Andy Ryan
Wes Anderson has never forgotten the first screening of his first feature film, the buddy heist comedy Bottle Rocket:
When we finally made it and showed it to an audience, they hated it. I was so shocked, it was a disaster.
The moviegoing public weren’t keen either and it was a box office flop, making half a million dollars from a $5 million dollar budget. Reviews were split and ranged from “a marvelous debut” to “a gruelling, numb black hole” (SF Chronicle). Three decades on, Bottle Rocket has escaped this inauspicious start to find cult status and the Criterion Collection treatment. Martin Scorsese picked it as one of his favourite films of the 1990s. He may have been amused to discover that Wes Anderson and his co-writer, lead actor and university roommate Owen Wilson first wanted to make something Scorsese-like, before realising that their life experiences weren’t on mean streets.
I side with those who see Bottle Rocket as not in Anderson’s top tier but a good film nonetheless. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it doesn’t have the breadth, depth and sheer artistry of the best of what came next. What is surprising is that in his early twenties, Anderson was already setting out many of the ideas that he’s returned to and built on over his career. While it has its flaws, Bottle Rocket isn’t a misfire; rather, it’s a manifesto. In an hour and a half, Anderson shows us the character types that he wants to explore, first signs of a style that would become instantly recognisable as his alone, a heavy dose of the whimsy that has won him both admirers and detractors and an astonishing finale.
Dignan (Owen Wilson), a wannabe criminal mastermind, pulls his friends Anthony (Luke Wilson) and Robert (Robert Musgrave) into his improbable plan to pull off a series of heists. He hopes to eventually work with Mr Henry (James Caan), a landscaper and criminal. They are outsiders of the sort that Anderson would turn to again and again in his work. Dignan’s manic optimism collides constantly with reality and yet he always bounces back. His energy drags along the dreamy depressed drifter Anthony and Robert, a gentle soul who’s bullied by his elder brother (Andrew Wilson). They may be outsiders but, crucially, they aren’t loners. Each of them want to be part of the gang and at the film’s heart, as it so often is for Wes Anderson, is how very different people find a way to rub along together.
They’ve found themselves on the fringes of society rather than having chosen to be there. Dignan proudly shows Anthony his red ring binder notebook with his carefully felt-tipped 25-year plan. For the second five years, goals include “Going Legitimate” and “Make Wise Investments.” He enjoys the thrill of his outlaw dreams but Dignan aims at eventually reaching very conventional respectability. Anthony begins the film in a psychiatric unit to which he’s voluntarily admitted himself for “exhaustion.” He wants to feel better. When an admiring Stacy Sinclair (Jenni Tooley) tells Anthony, “You’re so complicated,” he replies, “I try not to be.” After the group fall apart after the bookshop heist, Anthony puts himself on an exhausting self-improvement regime of running, working multiple jobs and coaching youth soccer. He wants to fit in.
With all three Wilson brothers in Bottle Rocket, we have familiar faces as well as familiar characters. That Dignan and Anthony have a brotherly relationship acted by brothers leaves the viewer having to remind themselves that the characters aren’t siblings. Perhaps that’s the point – old friendships can become family-like, with all the depth, complexity and love that that implies. We’ve got very used to Owen Wilson in Anderson’s films, yet this remains a unique performance. It’s the intensity, an actor throwing everything he has at a role. It may be intensity that you can only find when acting in your first film which you’ve made hand-in-hand with your close friend.
It’s a little disconcerting to watch a Wes Anderson film in what doesn’t quite look like Anderson’s world. There isn’t yet the full commitment to his now trademark symmetry or the carefully chosen color palettes, but, while it’s more naturalistic than the style that he’s become famous for, there are plenty of clues that this was the director who was going to create a look of his own. It’s there in the care taken in the lovingly shot Americana, like the bright yellow seats of the diner with the open road outside or the lingering shot of the stencilled gas station sign. There is even a hint of the intricate storybook dioramas to come. It may not be the Grand Budapest Hotel, yet we see the shimmering motel pool in front of the bright red doors of the box-like motel. The love of font is there in the opening seconds in the bright orange title card with Futura Bold which would soon be in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.
The style isn’t yet fully in place, but there is already the Anderson whimsy in the narrative. It’s there in Bottle Rocket from the start, with Anthony descending from a window on his bedsheets to play along with Dignan’s fantasy of helping him to escape from the psychiatric unit which he’s free to leave at any time. For those who don’t get along with Anderson’s work, it can be scenes like this that they struggle with. I’m a fan with a high tolerance for twee. However, I find Anthony’s courting of the motel maid Inez (Lumi Cavazos) does tip over from romantic to the cloying. Those who write off Wes Anderson on the basis of his whimsy miss his great skill in using that lightness to balance the dark. Bottle Rocket doesn’t have the sombre themes of some of his other work, but here is a director experimenting with how to explore real dilemmas in a playful world. Within just five years, he would be doing so in masterly fashion with the family dysfunction and trauma of The Royal Tenenbaums.
If you were watching Bottle Rocket back in 1996 and wondering about the prospects of this first-time director, it’s the final heist sequence that may have made you wonder if you had just witnessed the arrival of a special talent. In a good film, it is a great few minutes. Having joined up with Mr Henry’s gang, Dignan, Anthony and Robert attempt to rob a cold storage facility. Inevitably it goes wrong. It’s tense, hilarious and moving. Dignan, the fantasist, has come up with a meticulous plan that could have worked, but he is brought down by the failings of his teammates. Robert gets nervous and leave his lookout post. Kumar is a safe cracking expert who can’t crack safes. Robert fires his gun by accident. With the fire alarm ringing, smoke everywhere and their getaway van locked, Dignan puts the others before himself in the moment of heroics that he’s been looking for all along. As the Rolling Stones serenade his hopeless run from the police, going to prison has rarely felt so hopeful.
The rest of Bottle Rocket has given us hints of what was to come from Wes Anderson, but this is the real deal. It’s not just the flawless pacing of the farce or the pitch perfect dialogue. The finale has the trick that Anderson will conjure up many times in the following films: to take sadness cloaked in humour and emerge with something hopeful. Dignan, Anthony and Robert fail completely and yet find exactly what they each needed.
Nearing the end, it’s instructive to go back to where the film began. It started life in 1992 as a 13-minute short film. Screened at Sundance, it impressed enough to get Anderson the funding to expand the idea into a feature film. Watching the short film now is a reminder of the initial spark behind Bottle Rocket. It has the burglary of Anthony’s mum, the buying of the gun and the bookshop heist. That all three of these memorable scenes were then remade for the feature film shows the faith that Anderson kept in his initial vision. Relatively little changes in the portrayal of those repeated scenes. Anderson does choose to ditch the short film’s flashback retelling of the bookshop heist and instead allows the scene to play out in full. It’s better for it, with greater comedy and suspense and an example of a young director deciding that a simpler narrative structure can sometimes be best. While the feature film has time for more conversation, a romance and Mr Henry’s gang, the short film shows that Bottle Rocket began with Anthony and Dignan and their awkward but devoted friendship is its heart.
Bottle rockets are cheap, fizz briefly, and are now widely banned because of their erratic flight paths. Bottle Rocket’s erratic flight path is at the heart of its appeal. Rather than fizz briefly, it’s still dazzling thirty years later and had enough power to launch the career of one of the generation’s most significant directors. “Ain’t it funny how you used to be in the nut house and now I’m in jail?” It still is.
