THE CHATTER
Wes Anderson links us to his movies by linking his movies to each other
More than 20 years ago, Wes Anderson turned his short film Bottle Rocket into his first feature, a lackadaisical caper about two buddies played by brothers Owen and Luke Wilson. They hold up a bookstore (not the most promising target even in 1996) and then go on the lam. The un-presupposing movie put Anderson’s career in gear. He, it and his characters have been running ever since.
Clever capers, flight from authority, intricate plans and deadpan dialogue – there’s a clear through- line to the director’s features, now numbering nine with the release of Isle of Dogs. Some of this is no doubt due to his frequent collaborators; screenwriting credits are often shared with Owen Wilson, Roman Coppola, Noah Baumbach or Jason Schwartzman.
His actors also come and stay, with Schwartzman, Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel and others making frequent appearances. Bill Murray holds pride of place in that list, with a role in every film except Bottle Rocket. Clearly, Anderson is one of the few people on Earth with Murray’s personal phone number.
But far more important is a ser- ies of thematic motifs, unmistakable if not always precisely definable. His lead characters are children – extracurricular king Max in Rushmore; true love’s Sam and Suzy from Moonrise Kingdom; young Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel – or at least childish at heart, as with Bill Murray’s adventurer Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic, the immature clan of The Royal Tenenbaums or the wanderlusty siblings in The Darjeeling Limited.
These characters are grouped together in family units. Some are real, such as the Tenenbaums or the three brothers of Darjeeling, but more often they are ersatz families: a scout troupe in Moonrise Kingdom; a secret society in The Grand Budapest Hotel; a ship’s crew in The Life Aquatic; a school in Rushmore. Adoptions play an important role in many of Anderson’s movies, including Isle of Dogs; you may read what you will of the fact that his parents divorced when he was a child.
Anthony and Dignan, the Wilsons’ characters in Bottle Rocket, set the grown-up bar nice and low. The film opens with Luke “escaping” from a psychiatric hospital, in spite of being voluntarily committed. He could walk out the door, but Owen is in the bushes, making fake bird calls and terribly excited to see his friend bed-sheet his way down from the second floor.
And although they acquire guns for their robbery, they plot it out the way eight- year- olds would – with a 75- year plan scrawled in a spiral- ring notebook. Sample entries: “The Next 25 years ( Obviously these years will be heavily influenced by the years that precede them).” And my favourite: “Living into the 21st Century. (Anthony as you know there can be no way of looking this far ahead.)” Even though it’s only five years away, and the first part of the plan is called “The Initial Five Years?”
Anderson’s movies always contain handwritten notes of one sort or another. There’s a fan-letter exchange between Steve Zissou and his maybe-son in The Life Aquatic, telegrams and other missives in The Royal Tenenbaums, and the love letters of Sam and Suzy in Moonrise Kingdom. Is it any surprise that a reluctant Gene Hackman was eventually recruited to star in The Royal Tenenbaums after receiving an impassioned letter from the director?
Anderson’s epistolary bent also informs a host of other directorial fetishes, including a preference for the real over the virtual, the handmade over the manufactured, maps over GPS, and nostalgia over looking forward ( 75- year plans notwithstanding).
In fact, 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom functions as a wonderful nexus of this lo-fi aesthetic. One of the things Suzy brings with her as she runs away with Sam is a collection of fictional children’s literature with such titles as The Francine Odysseys: The Wild Adventures of a Spirited British Family; Disappearance of the Sixth Grade; and The Girl from Jupiter, by Isaac Clarke.
Designer Jessica Hische not only created the books’ covers, she also crafted an original font for the film’s title sequence, based on the Edwardian Script typeface but, as her website notes, “more handhewn looking and lightly referencing titles from a Chabrol film.” Well, of course.
Anderson’s characters have an inimitable style that is anything but stylish. They favour the fringe – cravats, berets, ruffles, tracksuits, khaki. They enjoy impractical ve- hicles – go- karts, rickety motorcycles, automobiles that look like one- off European concept cars from the ’60s, and the hot- air balloon tethered to Zissou’s rust-bucket ship in The Life Aquatic.
It adds up until it multiplies, and critics of Anderson’s work – yes, they exist – have faulted the director for an excess of artificiality. A New York Post review of Grand Budapest famously concluded: “That’s Wes Anderson: He can’t see the forest for the twee.” But it’s difficult to make that accusation stick to a filmmaker who favours analog over digital, and stop-motion over computer graphics ( in The Life Aquatic but also the full-length Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs), and whose characters prefer plays to movies, and paper to screens.
It’s also instructive to look at the many films that have borrowed elements of Anderson’s style. Without his body of work, there’s a good chance we’d never have seen such mid-2000s marvels as Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Son of Rambow and Juno. ( Then again, we’d also have avoided inferior knockoffs like Elizabethtown and Charlie Bartlett, described by this paper as “a Nickel- odeon version of Rushmore.”)
Of course, when those movies came out, Anderson’s oeuvre had reached only about five features. Since then, one could argue, he’s become his own best imitator, crafting original stories under the same analog rubric, and with the same cinematographic toolkit – left/right symmetry, carefully composed groups shots, overheads, cutaways, long horizontal tracking shots, and a slow-motion climax.
In interviews, he will of course deny any master plan to his masterworks, telling an Empire Magazine reporter several years ago that the last thing he wants to do is to “think thematically.” Viewers may find and even obsess over Andersonian tics and flourishes, but he’s got stories to tell.
Still, I like to think that somewhere in a locked desk drawer, to which only he and maybe the Society of Crossed Keys has access, is a dog- eared, coil- ring notebook with a list of leitmotifs, and a lot of blank space for fresh ideas. If Wes Anderson has his own 75-year plan squirrelled away somewhere, I can’t wait to watch the rest of it.