{"id":20309,"date":"2023-06-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=20309"},"modified":"2023-06-13T14:14:01","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T21:14:01","slug":"what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-wes-anderson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-wes-anderson\/","title":{"rendered":"What Everyone Gets Wrong About Wes Anderson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With this month\u2019s release Asteroid City<\/em>, Wes Anderson returns to his native Southwest for the first time since his late 90\u2019s double-punch breakout of Bottle Rocket <\/em>and Rushmore<\/em>. A lot has changed over the intervening 25 years and 10 features: while he has continued to craft quirky screwball ensembles suffused with deadpan humor and aching pathos, every frame bearing the mark of his singular specificity and instantly recognizable dollhouse aesthetic, he\u2019s also broadened the scope of his vision. Like Federico Fellini before him, Anderson has mostly moved from real world locations to hand-crafted (and increasingly meticulous) sets, while also coming up with progressively novel framing devices for his narratives (Asteroid City<\/em> is presented as the filming of a previously unproduced play for television broadcast) and moving further away from realism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anderson is the rare big-name American director whose every film has been a personal project. Not only has never come anywhere near some studio tentpole IP, he\u2019s never even done a \u2018one for them.\u2019 You would think even those most allergic to his work would have to begrudgingly respect that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say that every critique of Anderson is unwarranted. By the time he made The Darjeeling Limited<\/em>, his obsession with  daddy issues had started to wear thin, and every once in a long while he\u2019ll miss the mark when shooting for poignancy and land on something phony. And while I personally feel his movies never veer too far into whimsy\u2014Anderson, a truly gifted and underrated direction of action, balances this out with exciting moments of violence, as well as a fair helping of cynicism and dark humor\u2014it\u2019s easy to understand how someone might be automatically turned off by his ornate (some might say fussy) aesthetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, his stories remain achingly human at their core, something his detractors miss when they lobby the lazy criticism of \u201cstyle over substance\u201d (as though style itself isn\u2019t inherently substantive in the visual medium of film) or accuse him of telling the same old story about sad, rich white people (already a shallow take, as one look at the diversity of his casts over the last several films renders this moot). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stories he\u2019s chosen to tell of late have expanded along with his sets and casts, with The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/em> explicitly examining the rise of fascism two years before that became every politically-conscious filmmaker\u2019s favorite subject. The French Dispatch<\/em><\/a>, meanwhile, is one of those movies about seemingly everything, from civic engineering to modernist art to Marxist revolution to the experience of living as a queer foreigner to food to\u2026 Regardless of whether you think Anderson\u2019s has anything substantive to say about these subjects (and regardless of whether they pass any individual ideological test), you can\u2019t claim he makes the same movie over and over, or that he\u2019s only interested in disaffected WASPS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s not just Anderson\u2019s critics that get him wrong. His most ardent admirers are often guilty of the same. As with every original voice to come onto the scene, Anderson has inspired his share of copycats, as seen in the wake of overly-twee coming of age movies about precocious teen misfits and\/or family dramadies with a heavy Salinger-esque ennui released in the wake of his first three films\u2014a list that includes, but is hardly limited to, the dire likes of Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Chumbscrubber, Thumbsucker, <\/em>and Gigantic<\/em>. Even if these films didn\u2019t all sprout from his influence or weren\u2019t directly aping his work, they nonetheless traded on his popularity when it came to their marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(We shant count the films of peer and frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach because, for as similar as their milieus and themes, his work is far more grounded, acerbic and pessimistic \u2026 at least up until his recent White Noise<\/em><\/a>, which does feel like he\u2019s \u2018doing\u2019 Anderson, much to its detriment.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions\/Focus Features)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


These films have petered out over the last decade, but the influence of Anderson\u2019s current style\u2014particularly as the costume design and visual language he uses in Grand Budapest<\/em>\u2014can be seen on the likes of the much-beloved Paddington 2 <\/em>(2017) and the little-seen See How They Run <\/em>(2022). But while the glut of Anderson ripoffs are no longer as prevalent at the multiplex or arthouse, they\u2019ve infested social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the beginning, Anderson\u2019s work has made easy fodder for parodies. And while the most popular <\/a>examples aren\u2019t anywhere near as clever or exacting as some would have you believe\u2014The Midnight Coiterie of Sinister Intruders<\/em>? What Anderson title is that supposed to be taking the piss out of? The man didn\u2019t direct Mr. Magorium\u2019s Wonder Emporium<\/em>\u2014they stand head and shoulders above the recent crop that have spuing up on Tik Tok. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These \u2018Accidentally Wes Anderson\u2019 trend see Zoomers overlay a green-orange filter and a slice of Mark Desplat\u2019s score from The French Dispatch<\/em> on symmetrical shots of them\u2014always centered in the middle of the frame\u2014giving their best deadpan expression while going about their day. If these videos were your only frame of reference to Anderson\u2019s work, you\u2019d think he were Bresson, all static shots and \u2018modeling\u2019 in place of acting. In fact, Anderson and his loyal cinematographer Robert Yeoman are constantly using movement\u2014by way of both camerawork and mise-en-scene\u2014and Anderson himself has stated<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s the actors who are the center of it all to me.\u201d You\u2019ll notice that none of these homages or parodies ever attempt to replicate the films\u2019 acrobatic screwball dialog or Tex Avery-style slapstick (and in the rare instances they do<\/a>, it turns out disastrously).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Normally, such a trend wouldn\u2019t merit strong reaction or criticism, since it\u2019s just some young people goofing on a successful and popular filmmaker. But it\u2019s hard not to take offense given they\u2019ve popped up parallel to the far more insidious spate of A.I.-rendered short videos<\/a>, which \u201cimagine\u201d popular franchises (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Avatar<\/em>, and more) as made by Anderson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond how inherently disgusting  A.I. \u2018art\u2019 is, both morally and aesthetically, it\u2019s doubly infuriating that Anderson would prove a favorite of the cretins behind it, given how singular and personal his work is. That these videos reduce his deeply humanist works to a couple basic components\u2014again: symmetry and monochrome color\u2014in the name of anti-hum tech, while would-be influencers take the same tack to reduce it to a lifestyle brand, shows what our culture thinks of artists who remain true to themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Cannes premiere of Asteroid City,<\/em> Anderson told the AP<\/em><\/a> <\/em>that while he hasn\u2019t watched any of these Tik Toks or AI parodies, \u201canytime anyone\u2019s responding with enthusiasm to these movies I\u2019ve made over these many years, that\u2019s a nice, lucky thing.\u201d But for as magnanimous as that answer is, reading the whole interview, it\u2019s clear he\u2019s understandably uneasy about the whole idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond how insulting both trends are, there is something undeniably sinister at work in the aggressiveness to which all of these uncreative \u2018creatives\u2019 have set their sights on Anderson. And one wonders if, as with those earlier critical attacks on his work (as well as how allergic awards bodies are to it these days), it has to do with the fact that he\u2019s never compromised his art. If he\u2019d taken the route of, say, Tim Burton, and bent his style to fit corporate IP, would there still be this drive to diminish or disregard his work?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The release of Wes Anderson’s latest movie has inspired a host of criticism and tributes which, unfortunately, trade in the same clich\u00e9s and do injustice to his body of work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":20313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[1717],"class_list":["post-20309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-filmmakers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}