Are You With Us?
Bottle Rocket
By Shalimar Sahota
February 11, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Anthony (Luke Wilson) has just been released from a mental hospital, after voluntarily admitting himself for exhaustion. His friend Dignan (Owen Wilson) is waiting for him and together they ride the bus home. Dignan takes the opportunity to show Anthony a plan he's been working on, where they aim to lead a life of crime and pull off a number of heists; because it's clearly the sane choice. Their friend Bob (Musgrave) also wants to join their gang, so they recruit him as a getaway driver, simply because he's the only person they know that has a car. The three of them manage to rob a bookstore and go on the run, eventually hiding out at a motel, at which point their relationship starts to deteriorate.
Realizing that most audiences have the attention span of a freshman, Anderson doesn't waste any time and just gets right into it, with Dignan and Anthony well established early on. It could have made for a lot more emotional depth if the Wilson brothers actually played brothers on screen. Owen Wilson plays Dignan as incredibly naïve. He doesn't know how to live his life, but clearly craves excitement. It doesn't help that he's a liar, withholds information from his friends, and is neither very smart nor very strong (you almost expect the manager at the bookstore they rob to smack Dignan's face off). Luke Wilson's character Anthony is supposedly already a changed person from the outset, but matures after falling in love with Inez (Cavazos) at the motel they stay at. Even after leaving the motel he writes an incredibly sincere letter to his young sister Grace (Fowler).
The joke appears to be that the film is leading these characters up to a big job they're going to pull off, which turns out to be considerably small scale, especially in comparison to other heist movies, and in the end they can't even do that properly. But then it's not really a heist movie; so although it lacks "edge-of-your-seat" thrills and incontinence-pant-purchasing tension, it does deliver in a final act where one small slip-up by Bob causes a brilliantly unfortunate domino effect.
Made on a budget of $7 million, it opened in February 1996 on just 28 screens, making $124,118 on its opening weekend. A limited release resulted in just $560,000 in the US. It has since become a cult classic and even received some interesting praise from Martin Scorsese, claiming Bottle Rocket to be his seventh best film from the 1990s. Despite the limited release the film did gain some unexpected recognition from MTV, as the film landed Anderson an MTV award for Best New Filmmaker. He has since received some of the best reviews of his career with his animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Like (almost) all of Anderson's films, it became a part of the Criterion Collection. One of the major positives is that the Criterion edition DVD contains the original 13-minute short as one of the extra features. It was also one of the first films Criterion released on Blu-ray.
Bottle Rocket is more about the characters (who could be doing anything really) and the dialogue, which is generally witty ("Bob's gone. He stole his car."), but hardly laugh out loud, though almost all of Dignan's quips regarding Bob are a highlight. That the characters are involved in crime results in a lesson learned amid their misguided adventure. In the end it shows that crime doesn't pay, but it can be fun. One can only hope that it doesn't turn you into a real criminal, the way Scorsese's films do.