The view in retrospective. Could what we now see as a modest movie have been good when it first came out a couple of decades ago? Sure. You can’t really say that a film looks too much like something that hasn’t come out yet. But there’s a part of our attention that floats along with the latest something. Classics are immune because of what they started, but an alright movie that just borrows well for the time being? Not so much.
I’m using very soft language here. My point is that Wes Anderson’s latest (and best) films make the imaginations of other directors look bland in comparison. At this late in the game, if Anderson can not only create his own style but his own world as well, then it’s fair to say that he has become a modern master of his craft. However, even though he has always been an artist to look out for, his work hasn’t quite been consistent. He’s easily at his prime now, but his talent is too easy to take for granted.
So take his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket, which he directed and co-wrote with a then-unknown Owen Wilson. Watch it before and after you see The Grand Budapest Hotel. I’ll wait for you to tell me there’s something off during the “after” watching.
Anderson definitely had some things to learn (and plain make up on his own). Bottle Rocket, a thriller spoof of ordinary pals turning to a life of crime, does a good job with almost being cute. I don’t know if cute counts as funny. Neither of those qualities are really reached when you have rather expository shots of hold-ups at the cash register looped in with moments of brotherly bonding. We don’t really know when to laugh or not.
Luke Wilson stars as Anthony. When we meet him, he’s just gotten out of a mental hospital, which is strange, since Luke plays him in such a way that his best friend, Dignan (Owen Wilson, and yes, brothers), seems more like the oddball. He meets Anthony at the hospital doors, dashing between trees and shrubs for cover from no particular threat. Paranoid? Knows something we don’t? Very strange indeed, but the scene alone works and keeps us asking for more knowledge.
It would work better if there was more explaining. Anderson has never been one to explain, and rightfully so, because the character sizing he would eventually come to invent required to be quirked and clunked around to really fit in. With Bottle Rocket, the method stays clunky. Dignan desperately wants to organize his very own homemade crime spree with Anthony and his neighbor, Bob (Robert Musgrave), and he sticks with it, even when he has no experience in the area. That’s his goal for the entire movie. There’s less flare around this film than Anderson would put on such films as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou to keep us from noticing where the ends don’t connect. Dignan is someone who wants to do something, Anthony is the guy who lets him do it to give us some perspective, and that’s that.
While it’s somewhat amusing how Owen’s character flounders in his misguided confidence, in a world bounded by reality, there’s just some other factors that should be thrown in here along with clueless nature, maybe discomfort, maybe regret. Anderson’s layered thoughts were flowing, but they don’t work well on a tight production and in the ordinary. When it’s big and loud, the director can get to subtle. He can’t really start there.
There’s something lacking in this movie that you wouldn’t notice missing unless you had seen Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel. Those movies had an attitude that drove you to believe, however miscellaneous the events, that their occurrence was the only logical sequence in which they should occur. They said, “Of course.” Bottle Rocket, while intentionally trying to be offbeat, is less confident in trying to seem less confident. It says something more like, “Sure?”
But there’s a sweet side to looking in retrospective. Knowing where Anderson is right now, I watch Bottle Rocket feeling neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. I’m just glad. He made the stepping stone he needed for himself, and I won’t argue with that. It's not a film to be disappointed in, but one to move on from.
