WesFest Day 1: Bottle Rocket
For the absolute longest I’ve lived under the impression that the production of Bottle Rocket — director Wes Anderson’s first ever feature film — was bankrolled by MTV. There’s certainly a level of compromise to it, especially beneath the light of his subsequent effort Rushmore: the first true showcase of Anderson’s desire and ability to mine both comedy and drama from the beach sands of the (seemingly) mundane.
Bottle Rocket’s way too exciting for all of that, to even be called (heaven forbid) a Wes Anderson movie. Anthony’s friend Dignan hauls him out from a voluntary psychiatric facility, which he has checked himself into for “exhaustion”. Dignan ropes Anthony into several small-time crime schemes, which he plans with a level of care and dedication that would probably serve him well if he considered an actual job. He has one, but Mr. Henry’s landscaping company is a front for bigger things.
After they rob a bookstore of its cash, and laboriously so, Anthony and Dignan (and getaway driver Bob) speed out of town. They hide out at a motel where Anthony falls for a housekeeper called Inez. The whole movie, if I’m honest, is awash with what sweet nectar colours their interactions; it seems as if the sun’s always setting when Anderson celebrates the odd connection between two people that can’t even speak a common language. Owen Wilson, as Dignan, struts a lot of the stuff that will eventually position him as the best BFF in show-business. Even when he’s yelling orders at incompetent co-conspirators, he’s the most soft-spoken dude in the world.
Wilson helped write the thing, and his partnership with Anderson yields some leafy (and of course familiar) greens. The split-second Bottle Rocket starts to sway you think, Everyone was shooting some kind of heist movie in the Nineties, weren’t they? Everyone from Tarantino to Scorsese to the Coen brothers, I’d dare, was hoisting a middle finger at the law to try and get a revolution going in Hollywood. But only Anderson was parodying the whole thing, making a total mockery of the criminals themselves, and very loudly implying people weren’t above searching for meaning in the weirdest places.
That’s some of the sense I get when Anthony and Dignan sit by a pool and wait for Bob to tell them whether or not they’ve got a car. This trio of dudes repeatedly rescues one another from making straightforward choices, from getting too far in, and from institutionalisation. It’s too late for Dignan, who ultimately has to serve out 24 months in prison — but when he fools Anthony and Bob into believing there’s one last escape in him, that’s the moment you realize how powerful their friendship is. What a unique hope their bond is made of.
I kept looking for Anderson’s visual quirks, and was as delighted as I was mildly disappointed to not find that many. There’s definitely a master plan at the start of a Wes Anderson film, a bit of an obsessive person at the forefront of things, and a map as to how its characters will deliver us into the third act. Once that’s in place, Anderson’s free to expand or undermine the mission at will, by adding both negative and positive deterrents. Once his buffoons have convinced someone, anyone, that life is itself one big caper, the gags literally write themselves.
Not my favourite Wes Anderson movie, not by a long shot. But as a launchpad for the rest of an outstanding career, I’m glad to rediscover things weren’t quite so melancholic once.
