Greatest Movie on Blu-Ray "Bottle Rocket"

December 16, 2008
CRITIC’S CHOICE
New DVDs: ‘Bottle Rocket’

By DAVE KEHR
BOTTLE ROCKET

“Bottle Rocket” (1996) begins with a young man being released from a mental hospital and ends with another entering prison. These are harsh notes for Wes Anderson, whose first feature-length film this was. We have become accustomed to a gentler world from Mr. Anderson, one of private schools (“Rushmore,” 1998) and family mansions (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” 2001) rather than state institutions.

But in many ways Mr. Anderson’s manner seems almost fully developed in this first outing, which the Criterion Collection is releasing this week, completing its collection of his work. Most recognizably, there are his old friends the Wilson brothers: that’s Luke, with the lank brown hair, leaving the psychiatric hospital, and Owen, his blond hair chopped into a close military cut, going to the clink. (A third Wilson brother, Andrew, appears as a smirking thug.) They are bound by the filial affection that holds together Mr. Anderson’s entropic world, though they are portraying not brothers but best friends, who have presumably grown up together in the prosperous Texas suburb where the film mostly takes place.

We don’t learn much about the two young men: where they met, or even where they sleep. But the careful, reserved Anthony (Luke Wilson) has developed a protective relationship toward his extravagant and impulsive friend Dignan (Owen Wilson), as one would toward a brilliant young poet not quite at home in the world.

Dignan’s art consists of creating elaborate, long-term plans that have little chance of being carried out. (When he picks up Anthony at the hospital, he hands him a spiral notebook in which he has outlined a 75-year plan that will take care of the rest of their lives, and then some.) He now dreams of being a cagey professional thief, the kind celebrated in films like “Rififi” and “Bob le Flambeur,” with their maps and charts and minutely calibrated timetables. He has apprenticed himself to the mysterious Mr. Henry (James Caan, with a fussy little Steven Seagal ponytail), a criminal mastermind who walks among us, posing as the owner of a landscaping service.

A bungled bookstore robbery sends the boys, along with a friend, Bob (Robert Musgrave), whom no one seems to listen to, into hiding. They seek refuge in an anonymous cinder-block motel dropped in the middle of nowhere. If Dignan is the man of action, Anthony comes into his own in this orderly, geometric environment, where passive dreaminess rules the day. He glimpses a beautiful housemaid, Inez (Lumi Cavazos), and a great love is born — although it is one that needs a third party to translate.

Stylistically, “Bottle Rocket” swings between poles of tension and release, order and chaos. In purely visual terms the film is tightly structured, with a systematic use of color (white for Dignan, bright red for Anthony), frontal compositions anchored by the horizon line, and a self-consciously theatrical sense of space: an open foreground for the action, played against a flat, immobile background (just as the motel rises from the flatlands around it). And there is no more linear plot structure than that of the heist film, in which pleasure lies in the orderly fulfillment of a precise program.

Of course, nothing like that happens, and the boys’ assault on a cold-storage warehouse, complete with brightly colored jumpsuits and malfunctioning walkie-talkies, is a disaster sprung from Dignan’s self-delusion. But Mr. Anderson, in this early film, does something he can’t bring himself to do later: he shows us the realization, in Dignan’s eyes, that he has been living in a dream world, and reality has belatedly arrived to claim its price (with interest). The moment comes when Dignan, being led to his cell, casts a single furtive glimpse back at Anthony, and it remains without parallel in Mr. Anderson’s work.

“Bottle Rocket” is being released both in a standard-definition version and in Blu-ray, part of the first batch of Criterion titles in the new high-definition format. This is a moment that videophiles have been waiting for, and the new discs don’t disappoint.

The Blu-ray of “Bottle Rocket” shows a better color balance and far more vividly rendered textures than Criterion’s standard-definition disc (much less the now ancient Sony edition of “Bottle Rocket” from 1998), and the increased storage capacity of Blu-ray allows for a very generous selection of extras to be included on a single disc. The most intriguing of these (also part of the standard-definition version, though on a separate disc) is the original black-and-white short “Bottle Rocket,” which was screened at Sundance and eventually attracted the attention of the producer James L. Brooks, who shepherded the feature version into existence.

The other Criterion Blu-ray discs being released today are Nicolas Roeg’s ambitious science fiction film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in an upgrade from Criterion’s 2005 release; Wong Kar-wai’s aggressively stylish Hong Kong romance “Chungking Express,” which Criterion released in standard definition just a few weeks ago; and, most boldly, Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller “The Third Man,” which looks magnificent despite being derived from source material much older than Criterion’s other Blu-ray offerings.

As in the case of Warner Home Video’s new Blu-ray edition of “Casablanca,” the black-and-white cinematography of “The Third Man” comes to life in a way that standard-definition discs just can’t manage: the structure and swirl of the grain is now visible, which makes the digital-video transfer seem much more like an actual movie. (Of course, even Blu-ray discs can’t come close to a film print in terms of resolution and contrast.)

Criterion’s deluxe editions have always commanded a higher price than most DVDs (and justifiably so), but the company is not charging a premium for Blu-ray. The suggested retail remains the same for both the standard and high-definition versions: $39.95.