwartzman.

Moreover, Anderson scrubs the class-conflict subtext in Dahl’s 1970 original text and, in its place, turns the parable into another tale of personal destiny and family dysfunction, a la The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited. Ultimately, the suitability of Anderson is that he is, in many ways, the modern-day, cinematic counterpart to the eccentric Dahl. If anything, the animated backdrop affords Anderson more freedom for his trademark quirkiness than live-action settings.

Voicing the titular vulpine paterfamilias, George Clooney sounds like the sort of sly fox who could routinely talk himself and friends into and out of trouble. After swearing off a life of crime for a career as a newspaper journalist, Mr. Fox moves his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) and son Ash (Schwartman) out of a hole and into a hardwood tree that happens to overlook Boggis’ chicken farm, Bunce’s duck and goose warehouse, and Bean’s (Michael Gambon) apple cider cellar.

Mr. Fox and his opossum super, Kylie (Wallace Wolodarsky), launch clandestine, nocturnal raids that prompt the farmers’ escalating efforts to kill him. Felicity suffers her husband’s instinctual, dangerous schemes, while Ash struggles to win his father’s affections over his athletic, popular cousin, Kristofferson (Eric Anderson). The lessons to be learned include embracing and being true to one’s self – it is worth noting that the woodland creatures here talk, dress, and act like urban sophisticates except when performing basic functions like eating or arguing, when they assume their natural growling, scarfing traits.

That said, the joys of Fantastic Mr. Fox are far simpler. Juxtaposed nicely with rudimentary stop-motion animation, the dialogue is at once cerebral and sassy. Unlike in some of their previous efforts, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach never venture into pretentiousness; if anything, the closing battle royalé and coda are overly trite and tidy. The truth is that Anderson’s films usually connote a depth they do not actually possess. What’s fantastic about Mr. Fox is that any deeper meaning is only icing on the cake. For once, Wes Anderson just wants you to have a good time.

Neil Morris