dir Wes Anderson, scrpl Owen Wilson & Wes Anderson, cin Robert Yeoman, ed David Moritz
Anthony: You told, you told your friend Bernice I'm some kind of jet pilot?
Grace: What was I supposed to say, they stuck you in an insane asylum?
Anthony: It wasn't an insane asylum, Grace. I explained to you back then that it was for exhaustion.
Grace: Exhaustion?
Anthony: Yes, exhaustion.
Grace: You haven't worked a day in your life. How could you be exhausted?
Watching Bottle Rocket last night I was really struggling to stay awake, but I must stress that this is no fault of the film itself. Waking up at 6:30 to feed the baby, and then not getting around to watching a movie until nearly midnight, I was running on fumes. This is a shame, because I have a real affection for Wes Anderson’s first film.
I wouldn’t exactly call Wes Anderson’s films surreal. They’re too linear and follow the rules of their own universe too well for that. But they are somewhat fantastical, filled with wonderfully strange characters and stories. Bottle Rocket is alone in this sense, in that the story and the characters are more grounded in our world than in Anderson’s carefully designed universe. I think, perhaps, that this is a more human and warmer film than Anderson’s later works. Which isn’t to criticize the others, but Bottle Rocket is a sweeter, simpler film.
But, like all great auteurs, Anderson’s trademark flourishes are already forming in his first film. His fetish, shared with Stanley Kubrick, for the Futura typeface, is readily apparent. So too is Anderson and Director of Photography Robert Yeoman’s quirky cinematography.
I hadn’t really noticed the composition the last time I’d seen Bottle Rocket, but Anderson’s fondness for tack-sharp, wide angle composition —the entire film was shot with a 27mm lens—and shots filmed at a 90° angle, with perfectly straight horizontal lines, is already prevalent here. And though colors are, perhaps, both bolder and more significant in later works, each of this film’s three acts have a distinctive color theme.
Speaking about color, I screened Bottle Rocket from the recently released Criterion blu-ray disc. I may be misremembering, but the colors all seemed more vibrant and intense. It could be the nature of the new high-definition master, or simply the fault of my memory, but the previous DVD seemed muddier and a bit dull.
Finally, a couple of random observations. Though they’re brothers, Owen and Luke Wilson do not look or sound very much alike and are quite believable as friends. A third brother, Andrew, plays Future Man in the film, and is equally undistinguishable as a blood relative. Owen Wilson’s Dignan has a manner and a lackadaisical cadence to his Texas accent, that greatly remind me of the characters in Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991).