Wesley Wales Anderson was born in Houston, Texas on May 1, 1969. Anderson began experimenting with writing short plays and making home movies as a child, and continued that interest at the University of Texas, majoring in philosophy. It's there that he met his first of many collaborators, Owen Wilson, and in 1992, the two fashioned a short black and white film called "Bottle Rocket" starring Wilson and his younger brother Luke—they couldn't hire actors, due to the miniscule budget. But, they could submit it to the Sundance Film Festival. And the rest plays out like a particularly amazing after-school special. Or...one of Anderson's films.
The story of two friends, Dignan (Owen Wilson) and Anthony (Luke Wilson), it begins when Dignan helps Anthony leave a psychiatric hospital, where the latter has checked in for "exhaustion." Dig then outlines a "75 year plan" for a criminal career that sounds anything but restful. It's an eccentric "coming of age" scenario where the aimless Anthony must learn to live by the counseling of his "out-on-a-limb" friend, jump-starting his life
The work was strong enough, of its own, that it slowly gained cult-film status through home video, and then, through Hollywood (Martin Scorsese says it's one of the "Top ten" films of the 90's), making Anderson a particularly strong (and obviously eccentric) voice in the independent film culture.
Anderson's short film on which the feature is based.
 |
| The "75 year plan" |
Rushmore (1998) If Bottle Rocket seemed a little ambling in nature, Anderson's next film was extraordinarily assured and disciplined. Another collaboration between Owen Wilson and Anderson, it's the story of an under-performing enfant terrible, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman, in his film debut), who gets kicked out of his exclusive ivy-league High School and must exist in the uninspiring world of public school. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem for Max, as he's less of a student and more of a public institution, putting the "extra" in "extra-curricular," with a Wellesian brio and ego. Max's chutzpah attracts the attention of one of the Ivy-league fathers (Bill Murray), whose own kids, the product of an unhappy marriage, have none of Max's zest. His interest leads him to an affair with the teacher that Max is in love with, Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams) which further complicates things.
It's a weird hybrid of sources, from Salinger to Schulz, cuisinarted to become a bizarre anti-matter version of The Graduate, and starting to cement Wes Anderson's use of one-point perspective, composed to create a single, central locus, making his frames rectangular black holes to suck in the focus of his viewers. That perspective would start to dominate his work more and more, starting with his next film.
 |
| Max (Jason Schwartzmann) in a rebellious phase |
Father Royal (Hackman) is a con man who decides to return to his family after decades of absenteeism—and, of course, after he's been evicted from his hotel for not paying the rent—only to find that his gifted children are stuck on a treadmill of bad choices, childhood obsessions, and long-held personality ticks. He also is determined to derail the impending nuptials between his wife, Etheline (Huston) and her accountant (Glover).
If the film has a down-side (and it does), it is that the extended Tenenbaums are so zombie-like as to be not very interesting and certainly not as much fun as the "old goat" father is, enhanced by Hackman's gift for wolfish comedy, which is infectiously enjoyable. It's not the other actors' faults, so much as the characters Wilson and Anderson have written for them. Even in a real zombie movie, you don't root for the zombies.
 |
| The young Margot and Chas in their little box environments |
Meandering, and a bit off-course much of the time, The Life Aquatic is an acquired taste.
 |
| Bill Murray as Steve Zissou, life passing him by. |
But The Darjeeling Limited is about a close-knit family that's come unraveled—well, exploded in selfishness and separation—and is brought together by the control freak of the bunch (raising suspicion and defensiveness) to take a train trip across India, ostensibly to find their mother, but ultimately to find themselves. Or each other. Or to find a way to work together, rather than cross-purposes (in frequently hilarious ways). What could have been eye-rollingly heart-warming (ala Little Miss Sunshine) becomes intriguing and dramatically interesting, with good performances by the Anderson stock company (Anjelica Huston, Wilson, Schwartzman, and Bill Murray in a cameo), but also Adrien Brody who steps seamlessly into Anderson's off-axis world of vacant stares, and pregnant pauses.
 |
| "I'm going to go pray at another thing:" Schwartzman, Brody, and Wilson still have some healing to do. |
Hotel Chevalier (2007) Short film that tied in tangentially with The Darjeeling Limited as Jason Schwartzman's Jack Whitman character hooks up with "the girlfriend" (she's never named and played by Natalie Portman) who inspires the "short story" he wrote in Paris. And, I dunno, but I think she might be "gaslighting" him.
It might seem like an odd project for Anderson, but Dahl's sensibilities and writing had informed his previous films, like Rushmore, and the way Anderson's directing style was forming, the proscenium arch settings and cracker-box tableaux of Mr. Fox hew right into that one-point perspective he was becoming so enamored with. In fact, stylistically, it's difficult to tell the difference between Fantastic Mr. Fox and his next film.
Two kids decide to run away from their structured environments: Suzy (Kara Hayward), from her shattering family (parented by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand; Sam (Jared Gilman) from his Boy Scout troop (led by Edward Norton). They run off into the wild, trying to escape the various search parties trying to find them, and the local police (led by Bruce Willis).
Presented as if a documentary by Bob Balaban, Moonrise Kingdom is fun, odd, and rebellious in Anderson's over-stated understated fashion.
 |
| This shot still cracks me up: "Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop!" |
The French Dispatch (of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) (2020) Anderson's eighth film is a magazine format film about a magazine—the fictitious French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Sun (any resemblance to The New Yorker are purely reverential. The product of its editor's extended holiday in the city of Ennui-sur-Blasé (where he chose to stay),The French Dispatch is a magazine of higher tastes about the local scene with accomplished writers holding forth and making "something" of the city's day-to-day.
The film is an omnibus of the publication's final issue following the death of its publisher Arthur Horowitz, Jr. (Bill Murray). No more publication would be forthcoming and all subscriptions to future issues would be re-funded. That issue contains an obituary of Horowitz, the standard bicycle tour of Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson) and three stories of particular note from the magazine's past: "The Concrete Masterpiece"—about an insane murderer's (Benicio Del Toro) unlikely rise in the art field (as related by art historian J.K.L. Berenson (Tilda Swinton); "Revisions to a Manifesto" the work of Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand) in which she struggles with her objectivity in covering a youth revolt called "The Chess Revolution"; and "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner" by noted author Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) on the singular events surrounding his invitation to review the exquisite meals served to city's Police Commissioner (Mathieu Almaric), where a kidnapping is served as just desserts.
Fast-paced, with a consistent obliteration of "The Fourth Wall" The French Dispatch might well be called "Keaton-esque" in its dead-pan delivery amongst the frantic goings-on screen-wise. Many cinematic tricks and playing with "the form" but one is advised to see it on as big a screen as possible as the sub-titles are rather small and delicate. 
Asteroid City (2023) The story of the first contact of humans and aliens isn't nearly as life-changing as most experts think, as the precedent is the concerns of a couple dozen people quarantined at the "Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet" convention at the tourist-trap town near the Arid Springs Meteorite impact crater. The concerns are a government-imposed quarantine, the contest for the kids at the convention, the usual conflicts of disparate people thrown together where kids are concerned and where the chance of romance blooms even in the desert.
Anderson tells that story, but he stages it as the documentary presentation of an arts program (in square TV format) about the creation and subsequent production of the last play of a playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Jason Schwartzman leads the voluminous cast which, when it's not told from the point of view of the television series is in severe widescreen tinted in the bleached colors of long-in-sun post-card. Anderson stretches the production until it's so tight it threatens to snap an audience's attention, but it's dead-pan humor and constant fancifulness keeps the things afloat.
The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar and Three More (2023) Anderson was a huge fan of Dahl's writing (He did an adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox), and he wanted to do more, but when he signed on to this he didn't know it would be consigned to Netflix (who bought The Roald Dahl Story Company for 686 million smackers), rather than theaters (or maybe he hoped they'd be less stingy about theatrical releases). But no, the four short films, "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," "The Swan," "Poison", and "The Ratcatcher" debuted on the streaming channel, presenting itself (under Anderson's supervision) as short films that had originally appeared on the fictional British Channel 7 in 1978.
Anderson completely throws out trying for filmic verisimilitude, presenting the films as seemingly "live" presentations with disappearing sets, visible stagehands, and a fourth-wall-breaking aesthetic, making the settings exoticly claustrophobic neverlands that don't distract from the stories, but act as their own little "bubble-worlds". The cast, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, and Richard Ayoade in differing roles much like frequent anthology series guest-stars. A couple are better than others, but blame the stories, not Anderson's inventiveness.
This one is as dense as can be—I can't help wondering if Anderson and his co-writer Roman Coppola had the chock-a-block "strange-bedfellows" approach to movie financing when they conceived it—with a dizzying number of Anderson alums stopping by for cameos, and locales...one of which is a Powellian black-and-white Heaven (Bill Murray, of course, plays God).
del Toro has the herculean burden of the lead player, but mention must be made of his two co-horts in his quest for funds, Michael Cera, and Mia Threapleton, who plays his daughter, a Catholic novice. New to Anderson's major-miniature world, they fit in like they'd always been there.
Wes Anderson // Centered from kogonada on Vimeo.
* Mitch Hurvitz, created his "Arrested Development" series before The Royal Tenenbaums and almost abandoned it, after seeing Anderson's film.
_3.jpg)
_10.jpg)
_8.jpg)
_1.jpg)
_5.jpg)
_4.jpg)
_7.jpg)
