Fantastic Mr. Fox

Related Content

• W Bar Happy Hour
  September 21, 2011
• Mamma Mia!
  March 7, 2012
• George Clooney, You Belong at the W Bar
  October 11, 2011
• The Ides of March: Ryan Gosling and George Clooney Make Political Sausage
  October 5, 2011
• George Clooney's Sunny Grief Odyssey Includes Dinner in Wallingford
  November 25, 2011

More About

• Wes Anderson
• Roald Dahl
• Meryl Streep
• Movie Stars
• Celebrity News

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

In this 2009 stop-motion adaptation, Wes Anderson has added an existential layer to the protagonist of Roald Dahl's 1970 children's novel. Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is no longer just a devoted husband and father trying to put food on the table, but instead a gentleman bandit who walks upright and steals not out of necessity but because he's good at it. Having given up his life of crime at the behest of Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), Mr. Fox remains, in his heart, footloose, fancy-free, and looking to make one last score. "Who am I? Why a fox?" he asks, literally stating the film's unanswerable question. "And can a fox ever be happy without a chicken in its teeth?" Where Dahl's book was essentially a survival story, Anderson's film has become a non-conformist fable about that wildness of spirit we are encouraged to tame as we get older and "settle down." Clooney and Streep do some of their best work, rendering an unusually convincing portrait of a marriage, one of many ways in which Anderson's film is—underneath all the carefully affixed, wind-sensitive whiskers and fur—his most deeply human to date. Movie screens at midnight. (PG) SCOTT FOUNDAS
Fri., June 24; Sat., June 25, 2011