WRB—July 2023 Film Supplement
Well, everyone knows Steve Larkin died at Little Bighorn. What this newsletter presupposes is—maybe he didn’t?
[This month’s Film Supplement is free as a gift to our readers. We hope you enjoy those sections that are usually paywalled, especially Movies across the decades. This month’s is another essay by me, this one looking at the whole of Wes Anderson’s filmography, but in the past we’ve experimented with various formats for the section itself, mostly different kinds of dialogue. What’s under discussion has also taken different shapes. We’ve compared two directors, we’ve compared two old movies, we’ve talked about an old movie in relation to a recent release, we’ve talked about the relationship between novels and film adaptations, and so on. If there’s anything you particularly enjoy, or that you’d like to see, please contact the Managing Editors at washingreview@gmail.com. —Steve]
Links:
Miles Surrey on the legacy of Jurassic Park (1993) and its CGI in The Ringer:
In retrospect, the lunch scene in which Jurassic Park founder John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) asks his guests what they think of his dino-creations also works as an apt metaphor for Hollywood’s CGI-obsessed future. Even though Alan, Ellie, and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) are undeniably awestruck by the experience, they fear that Hammond doesn’t understand the grave implications of what he’s just put out into the world. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” Ian tells Hammond in one of the most quotable lines in the film. Only Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), the ghoulish lawyer representing the park’s investors, is on Hammond’s side during the argument.
Jessica Winter on Elemental (2023) and the decline of Pixar in The New Yorker:
In retrospect, it seems clear that Inside Out was when Pixar’s Silicon Valley brain trust began to peel off from the universe and float into the metaverse, borne aloft by a kind of totalizing cleverness. It was the moment when the studio’s narrative and emotional complexities became convolutions, when it began anthropomorphizing concepts instead of creatures, and when its big cry scenes started to feel like they were scripted by large language models.
Lillian Crawford on the BFI’s first annual Film on Film festival in Little White Lies:
I asked Shackleton what the film’s inclusion in the festival means to him. “For me that’s always been the draw of celluloid: the chance to encounter a film through a material object with a material history, and feel that strange sense of communion with every audience that came before you, and those yet to come,” he says. “Because The Afterlight exists as a single print, the effect is magnified. To see the film is to encounter the same artefact as everyone who’s ever seen it, and everyone who ever will—and to know that your screening is leaving a trace, literal and figurative, that will indelibly mark the experience going forward.”
Shackleton will be demonstrating how he prepares the print for projection in the foyer beforehand, and the festival includes a plethora of workshops and talks on the nature of film. The important thing to remember, according to Baker, is “that there is a very skilled human being or several human beings in the projection booth putting on a show for you. There’s an element of danger to these screenings, like going to the theatre. It will never be the same. It could go wrong. Things do go wrong very often. It is cinema as live event.”
Alex Kong on class conflict in the filmography of Kelly Reichardt in The Nation:
The ruthlessness of such accounting hangs over Reichardt’s vision of contemporary America, which is governed by numbers on the scale of populations, too; as Wendy puts it, she is making her way to Alaska because “they need people.” There are simply not enough decent jobs in too many areas of the United States; the surplus workforce produced by deindustrialization and recurrent financial crises is too large for a strained economy to support. What Reichardt’s contemporary characters are up against, in other words, is nothing less than the imperious indifference of capitalism’s arithmetic. This is why Wendy’s only option to secure a livelihood is to seek new frontiers in Alaska, as a world with no room to accommodate her moves on. Her misfortune is in being in the wrong place at the wrong time, arriving at the party after the spoils of progress have already been reaped. For Reichardt, the cataclysm of history spreads unevenly, ravaging some areas while leaving others untouched, and her characters’ fates are determined largely by whether they can elude its reach.
- on Nicole Holofcener’s portrayals of middle age:
That’s the tougher point that Holofcener is trying to make with You Hurt My Feelings and one that intersects with Enough Said. Part of growth is accepting imperfection in yourself and others, and perhaps even coming to terms with your own mediocrity. We see evidence, for example, that Don is not a great therapist for all of his clients though he does start to learn that a bit more honesty and engagement might be helpful to them. We see evidence, too, that Beth is a good writer but not one who’s going to storm the bestseller chart or land on critics’ best-of lists. Beth and Don don’t have to be great to be happy and they don’t have to offer robust approval to each other (or their son) all the time to support each other properly. Middle age is about compromise, of coming to peace with who you are and the lives you’ve built with other people. It can be about change, too, if you’re open to new possibilities. These films open the curtain on the Second Act.
Charlotte Higgins on her teenage love of Julian Sands’ performance in A Room with a View (1985) in The Guardian:
I remember friends of mine mildly disparaging Sands’s performance as “stiff” at the time. It’s true he has a slightly otherworldly air—appropriate, I would argue, to a young man so at odds with what he finds around him that he draws a huge question mark in his room at the Pensione Bertolini in Florence; who climbs an olive tree to shout to the world of “Truth” and “Beauty” (before the branches crack and he tumbles out of it); who, after that kiss on the hillside, which he rightly understands as momentous, runs back to Florence in a storm, drenched to the skin. Sands’s George is a lost boy who really has burst from another world—that is, another class and politics—into Lucy’s provincial life, which itself, as reflected through the eyes of the refined Cecil Vyse, the man she self-deludingly gets engaged to, is limited and narrow.
Emerson Goo on the connections between Japanese and American cinema hinted at in Yasujiro Ozu’s films in Screen Slate:
According to Hasumi, the Hollywood inflections in Ozu’s early films are not merely the result of his personal preference for American films. An aspiration and curiosity toward Hollywood was systematized into film production at the Kamata studio from its very beginning, and in the wider culture of film exhibition in Japan. The sight gags in I Was Born, But… and Keiji and Ryoichi’s antics owe a great deal to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, whose films would surely have been shown in Japan with a benshi providing not only narration but also explanations of cultural context to help audiences understand them. The Kamata sound stages and backlots where the film was shot did not necessarily imitate American suburbs, but conveyed the domestic ideals associated with them through their patchwork of vacant lots and new houses. Unobstructed by buildings, trolley lines and utility poles feature prominently in outdoor scenes, heralding the developments that will pop up around them. But their geometry also clutters the frame, cutting harsh and unsettling lines across the sky. An ambivalence towards this modern life hides behind the outwardly cheerful scenery.
Bill Ryan with an obituary for Alan Arkin (RIP) in The Bulwark:
This sort of sharp thinking, and the thoughtfully individualistic approach to his roles to which it attests, made Alan Arkin stand out as one of the best and most dependable actors of his generation. His training at Second City, the improv and sketch comedy group out of Chicago, during its early days no doubt helped him develop the tools that allowed him to handle Mamet’s dialogue with such apparent ease. But it didn’t make him funny—he just was funny. And it didn’t make Arkin, who basically looked and sounded like an ordinary guy, jump off the screen with such energy, making the audience pay attention to him, despite a relative absence of flamboyant flourishes. This was the case even when he played a flamboyant character, like the murderous hippie stalking Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967). Arkin could go big, to be sure, but he had such a tight grip on that side of his talent that he could surprise you by underplaying certain moments.
Reviews:
Ed Gonzalez reviews the new Criterion box set of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini 101, in Slant:
With each new film, Pasolini ventured deeper into a mythic past, tortured places inhabited by bawdy women and beautiful men. And the further back he went, the more tightly, and passionately, he entwined the corporeal and the spiritual. That’s evident in everything from the films in his Trilogy of Life to 1967’s Oedipus Rex and 1969’s Medea. These works are occasionally dissonant for the way they threw the complexity of human psychology to the wind. But that was by design. Indeed, wherever Pasolini ventured, his juxtaposing of crude impulse with inescapable destiny reveals a profound sensitivity toward humanity.
N.B.:
What’s in Wes Anderson’s office? A blurry Polaroid of Gene Hackman, among other things.
On Sanjay Sami, Wes Anderson’s key grip: “The thing I love is, with Sanjay, we essentially are using the same equipment that we might have used on a movie 75 years ago,” Anderson said, “but we’re arranging it in a way that it hasn’t been arranged before.”
James Cameron opines on the Titan sub implosion.
A profile of Greta Gerwig. [I read that her parents were UUs and all of a sudden everything made sense. —Steve] [This is going to go great. —Chris]
TNR has assembled a list of the 100 most significant political films, whatever that means. [It means I’m going to make you watch La Chinoise (1967) soon. —Chris]
50% off anything from the Criterion Collection at Barnes & Noble until July 28, both online and in stores. [Oh no. —Chris]
Currently in theaters:
[It has been suggested to me that I should make it clearer which movies I would recommend in this section. To make that happen the reviews will now be arranged in approximate order of how good I think the movies are, with the section Steve’s larks being what I think is worth seeing in theaters. —Steve]
Steve’s larks:
Past Lives (dir. Celine Song, June 2):
The best movie of the year so far, and it isn’t particularly close. The greatest advantage this art form has over others is close-ups—where else can you watch a person’s face in such detail? [We get it, I made you watch 20 Bergman films last month. —Chris] Song takes full advantage of the performances of Greta Lee as Nora Young and Teo Yoo as Hae Sung, two childhood sweethearts in South Korea who had their friendship interrupted when Nora’s family immigrated to Canada, to reveal the depth of the emotions underlying what is otherwise a meditative and understated movie. That this is Celine Song’s debut as a director is shocking—it is so self-assured, and there is no sign that she is relying on her past experience in theater. (She wrote it as well, and her script has a kind of theatrical understanding that the words should be able to carry it on their own to it.) The visual language is not that of a filmed play. It revels in the sights of New York City, where the majority of the movie is set. [We get it, I made you watch 20 Woody Allen films last month. —Chris]
It’s a movie reminiscent of Éric Rohmer, and not just in the setup, where a thirty-something Nora, now established in New York City with an American husband, Arthur, is forced to choose between him and Hae Sung, who has traveled to New York to see her after the failure of his most recent relationship. This is reminiscent of any of Six Moral Tales with the sexes swapped, but like My Night at Maud’s (1969) the two people the main character is choosing between become representative of and associated with different ideas, different ways of life. Arthur represents the life Nora has created for herself in America—they rushed their wedding to get her a green card—and so lacks a full understanding of her as a Korean. And he admits as much when he tells her that he was motivated to start learning Korean out of a desire to understand the language in which she talks in her sleep. The reappearance of Hae Sung, who is, as Nora tells Arthur, not “Korean-American” but “Korean-Korean”, forces her to confront that aspect of her identity and her alienation from it.
Also like Maud’s is the movie’s understanding of the way people say things as a defense mechanism, where pronouncements of ideas and values are made to reassure the self more than to persuade other people. In Maud’s, the rambling of Jean-Louis about God, Catholicism, and Pascal is, despite the great sincerity with which he states it, rather transparent and unserious self-justification. Past Lives comes at the issue from the other side. Nora explains the Korean concept of in-yun, layers of encounter that build up between people as they encounter each other, however briefly, in past lives, to Arthur when they first meet at a writers’ retreat. Lovers, so it is said, have eight thousand layers of in-yun between them from past lives. Arthur asks if she believes it, and Nora says, “That’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone”.
And maybe it is, but Hae Sung talks about it far more sincerely than that. The dynamic is reversed: the idea at first espoused flippantly ends up being able to make a significant claim on Nora’s life, one strengthened by its nature as a particularly Korean idea. And her final decision, as in Rohmer at his best, is a choice about how to live.
Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson, June 16):
See Movies across the decades for more on this and other movies directed by Wes Anderson.
The rest:
No Hard Feelings (dir. Gene Stupnitsky, June 23):
Good to know that Hollywood still has the potential to make sex comedies, and good to know that we have a star in Jennifer Lawrence who can sell them. This is very funny as a sex comedy and surprisingly touching, considering that it is a very funny sex comedy, as a depiction of a relationship between a lost teen boy and a lost early-30s woman. The ending is far too cute about this—it doesn’t ring true at all and goes much more smoothly than it would in real life—but a sex comedy can be granted some allowances there.
It cannot be granted allowances for its ham-handed attempts to explore areas having nothing to do with sex comedy, such as helicopter parents, what sorts of kids are going to Princeton, and the way that an influx of money to places like the Hamptons is driving up property values and driving out the locals. It feels as if someone decided that if they were going to release a sex comedy in 2023 it had to at least pretend to be Important and address Important Subjects. It’s a sex comedy. Sex and relationships are important subjects. If you want to bring real estate into it, modernize Jane Austen.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (dir. James Mangold, June 30):
This movie’s most annoying and insistent flaw is one of the besetting sins of all modern revivals of beloved franchises: repeated call-backs to the original thing. In this case, the endless references to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) repeatedly present the viewer with this question: “Why am I watching this OK movie when I could be watching Raiders, the best movie?” [I did like the bit with the eels, since it took a spark of cleverness absent in the others. —Steve] Worst of all on this score is the ending. If the movie had ended about three minutes earlier it would have been a good ending. Instead it ends with its most infuriating Raiders references. And the CGI de-aging of Harrison Ford in flashback scenes, which never looks any better than “fine” and doesn’t make him sound young, poses a similar question.
As a thrill ride it’s serviceable. It drags in the middle, it’s twenty minutes too long, the two best action sequences (and maybe the two best-looking—so much of this movie looks flat-out bad, and a lot of the action is weightless) are the first two, and it lacks the feeling of incredible movement that this series relies on. If nothing else, things are kept lively enough by a plot that is completely off the walls (the trailer shows Jones riding a horse through the New York City subway tunnels, and this is significantly less bizarre than the movie’s second half). But Harrison Ford, who probably needed to do very little acting to convey “I’m an old guy who is tired of all of this and wants to go home”, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Jones’s goddaughter are fun to watch.
Waller-Bridge’s character, Helena Shaw, seems to have been inspired by the interesting idea present in Raiders that Jones and Belloq have a lot in common, which leads to wondering what Indiana Jones types would be if dropped in various situations. And Shaw is mostly convincing as an attempt to imagine Indiana Jones if he had emerged from her circumstances.
The Nazis are handled less well. They’re there, it feels like, because this is an Indiana Jones movie. The idea that the villain, based on Wernher von Braun, wants to use the titular device to undo Hitler’s mistakes is a poor attempt to have something interesting to say about Nazis or about the American space program. [Tom Lehrer beat you to this, guys. —Steve] Once again the desire to ape Raiders, which did have something to say about Nazis, works to the movie’s detriment. The text of Raiders has the Jewish God intervening to destroy Nazis. Raiders as an object has Steven Spielberg, Jewish God of making enduring blockbusters that shape pop culture, defining them as the guys who get their faces melted off. As Tarantino has it, “this is the face of Jewish vengeance”. But that can’t be replicated, and it’s silly to try.
Elemental (dir. Peter Sohn, June 16):
Pixar’s coasting. The settings look great. The characters really don’t. And in what world is “West Side Story for five-year-olds” not going to be something stripped of all emotional power?
Critical notes:
Since the year is half over, here’s Steve’s top ten list for the first half:
10. Polite Society
What if Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) were a good movie?
9. You Hurt My Feelings
Artists are so needy.
8. Paint
Owen Wilson stars in a movie Wes Anderson would be proud to have made.
7. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
Being eleven years old sucks because you can’t see how funny and poignant it all is.
6. John Wick: Chapter 4
This franchise continues to set the bar for action movies.
5. Suzume
Few bildungsromans are this desperately melancholy about people, let alone places.
4. Asteroid City
Wes Anderson is back and maybe better than ever.
3. Infinity Pool
The best of the recent “rich people are behaving like monsters” movies.
2. BlackBerry
The best of the recent “guys are making business deals” movies.
1. Past Lives
This is why this art form still matters.
[That two-thirds of the podium is Canadian is unbelievably embarrassing for the United States of America. I now believe every claim about its decadence and decline. Where does it end? New Zealand? The Falkland Islands? Hollywood, get it together.
In recognition of Canada’s achievement, here’s the animated short Blackfly (1991) from its National Film Board, accompanying Wade Hemsworth’s folk song of the same title about the number and ferocity of the blackflies of north Ontar-i-o. I particularly like the chorus line and water ballet with blackflies. —Steve]
Barbie (2023) is apparently only the first step in Mattel having movies made based on its products.
[Here are some lines from the piece: “Daniel Kaluuya, for example, has agreed to produce a feature about Barney, the purple dinosaur. Thirteen more films have been publicly announced, including movies about He-Man and Polly Pocket; forty-five are in development.” Here are some more: “Eva Longoria recently directed the Cheetos dramedy Flamin’ Hot; Jerry Seinfeld is at work on Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.” The number of dollars available for movie making is finite. So is every human life. Every dollar and every moment spent on Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story is a dollar and a moment not spent on something else, something no doubt better or of more value.
Celine Song made the movie of the year so far, as I mentioned above, and it’s the first movie she’s directed. I hope she gets to write and direct plenty more, and I hope other talented people can do the same. If they can’t because Hollywood is unwilling to or, worse, has forgotten how to market movies for adults, or because all the money was spent on the latest terrible-looking blockbuster, the money and effort was stolen from better artists who could have done something worthwhile with it. My congratulations to Dulness on her imminent triumph. —Steve]
“Wes Anderson backlash stems from the fact that his style is discernible to people who cannot normally recognize style. It's a different head of the same hydra that gives us ‘Scorsese only makes gangster movies.’ In that case no capacity to recognize style or even theme means the only thing left to criticize is content”
Things have changed, largely because of Lucas and Spielberg. The films they fought to see recognized as great works of art now not merely have become canon but have aged into snootiness; whether or not it inspired the terrific truck chase in Raiders, Stagecoach is generally the purview of film buffs, now a tweedier demographic than the kind of nerd who dreamed up Indiana Jones. Same with Lawrence of Arabia, Lost Horizon, and the rest. Instead, everything looks like a Spielberg movie, even when it’s not. Our world is now filled with Apple products that look like set dressing from Minority Report, and moviemakers like J.J. Abrams have constructed entire visual styles out of E.T. The most popular show on the most popular streaming service is a travesty of Spielberg’s work in every sense of the word. We have more, but we draw on far, far less.
And
addressing the same:Rather than move into the future and support some new sandboxes, the Hollywood of today mostly maniacally rehashes what it’s already done. It envisions a future where what’s on offer is mostly what we’ve already had before.
In this I hear echoes of thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—two men who fled the Nazis, incidentally—who proposed the culture industry was giving people the illusion of choice, but only the freedom to choose what they said was on offer. You can have infinite variations on the same thing.
[Fritz Lang in Contempt (1963): “Some years ago—some horrible years ago—the Nazis used to take out a pistol instead of a checkbook.” —Chris]
Netflix recently canceled its vast DVD-by-mail reserve, leaving millions of their customers without access to movies no one streams. As with the music industry, which lost its CD business to digital distribution, physical media in the form of DVDs and Blu-rays faded out with the rise of streaming. Given how often a film you thought you paid for in your platform subscription simply disappears, the importance of boutique Blu-ray labels like Arrow, Flicker Alley, Kino Lorber, the British Film Institute, Eureka, Second Sight, and Criterion has only grown. They curate lines of obscure movies or neglected filmmakers with cleaned-up prints, deluxe cases, audio commentaries, and extras. The appeal is easy to understand: With physical media, once you buy it, you own it. You don’t get an e-mail that says, “Hurry and watch your Blu-rays because half of them are leaving your bookshelf at the end of the month.”
Paul McCartney: “There’s a lot of really rubbish films out these days. Some good ones. Dune’s great. I like Dune!”
Cormac McCarthy: “Days of Heaven is an awfully good movie.” [True. —Steve]
Movies across the decades:
Wes Anderson:
Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch (2021), Asteroid City (2023)
[Spoilers for Asteroid City ahead. —Steve]
The most common criticisms of Wes Anderson are at best oversimplified and at worst wrong, being as they are about the existence of his distinct, easily identifiable, and easily parodied style. An instinctual aversion to twee is understandable—it’s not a style that frequently manages to play a role in good art—but the problem with Anderson’s style cannot simply be that it exists. Thinking that a style makes art bad merely by being its style is gross philistinism, unwilling to engage with what the purpose of style is and its interactions with the rest of an artistic work.
Wes Anderson is now defended from his laziest and worst critics, but it is still the case that, even though he is a great director, many of his movies are not very good—and it is still the case that his style is an important reason why. But this is not inherent to his style, since Asteroid City is both his most “Wes Anderson” movie and a complete triumph. Anderson has learned from his repeated handling of the subjects he favors, both in his successes and his failures, and through pushing his style as far as it will go is finally able to say what he wants to say and say it clearly without being imprisoned by that style.
The question of what Asteroid City does well is inseparable from the same question about the rest of his filmography. There have been, more or less, three phases to Anderson’s work before Asteroid City, distinguished by an increasing stylization and by different central concerns within his plots. The first, consisting of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, focuses on young men trying to become something as they make their way in the world. The second, running from The Royal Tenenbaums to Fantastic Mr. Fox, centers on dysfunctional family relationships. And the third, running from Moonrise Kingdom to The French Dispatch, concerns individuals or small groups resisting authority. This is of course an oversimplification, but these are the three great themes of Anderson’s career. And Asteroid City unites them through Anderson’s style. To see how, it is worth looking at how that style has worked, or not worked, for him throughout his career.
A Portrait of the Auteur as a Young Man
Bottle Rocket and Rushmore are not “Wes Anderson movies”—it is worth acknowledging in as many words that he was not born with his style but developed it—but they do have a style that minimizes some of their flaws. Bottle Rocket is not quite successful as a hangout movie: Anderson and Owen Wilson are not quite able to manage natural dialogue. It’s not a coincidence that the best part of the movie, the relationship between Anthony and Inez, is impeded by a language barrier that allows it to be conducted either without words or through stilted translation by a third party. And this is a problem that Anderson mostly solved for the rest of his career through his style—the mannerism of his later movies solves some of it, and writing characters who are eccentric or not well-adjusted takes care of the rest. An inability to write natural dialogue is not a problem when there is no expectation of natural dialogue.
Rushmore is a tentative step into the world of Wes Anderson style, mostly through the character of Max Fischer, the first of many weird smart kids in Anderson’s work. Anderson is mostly very good with kids and their relationship to the adult world, especially as it manifests in a desire to be taken seriously as an equal. On that front Rushmore is his peak, showing clearly why the sadnesses that come with long experience in the world lead Herman Blume and Rosemary Cross to see a kind of escape through friendship with Max, even as they cannot treat him as an adult.
But Rushmore is too much like a movie that a 30-year-old Max Fischer would make, or, more accurately, a 30-year-old with a similar personality to his who wishes his high school career produced some more exciting stories. By all accounts, Max’s high school career has important similarities with that of Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the movie, and much of it was shot at the high school Anderson went to. The charge sticks for a reason, but it avoids being a pleasant and useless fantasy because the fantasy is so over the top. Instead, it heightens the emotions the characters feel and makes them more transparent.
That Anderson never made a movie like these two again suggests that he knew that personal material of this kind is a very limited source of inspiration for most artists, and one likely to lead to the worst sort of self-indulgence. Whether his solution was successful is a different thing.
Technical Exercises
The Royal Tenenbaums is a tour de force as a technical exercise. Constructing a plot in which such a large number of characters are constantly dealing with each other and having them all end up exactly where they need to is an impressive feat. But there is a coldness to it, stemming from the fact that the eccentricity of the characters does not make the problems of their relationships to each other any more clear or show them more convincingly on any level beyond the fact that anyone acting like they do is suffering. Despite this general bloodlessness, there are some moving moments generally made so by Anderson’s style. The most moving, Margot getting off the bus, is also the most Andersonian in its composition, and in the ’60s needle drop, and in the way the camera moves with her as she walks forward towards it, and even in the background details, like the men in white sailor suits walking behind Richie. The same goes for the “Needle in the Hay” sequence. The remove from the emotionality created by the style heightens it, as does the shift from working with personal material to impersonal. And Anderson’s willingness to leave so much unsaid, to instead produce striking images and let the music speak for them, is well suited to family drama, where so much is always left unsaid.
Unfortunately, he immediately forgot all of this. Or, perhaps, Owen Wilson was the one who knew, and he did not co-write anything after Tenenbaums. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited are not very good, in large part because the style is toned down and no longer used to heighten the emotion of the family trouble at the center of each. Anderson shows in Aquatic that Zissou’s submarine is very cool and in Darjeeling that there are many bright colors in India. [All true! —Chris] The scripts are weak, too—Darjeeling ends with characters very literally throwing away their baggage. But when Anderson’s style comes through most it can still salvage these movies, and the scenes where the style is strongest (the stop-motion shark in Aquatic, the “Play with Fire” sequence in Darjeeling) tend to be the strongest parts of the movies.
Roald Dahl’s children’s novel Fantastic Mr. Fox was a bizarre choice of material for Anderson to adapt into a movie of the same name. He does not make it better by adding an insipid subplot about Mr. Fox’s unconventional son, who resents his cousin for being better at sports and more well-liked. What is best about the movie has little to do with Anderson. George Clooney delivers a store-brand version of his performance as Ulysses McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) with the charm intact, and Dahl’s villains are at least present. (Anderson doesn’t have it in him to revel in their villany, which no doubt makes him a nicer person to be around than Dahl was, but it also means he should leave adapting Dahl to other people.) And whatever style the stop-motion has is ruined by the fact that the animals’ fur is constantly moving in every scene, as if it were very windy. Maybe it was a stylistic choice, in which case it’s impossible to understand. Or maybe it was the result of not taking the time to solve the problem, in which case it’s inexcusable.
For Anderson, the only way out is through, and he got out of this rut through ever more style.
The Past is a Foreign Country
To intensify the style, his movies become more like jewel boxes. The costuming becomes fully part of the style, as do labels, signs, and anything else in the world of the movies with words on it. Perhaps most importantly, nothing is set in the present, not even the present as filtered through Anderson’s sensibilities. The primary subject also moves away from family drama to a more nebulous category, different forms of resistance to authority. The one stop-motion animation film from this period, Isle of Dogs, is set in a fantastic Japan, and the others are set between the 1930s and 1970s. The jewel box aesthetic is not just suitable to the past but reveals a truth about it and a knowledge of how it is understood. A person’s experiences in time shape their understanding of that time. But, Anderson suggests, an understanding of a time not personally experienced must be a collage and a pastiche, as constructed as any of his movies. The world of The Grand Budapest Hotel is not a creation of Anderson. It is lifted from Stefan Zweig. In a similar way, the ’50s of Asteroid City, early ’60s of Moonrise Kingdom, and late ’60s/early ’70s of The French Dispatch are deeply indebted to common stereotypes of those eras. These are not Anderson’s jewel boxes—instead, his jewel boxes reveal that these stereotypes are also jewel boxes. But having something interesting to say about the construction of the past is no guarantee of a good movie.
Despite these refinements in his style, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel are his two worst movies. In Moonrise Kingdom the style forces the depiction of adolescent sexuality to seem prurient because it is impossible to forget that Anderson has carefully decided every aspect of what is shown on screen and is deciding what the characters do. Anderson’s style makes the characters into puppets, where “why is Wes Anderson making the character do this?” is a more operative question for understanding their behavior than “what in the character prompts them to do this?” That the adolescent sexuality is so arch (nude watercolors? Really?) that it loses any sense of realism makes the problem worse.
At one point in Moonrise Kingdom, a scoutmaster is so concerned with evacuating in proper style that he almost gets himself killed by not evacuating in time. Anderson suffers from an artistic version of this problem. He cannot show the wistfulness of the end of childhood because his dialogue makes the children seem like adults, and so the central couple’s attempt, aided by other children, to avoid from and escape the authority of the adult world devolves into wacky hijinks for their own sake. He cannot show the innocence in kids’ first fumbling around with each other because his style makes it prurient. The underlying story has a tenderness to it, an almost luminous quality, but Anderson undermines it at every turn.
The Grand Budapest Hotel suffers from a similar problem. It is a movie that wants to show fascism destroying the panache and, well, style inherent to the civilization it snuffed out. Ralph Fiennes can only embody so much of that on his own, and he is not helped by much of his dialogue sounding very modern, breaking the illusion created by the style. But the style is everywhere. The titular hotel in the days before fascism is in his style. So are the fascists—their violence is stylized and done with plenty of flair. Even the hotel after the Second World War is, when it sits mostly abandoned in some Eastern Bloc country. There is a fundamental incoherence to the movie, which wants to argue that there is a kind of style, even a correct way to be and act in order to be a civilized person, that is easily lost and difficult to recover. But the most obvious style in the movie is not this style but Anderson’s, and Anderson can, and does, shoot an empty relic of better days in the exact same style he shoots the hotel in its glory days, which contradicts the intended message. [What, yet more conservative criticisms of facism? —Chris] [Say what you will about Jünger, I don’t think he had a shrine to Blessed Karl. —Steve]
Perhaps Anderson was aware of this flaw. Whether he was or not, his next movie, Isle of Dogs, returns to anti-fascist messaging, fixing the deficiencies of The Grand Budapest Hotel by only showing the leader of the fascist types at rallies, which are by their nature stylized. The underlings are portrayed in ways familiar from the villains of children’s movies, such as the evil counselor and the robots tasked with killing the heroes, and in that context the stylistic logic makes sense.
The Grand Budapest Hotel also introduces to Anderson’s work an explicit concern with other forms of art. The movie shares its title with a book in the movie, which is based on a conversation that the author had in the ’60s with the owner of the titular hotel about events that happened to the owner in the ’30s. Anderson just lets this sit there—the different frames are necessary to get to the different points in time to show how things have changed.
The French Dispatch takes more interest in the artistic process—in its case, the process of writing pieces for a pastiche of The New Yorker. The second segment, in which the writer wrestles with the concept of journalistic objectivity and the extent to which she should involve herself in the story, is a more in-depth exploration by Anderson of the production of art than anything in The Grand Budapest Hotel. It is also probably a question that his own art confronts him with constantly. It is possible that his work more or less creates itself—he invents his bizarre and broken characters, he selects a variation on his style, and he puts the characters in it. At this point, it is possible that everything happens on its own, like a piece of machinery that he needs only to set in motion. But it is also possible that he is a god who forces his creations to make the decisions he wants throughout, like puppets. Anderson seems torn between the two—he tends to be better the more freedom his characters seem to have—and so the question works its way into his art through the most interesting of the segments of The French Dispatch.
At this point Anderson had been working in his post-Rushmore mode for eight movies and produced more misses than hits. Little wonder he decided to explain himself.
Dear Alien
And Asteroid City is an explanation. There is no other reason for it to lift so much out of previous Anderson movies. The structure, where the movie is in theory a TV show about the making of a play with the same title as the movie (set in a town with the same name as both) that also shows the play itself, is a more sophisticated version of the more decorative frames of The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch. But smaller pieces have parallels as well. The interest in organizing a theatrical performance is in Rushmore, and Jason Schwartzman’s character (in the TV show) is reminiscent of his performance as Max Fischer. The interest in a relationship between young siblings and a grandfather they barely know is in The Royal Tenenbaums. The relationship between adolescents is in Moonrise Kingdom. The quarantine is in Isle of Dogs. The stop-motion alien serves a similar purpose to the stop-motion shark in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. This is by no means an exhaustive list. And the in-movie play combines the three central plot elements of Anderson’s career. Woodrow is a boy trying to make his way in the world, Augie is trying and mostly not succeeding at navigating his relationships with his children and his father-in-law, and the quarantine imposed on Asteroid City inspires attempts to subvert it.
From all this typically Andersonian material, brought together in one place, Anderson creates something new through the explicit acknowledgement that the play Asteroid City is a created work of art. It shows the process by which the playwright wrote the play and the relationship that the director and actors have to the work they are performing. Applying what is here to Anderson’s attitudes towards his work is not a stretch. The play Asteroid City is a very Andersonian play, after all. Yes, there is no point in looking for him specifically in the director, or the playwright, or the actors, or any of the other people on set. Nothing is that simple. He is in this movie a great artist. He is everywhere in his work and nowhere. He cannot be pinned down.
The Wes Anderson style is stronger than ever. It imprisons the characters even more than the quarantine does—they attempt to get around that, but they are all trapped within Anderson’s strictures for character performance. Even someone like Midge Campbell is not really a brunette Marilyn Monroe in full but a brunette Marilyn Monroe forced to behave in the limited ways Anderson’s characters do. She has been flattened into a desperate loneliness and emptiness, and her relationship with Augie Steenbeck reveals very little of them beyond an attempt by both of them to fill it. And that loneliness and emptiness characterizes the movie as a whole. Everything is as dry, flat, and spare as the Andersonian desert, occasional stop-motion roadrunner notwithstanding. Characters respond to emotionally fraught situations almost blankly, as if their restraint protects them. Even the appearance of an alien does not alter the characters.
That previous sentence is not quite true. The adults are unchanged, if maybe slightly more annoyed and bored as a result of the quarantine. Even the general tasked with implementing it seems to regard it as an imposition, another role that he has to play out of necessity. The children, though, have their minds opened and their imaginations fired by what it means. The brainy teens try to contact the alien and get information about it out into the unquarantined world outside, and slightly younger children repeatedly interrupt the standard lessons their teacher insists on giving, to maintain a sense of normalcy, about space with questions about the alien and straightforward declarations that it exists. And this sense of joy and wonder leads one of the kids to make art in the form of a song about the alien, which some traveling musicians stuck in town help him perform. Become as little children, says Wes Anderson, and get by with a little help from your friends.
It is that same artistic impulse that leads one of the students in an acting class the playwright is visiting to say, while performing being asleep with the rest of the class, the tautological and yet baffling “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”, and that impulse also leads the rest of the class to eventually join in and start chanting it. The sentence itself is a kind of art, taking an obvious fact and making it into an incomprehensible statement about the relationship between art and life. There is no single meaning to it anymore, although it suggests that the connection between the experience of art and the experience of life is as fundamental as the connection between sleeping and being awake. There is no waking up without being asleep, and there is no real life without art.
But what is that connection? In other words, why does it upset the actor in the TV show who plays Augie that he has no idea what the play is about? Why does he need to know why the character he plays burns his hand on a griddle on purpose? Why does he find the actor playing the alien saying that the alien is some kind of metaphor so unsatisfying? He can ask the director, but that avails nothing. He could, I suppose, ask Wes Anderson, but if Wes Anderson had him do so and then responded it would be a very different movie. The character is a mystery to him, but who could explain the thousands of subtle roles played throughout a life, let alone the life itself? There are aliens out there, beyond imagination and beyond understanding, as Anderson tells it. And the interior of the human heart is still more mysterious. All anyone can do is have an open mind and an open heart that allows an escape from the narrowness of the self. You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.
[Next month in Movies across the decades: Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan. —Steve] [Sometimes it's good to do what you're supposed to when you're supposed to do it. —Chris]