The movie has been adapted by Anderson and Noah Baumbach (writer-director of “The Squid and the Whale’’) from the 1970 kids’ book by Roald Dahl. It jettisons Dahl’s coolly subversive tone, as well as large chunks of plot, to make room for Anderson’s (and Baumbach’s) usual obsessions: feckless parents, hesitant kids, the endless family struggle between the ones who take and the ones who get took.
George Clooney exudes slippery vocal charm as Mr. Fox, a natty former carnivore turned newspaper columnist (!) who tries to solve his midlife crisis with a raid on the three meanest farmers in the land. Meryl Streep plays Mrs. Fox, anxious when things are calm, calm in times of crisis. Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman is their misfit son Ash, glowering with resentment over a father who hogs the spotlight.
Bill Murray provides the voice of a badger attorney, Owen Wilson a rabbity coach. Willem Dafoe? A rat, of course. Hearing these familiar voices issuing from the bristling, bustling animal forms is one of the daft pleasures of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,’’ which at times feels closer to Kenneth Grahame’s beloved “The Wind in the Willows’’ than Dahl. Like Grahame, Anderson doesn’t humanize animals so much as animalize humans, holding on to our joys and doubts, hopes and delusions, the small daily lies we tell each other and ourselves.
So Mr. Fox hits the henhouses and storerooms of farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean - Michael Gambon gives amusingly splenetic voice to the latter, a rawboned country sharpie - because it makes him feel young again, no longer tied to a desk job and a mortgage on a tree. The adventure blows up in his face, obviously, and an early casualty is Fox’s fine red tail, shot off and turned into Bean’s necktie. “Fantastic Mr. Fox’’ goes further, though, and traces the consequences of one creature’s middle-aged folly until it ensnares the entire forest ecosystem and there’s nowhere to dig but down, sideways, and hopefully up.
