Bottle Rocket (1996)
Director: Wes Anderson

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Bottle Rocket stars two brothers, Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson, features a third in a supporting role, and was directed by Wes Anderson, who co-wrote it with Owen, his pal and roommate from the University of Texas at Austin. A lot of guys have fantasized about making a movie with friends and family; this group’s funny, loose-but-not-disjointed debut feature is like an ideal of what they have in mind.

Owen plays Dignan, a suburban boy with big ideas of breaking his gang of friends, Anthony Adams (Luke) and Bob Mapplethorpe (Robert Musgrave), into a bigger ring of thieves run by the small-time operator Mr. Henry (James Caan). Dignan froths with the spiel of motivational seminar leaders. When Anthony or Bob asks him something, he knows to keep the mood upbeat, prefacing an answer with, "That’s a good question." And after he has a snit and throws all three of them, including himself, out of their own gang, he has to calm down and reformulate the snit: "I apologize--that was poor leadership. . . . But I don’t think the team is gelling." In a spare moment he teaches the sluggish rich-boy Bob how to sell himself. Bob’s resulting pitch for membership in the gang is mixed in spirit if inarguable in substance: "I really want to be part of this team, and I’m the only one with a car."

Bob’s combination of selling points is perfect for these aimless boys. Like everybody now, they know it’s important to present themselves effectively, but only Dignan, whose family isn’t as well off as Anthony’s and Bob’s, and who has mapped out their future for the next fifty years or so in a spiral notebook, has any ideas about what they should do with themselves. He’s trash compacted this future from movies and TV shows and comic books, but it’s the self-promotional style that enables him to put his loony, criminal ideas of adventure over on the other two. They’re not convinced and only half willing, but Anthony especially sees what’s winning about Dignan. It’s just conceivable that he sees more than they can and so in essence they con themselves. Even when Dignan’s initial scheme has fallen through and he and Anthony are stranded at a motel, new ideas to cope with the disaster keep occurring to Dignan, who buzzes around Anthony’s head until Anthony lets himself be stung.

Owen Wilson looks like a blond Dennis Hopper with a busted nose, and has some of Hopper’s declamatory mania. You keep thinking of Wilson as pretty, but then that nose keeps drawing your eyes, as well as his oddly small hands--he can sputter with those hands. Owen also has a sensitive, small mouth under that hypnotic nose; he contrasts neatly with Luke’s open, wide-jawed clown face. You can imagine young girls arguing over which one’s cuter, but they’re both better than pretty boys because they don’t ride on their looks. Owen in particular is always putting the performance across in the same way that Dignan is putting his plans over, though one of the charming things about Dignan is that he needs a positive response from his audience to be able to sustain the mood, dejection always hovering. For a criminal, Dignan is completely unthreatening (he doesn’t get angry, he gets frustrated, like a six-year-old), but Owen makes his posing fetching, even when he’s just walking down an alley and throws an apple core behind his back and misses the garbage can. If Dignan were dangerous we would have seen his type before. But Owen plays him as a sexy doofus and you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Terming Bottle Rocket a slacker movie doesn’t do it justice, because it’s beyond attitudinal slice-of-sociology. Dignan is a real live wire, and all the characters are very consistently drawn. Dignan and Anthony fit a classic American pattern: Owen’s Dignan is Tom Sawyer to his brother’s more sensible, but malleable Huck. At the end of Huckleberry Finn, when the boys conspire to free Jim from his prisoner’s hutch, Tom has to complicate everything according to the romantic European fiction he’s read. (In Twain’s terms Huck and Tom aren’t equivalent to Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, respectively, but to the skeptical Cervantes and the romantic author of Amadis de Gaul.) Twain shows how a trouble-fleeing boy like Huck can get into messes despite his basic sanity, as if something in his cells led him toward mischief. Dignan, however, is in the relative class position of white trash Huck, not middle-class Tom (raised to take part in the community), and so the picture isn’t deeply anti-social the way Huckleberry Finn is. And we’re more drawn to Dignan than to Tom Sawyer because Owen Wilson charges the movie with Dignan’s ludicrous sense of calling. When he puts a strip of white medical tape over the bridge of his nose before going in to rob a bookstore, Bob asks what for, and Dignan answers, "Exactly!" You could read by the gleam in his eye.

All three boys are perilously over twenty-five. When we first see Anthony he’s checking out of a voluntary sanitarium where he’s gone to recover from exhaustion, although he’s never had a job. We later see him with his grade-school-aged sister, and even she has more gravity. Certainly more than Dignan, who, when he hears that the sister called Anthony a failure, counters, "What has she ever accomplished with her life that’s so great, man?" Bob lives in his parents’ showplace home with his bullying older brother Jack (Andrew Wilson), whom the trio call Future Man. Dignan has had and lost a variety of low-level light industrial jobs, including lawn boy for Mr. Henry’s Lawn Wranglers, which he’s convinced is just a front. (Unfortunately he doesn’t know how right he is.) Anyone can see that these boys are heading nowhere. When Dignan shows up riding a sputtering minibike at Bob’s, where Anthony is now living too, Future Man and a friend make fun of him in his yellow jumpsuit; they say he looks like a banana. Anthony, teetering between adolescence and adulthood, goes along with Dignan’s new plan because Future Man’s smugness activates his boyish gallantry. He wills himself to give in to his friend’s fantasies all over again, stipulating that he be issued a jumpsuit just like Dignan’s.

The view we get here of overaged boys’ wrongheaded loyalty to their improvidence is as good as any we’ve had in movies. It’s certainly better than any movie version of Huck Finn. Bottle Rocket doesn’t show these delinquents as psychopathic, but as comically harmless. It’s like Bertrand Blier’s Going Places with the characters’ emotional ages cut by half. When they rob the bookstore Dignan is still young enough to be deferential to the manager who objects to being called "stupid." Meanwhile, Anthony, striding through the rows of bookshelves to check for another clerk, picks up a manual that catches his eye, Job Opportunities in Government 1995, as if he weren’t fully committed to robbery as a career. To Anthony their criminality is prospective, like a summer job you wouldn’t necessarily want for a lifetime. When they get away they stop at a fireworks stand and load up on cherry bombs, Bottle Rockets, and roman candles which they shoot out in front of the car while it’s moving across deserted back highways.

Some people may find themselves disapproving of what these boys are up to because they’re presented as harmless, but a lot of former boys may realize how close their own escapades were to these amoral adventures. I knew a poet who had robbed a bank solo, and an English professor who had emptied the back of a liquor store with his pals, both while in high school. We just never pulled any of our illegal stunts with a sense of vocation like Dignan’s. (Or with Twain’s intransigence to "sivilization" which made him feel that the only thing for boys to do is to light out for the territories rather than stay in the river towns and grow up and get married and beget more moral idiots.)

Anthony and Bob have the advantage of not really sharing Dignan’s commitment to his criminal fantasies. They don’t have the resources to grow up, exactly, but they can stay out of prison. This is one of the least phony things about this very unpretentious movie. In the middle of the story Anthony breaks away from Dignan for a while and works three jobs: delivering papers, parking cars, and coaching a kids’ soccer team. Anthony does have a sexual interest, which also makes him more like Tom than Huck. Anthony’s own kind of salesmanship comes out in his dizzy courtship of Inez (Lumi Cavazos), a Paraguayan housemaid at the motel hideout. Inez barely speaks English so Anthony talks and talks and talks for both of them. He’s learned more from Dignan than we thought, but his efforts seem much more worthwhile, if little more successful. When he resorts to using Rocky (Donny Caicedo), a young immigrant dishwasher, as an interpreter, Inez says she won’t go with Anthony and she doesn’t want him to stay, because he’s "like trash--you know, paper flying by." Anthony looks crushed and repeats, "Trash?" and Rocky tries to reassure him, "It doesn’t sound that bad in Spanish."

Still, in Inez Anthony has something to work toward, whereas Dignan is always chasing mirages that he is, biologically speaking, traveling away from. (That’s one of the aesthetic problems with many criminals, and junkies and alcoholics, too--their faces and bodies lose the bloom that gave their permanent adolescent mentalities some appeal. They end up looking like Satanic yet spent junior high hoods.) And Dignan doesn’t seem to have the crust to become the kind of rotten operator that Mr. Henry turns out to be. Dignan, because his amorality is stuck at the teenage level of fantasy, is innocent. These boys are different from the boys in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets whose criminality meshes too neatly with the semi-criminal trafficking and loan-sharking and protection racketeering of the adult males who, like Charlie’s Uncle, pass for established businessmen. The boys in Bottle Rocket live in the suburbs, havens from urban corruption, where boys have to import criminality to live out their rambunctious impulses. (Dignan and Anthony pull their first heist in Anthony’s parents’ house).

The movie has a split happy/downer ending, but nobody really has got hurt. There’s no dark meat here. And there are no more responsible adults for contrast than in a "Peanuts" cartoon. That is, it seems there has never been anyone they could have been better socialized by. Bottle Rocket presents teenage amorality as teens experience it, including teens who have a hovering sense that it isn’t the best way to do. It’s jokey, without irremediable repercussions--the only prison sentence is for two years. In other words, the movie plays the characters’ innocence for comedy rather than pathos. The fact that there’s scarcely a character on the screen capable of appreciating the satire of the paradoxical range of adolescent male urges doesn’t make it less funny.

Bottle Rocket feels something like the boneless Italian slapstick heist classic of 1958 I Soliti ignoti (released here as Big Deal on Madonna Street, and remade by Louis Malle in 1984 as Crackers). Though James Caan lacks the patched-up elegance that Totò brought to the original as the veteran member of the team, he has a burlesque gusto that seems properly American, and Anderson is startlingly good at mixing a visiting star with his home team of fledgling players. The jokes are superb, both the dialogue, and such nutty things as Dignan’s making an agreed-upon bird-call signal for help to the oblivious Anthony as a Mexican pool hustler drags him out of a bar. Even better is the fact that the picture opens with Dignan insisting that Anthony "escape" from the hospital he’s checking himself out of and ends with Dignan telling Bob and Anthony to stage a prison break when they’re saying goodbye to him on visiting day at the state pen. In this last moment, the audience shares their confusion, wondering if Dignan maybe has the nerve and brains to pull off something really big.

Anderson has said of the way he and Owen developed their latest script:

It comes from a collection of ideas and characters. I had a whole history for this family that we’re writing about--we had all the characters, the setting, little episodes--but we had no story for a long time. It was really a backwards way to do it. But at a certain point, I’m just going with what I feel is automatic. And writing about this subject and this group of characters is what I keep wanting to put my energy into, even though it seems like it would sure be a lot easier if we just cooked up a plot or something. But apparently we don’t work that way.  1  

Surely this way of working is exactly what gives Bottle Rocket and their follow-up feature Rushmore (1998) the unusual feeling in American movies that the situations and characters are recognizable, complete, and yet you feel that anything could happen. The high school play version of Serpico in Rushmore is an insane bubble of an idea, and yet Anderson shows us enough of it (and not too much) to see that it could actually be pulled off. It’s an eccentric creation and yet credibly in character for the teen hero.

Anderson’s interviewer Tod Lippy gets the quality just right when he says that "[o]ne of the great strengths of [Rushmore] is that you don’t need a lot of explanation; you’re compelled from very early on just to accept its logic." 2   Bottle Rocket has something more of a mayfly quality than Rushmore; as Anderson has said, "Rushmore is personal to me in a way, from stuff growing up, but Bottle Rocket is personal because it’s about the stuff that we were doing right then, six months before we were shooting the movie." 3   It’s amazing to hear that Bottle Rocket was rehearsed for two years 4   because despite the texture in the writing the movie has something of the characters’ own looseness, the open-ended sense of becoming, which includes the possibility that the episodes of one’s existence won’t add up to a story.

Anderson has also said that his first two movies "might fall into the category where they can’t find a ’demographic’ for the movie: it doesn’t exist, because it’s a personality type rather than an age group or anything else. There’s no way for the marketing people to break it down...." 5   This is exactly the lack of calculation, the beginning from characters and episodes rather than plot, that makes the Anderson-Wilson movies distinctive.

The director James Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets) served as the team’s mentor in their transition from a short film to Bottle Rocket, and Anderson still thinks of Brooks as the "best first audience" 6   for their work. I can only imagine this is because Anderson and the Wilsons lack what Brooks has too much of: the ability to process off-kilter ideas so that they hit that jackpot demographic. James Brooks folds the edges of comedy back in to the center. Albert Brooks and Cameron Crowe are other original writer-directors drawn into Brooks’s orbit. It must no doubt help truly singular moviemakers like Anderson and the Wilsons to have the sympathetic comments of an insider. Still, God preserve these uncommon moviemakers from breakthroughs like Mother and Jerry Maguire.

The only thing I don’t like in Bottle Rocket is Mr. Henry’s put down of Future Man--a mean, smug older brother out of a sit-com doesn’t require a comeuppance, and certainly not one as crude as his own jokes (saved only by Andrew Wilson’s little mocking laugh as he leaves). I also felt that the camera was usually too close to the actors. An inch away from streaking the lens with the actors’ noses, the shots slice their noggins in mid-forehead. That’s one problem with deriving your culture from TV that the moviemakers don’t seem conscious of. They need D. W. Griffith to uninvent the close-up every now and then, just for variety. (Apparently the entire film was shot using a single lens. 7  )

This also seems to relate to the lack of adults in the picture (even Mr. Henry is an overgrown kid, sending Dignan off to buy him an ice cream cone when he wants to chat alone with Anthony), to the lack of context. So the picture can’t offer anything quite like Anthony Perkins’s performance as the mixed-up overgrown kid led on by Tuesday Weld in Noel Black’s 1968 mini-classic Pretty Poison. Bottle Rocket is more of a joyride. Even when the plot seems to stall after the bookstore robbery, these boys keep it hopping with their intent impracticality. You had to take Perkins’s vulnerability to female manipulation seriously, but in Bottle Rocket nothing is consequential in the way it is for adults. (Dignan’s jealousy of Inez is prepubescent). The harmlessness doesn’t feel innocuous; it puts a twilight glow around these boy heroes who are singular at the same time that they remind us of what makes boys in general such a handful.

1. It comes from: Lippy 110. The finished movie was The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and it isn’t as satisfying as their working method would lead you to expect. J.D. Salinger’s writing about the Glass family, and the writing of New York literary figures of the ’20s and ’30s, served as inspirations, but Anderson and Wilson don’t communicate whatever connection they felt to these brilliant lost New York souls, or to the cultural life of the city (Lippy 110-11). It may turn out that they’re at their best only with material that’s close to them (true of Scorsese, for instance). They seem never to have developed an intuitive feel for the characters or their milieu, which explains why the movie spends so much time vainly trying to establish with notebook detail who all these traumatized people are and how their relationships have got all snarled. Then, either despite or because of this disconnectedness they use the over-"tagged" characters as pretexts for talking about their own fears: The Royal Tenenbaums is immobilized with the horror of not being able to carry precocious success into adulthood. Emotionally it feels dubbed; Anderson and the Wilsons imagined what seems to be for them the scariest pitfall but in such an abortive way that it opened right at their feet. (return to text)
2. great strengths: Lippy 113. (return to text)
3. Rushmore is personal: Lippy 118. (return to text)
4. rehearsed: Lippy 114. (return to text)
5. might fall into: Lippy 118. (return to text)
6. best first audience: Lippy 113. (return to text)
7. single lens: Null. (return to text)