Isle of Dogs (2018)

rating: *****

the story: A corrupt politician creates a conspiracy to exile all dogs, but his adopted son mounts a campaign to rescue them.

what it's all about: The exact parallels aren't there, and they don't need to be, but Isle of Dogs might be the first great cinematic response to Trump, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.  Its plot can be seen as a response to Trump's immigration policies.  But regardless of all that, it's a great film, the crowning artistic achievement of Wes Anderson's career. 

Anderson has made a career of creating quirky movies.  He's become increasingly ambitious over the years.  2001's The Royal Tenenbaums was his first widely-acknowledged success, but Anderson took a giant leap forward with his follow-up, 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which can be interpreted as a modern, absurdist's version of Moby-Dick.  2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stylistic herald to Isle of Dogs, saw Anderson begin to break free entirely of conventions, while 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel saw him emerge on a truly grand scale for the first time. 

Isle of Dogs, no matter how you interpret it, even if it's only to be understood as a generic cautionary tale, is a wholly contained accomplishment, a complete vision capable of being enjoyed on multiple levels.  The title itself is a nod and a wink; you can love it if all you are is a dog lover.  This is an era that relishes simple pleasures, after all.  You can relish it for the rich vocal cast, a true embarrassment of riches that continues Grand Budapest Hotel's most simple pleasure, all those small roles filled by well-known actors.  You have Bryan Cranston, still justifiably riding the wave of his breakthrough performance in Breaking Bad, in the lead role.  You have Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber just below him.  You have Bill Murray, you have Jeff Goldblum, you have Scarlett Johansson, you have Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Harvey Keitel.  You even have Fisher Stevens!  You have Courtney B. Vance as narrator! 

You can appreciate it as a boy's quest movie.  You can appreciate it as the rare movie omitting subtitles despite heavy usage of Japanese characters speaking Japanese.  You can appreciate it for subverting the "white savior" concept, despite criticism that it plays into that concept.  Gerwig voices an American schoolgirl who leads a peoples revolution against the corrupt politician, but in the end it isn't her actions that produce the happy ending, but the adopted son's, who is Japanese, and the dogs, all of whom have plenty of reasons not to work together, but do.  And that's as much the message of the movie as anything else, that idea of putting aside differences that seems to have been utterly lost today. 

The music is intrinsic to all this.  Not just the taiko drumming.  Another criticism of the movie is that it takes a white man's poor understanding of Japanese culture and assumes it's being accurate.  The whole point of omitting subtitles is acknowledging the cultural divides that even the dogs represent, speaking English (dogs don't speak English).  It's metaphor, people.  There's nothing intrinsically Japanese about this movie, it's a creative choice, in a movie brilliantly bursting with them.  Very few directors in history have made as many of them, and as many of them as well, as Wes Anderson has in Isle of Dogs.  The constant drum beats, with or without taiko drums, and the anonymous indy-style songs, are incumbent of a talent who has been synthesizing the castoffs of film history for decades, and come up with a masterpiece from them.

I don't know if this is going to remain my favorite movie of 2018, but it's going to be difficult to beat.