Twee Magazine

Luke Wilson, Robert Musgrave, and Owen Wilson in "Bottle Rocket."

There is a third Wilson brother, Andrew, who didn't appear in the "Bottle Rocket" short, but had a hand in it. He had some background in film before "Bottle Rocket" was ever made, including creating a campaign spot for Ross Perot's failed presidential run, and gets occasional credit in print for helping produce the short. He's had his own career in film since, often in small roles, although he limned a marvelously wounded, spacy performance as a coach in the 2009 roller derby film "Whip It." Andrew has appeared in a selection of Wes Anderson's films as well, and I'll mention him when he appears, because it's often in surprising and delightful places.

He has a role in the feature-length "Bottle Rocket," and I'll get to that in just a moment, but I wanted to mention Andrew Wilson upfront because he was part of a small gang that, behind the scenes, had some responsibility for the existence of "Bottle Rocket," and for its transition into Wes Anderson's debut feature. There was also L.M. "Kit" Carson, an actor and screenwriter who had at least one terrific, Texas-themed art film under his vest (the screen adaptation of Sam Shepard's "Paris, Texas") and one terrific, Texas-themed cult film (the delirious, campy "Texas Chainsaw Massacre II").

Carson was acting as a sort of film guru to aspiring Texas filmmakers, and Anderson and Owen Wilson made him, in their words, an adoptive father. He took a shine to their "Bottle Rocket" script, suggested they submit the short to Sundance, and used his industry connections to introduce the pair to two people. There was Polly Platt, a film producer and production designer, and her frequent producing partner James L. Brooks, who boasted an extraordinary resume of television programs that he created or cocreated, including "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Taxi," and "The Simpsons." Brooks liked the short enough to produce the feature-length expansion, locating approximately $7 million, setting Anderson and Wilson up in a Hollywood office to work on rewrites, connecting them with industry professionals, and setting up a distribution deal with Columbia.

And that's it, more or less: The path by which two young men in Texas go on to make a film. "Bottle Rocket" seems to exist in an uncertain place in Anderson's oeuvre -- it received ambivalent reviews, didn't do very well in the box office, but has gone on to develop a cult audience. It introduces a number of themes and stylistic elements that would become Anderson's signature, and also introduced a handful of actors that would become part of Anderson's stable. But it is also the least Wes Anderson-y of his films, featuring a casual eccentricity and a meandering storyline, instead of the increasingly formal oddness and theatrical plotting of his later films.

As a result, the film has its own charms, different from Anderson's later work. The movie really belongs to Owen and Luke Wilson, and I honestly don't think either has ever been better. Owen's expanded version of the aspiring Dignan is a nervy, crew-cutted, nakedly neurotic creation with the inchoate ambition and easy hurt feelings of a 10-year-old. He maps out a five-year plan for a criminal career in a school notebook in carefully crabbed handwriting (actually Anderson's; he would continue to do this in later films). When Dignan is humiliated -- and he often is -- he nearly crawls with discomfort, and it's obvious that Luke Wilson supports Dignan's criminal ambitions merely to keep Dignan from feeling bad about himself.

Luke Wilson, in the meanwhile, plays an unambitious 20-something slacker recovering from a recent emotional crackup -- it's never clearly explained, but one gets the sense that Wilson's character, Anthony, just sort of got sick of his middle class life in Dallas. He's aimless but strong-willed, which is a strange combination, one that frequently causes minor but explosive conflicts with Dignan. Anthony also has a habit of distractedly sketching, and his drawings are childlike, an early version of the art of his later character Richie Tenebaum, who had failed to develop as a painter.

The pair have a third friend, Bob Mapplethorpe, played by Robert Musgrave in an expanded version of the dour hipster he played in the short film. Owen Wilson and Anderson fleshed out his role smartly, making Bob a bullied, hangdog sad sack with a mindlessly vicious older brother named, for no clear reason, Futureman and played by Andrew Wilson. Bob lives in an exquisite Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house (the first of many gorgeous sets used by Anderson), abandoned by their jet-setting parents, where Dignan makes plans for low-rent criminal schemes while all the while planning to cut Bob out. Dignan and Andrew rob Andrew's parents house, and then the three of them rob a bookstore, both in service of demonstrating their criminal competence to a shady, deeply weird landscaper/criminal mastermind named Mr. Henry, played by James Caan.

The robberies are terrific, by the way, shot with genuine verve by Anderson. They'ds hould be inconsequential, netting almost no money -- in fact,  the bookstore manager seems mostly irritated to be bothered by these wanna-be criminals. But Dignan dives into them with a mix of incompetence and high-strung lunacy, at one point putting tape on his nose as a sort of makeshift disguise. "Why would you put tape on your nose?" Bob asks, and Dignan grins back at him. "Exactly!" he answers.

After the robberies, there is a long middle section in a mid-century motel in the middle of the desert, during which Anthony develops a crush on a housekeeper named Inez, played by Lumi Cavazos with a series of subtle, sideways, delighted glances. This romance is simultaneously genuinely charming for the audience and profoundly inconvenient for Dignan. It leads to a little blow up, quickly resolved, and then on to the film's final set piece, a robbery of a cold storage business that goes disastrously wrong.

If the film doesn't feel as Anderson-y as later films would, it may be because it only hints at the stylized production design found in his later work. Characters in Anderson films don't so much wear clothes as they do costumes, but the closest we get in this film is an orange jumpsuit Dignan puts on late in the film and then never takes off. The film does offer occasional cutaways to props -- most significantly, in Anthony's room, when he stops to tidy up an orderly row of tin soldier toys. But these cutaways don't have the bravura that they later would, when they often stop the action of the film, and, as a result, have neither the comic nor the iconic weight they later would.

The film features infrequent uses of pop music, but mostly relies on a lovely score by Mark Mothersbaugh, who would go on to be a frequent collaborator with Anderson. But there aren't the Martin Scorsese-inspired scenes set to oldies music that Anderson would later make terrific use of, sometimes over slow motion, but for a climactic chase at the end of "Bottle Rocket" scored to “2000 Man” by the Rolling Stones. Scorsese himself loved this moment in the film, by the way -- his exact quote was "I love the scene .. for me its a transcendent moment.  And transcendent moments are in short supply these days."

It is transcendent. It's the most Wes Anderson-y moment in the film. Right near the end of "Bottle Rocket," we get the clearest look at the sort of filmmaker Anderson would turn into, and it's joyous, and it's absurd, and it's something you want to see more of.