Zach Vasquez
Wes Anderson’s new film, The Pheonecian Scheme, is another great work from the best American director of his generation, a delightful yet sneakily weighty screwball comedy-cum-adventure story-cum morality tale made at such a high level of craftsmanship that we almost take it for granted: if any other director put out a movie of this quality we’d be hailing it as their masterpiece.
The film is unlikely to win over any of Anderson’s detractors, whose rote complaints and criticisms miss the mark every time he releases a new one, but at this point who cares? That Anderson is able to continue creating his worlds, and that we get to visit them every couple of years is, frankly, a miracle.
I choose that phrase – “building his worlds” – carefully. People often describe his immersive sets as dollhouses and dioramas, but it goes further than just set dressing (although there’s no limit to the praise he and his crew, particularly long-time production designer Adam Stockhausen, deserve). At this point in his career, Anderson truly is a world builder, moving away from any semblance of so-called realism in order to bring us a version of reality built in his image.
And yet, for as fantastical as that reality is, as specific to his tastes and obsessions, it still manages to reflect back to us universal truths about life on this side of the screen. In this way, Anderson reminds me, more than any other filmmaker, of Federico Fellini.
Tonally and aesthetically, those two are pretty far removed from one another. Anderson favors precision and symmetry, Fellini the rococo and baroque. Anderson’s characters deliver fine-tuned dialog with deadpan gravitas, Fellini’s yell and gesticulate and yearn openly. Anderson carefully structures his films like novels, plays, and magazines, replete with titled chapter and act breaks; Fellini, especially in his late period, preferred a loose episodic (or “fresco”) model. If Anderson is a maker of dollhouses, Fellini is a circus ringleader.
And yet, Anderson has long cited Fellini as one of his major influences. There is even a short documentary film about this: The Fantastic Mr. Fellini (2020) is a 45-minute interview with Anderson on his love of the Italian auteur. Sadly, this doc is currently unavailable to watch, but Anderson has spoken elsewhere of what he takes from Il Maestro, explaining during the press tour for The Grand Budapest Hotel, “I always think about Fellini in terms of the characters, he makes deep characters that are sort of cartoons, and somehow he finds that balance and sometimes I’m trying for something like that with some of mine.”
Fellini himself was a professional cartoonist, and Anderson has become one with his forays into animation. But more than that connection, or the inspiration Anderson draws from Fellini’s use of character, it is Fellini’s evolution as an artist, as well as the critical and public reception to his work, where I see the greatest comparison between the two.
Fellini’s early work as first a screenwriter, and then director, fall within Italian neorealism, but when he began making a name for himself on the global arthouse scene via critically acclaimed works like I Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), and Nights of Cabiria (1957), he had veered away from that movement. By the time he became a full-on international sensation with La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963), he’d embraced a surreal, carnivalesque style that would later bear his name: Felliniesque. His post 8 ½ films, almost all shot in lavish color and often taking place in the ancient past, became even stranger and more phantasmagoric.
In his late period, Fellini rarely shot on location, preferring instead to construct his elaborate settings within Rome’s famed Cinecittà Studios. The brainchild of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Cinecittà was meant to bolster the nation’s film industry so that it might challenge Hollywood’s influence on a global scale. Partially destroyed during WWII, Cinecittà was rebuilt in the aftermath and, ironically, became a hub for large-scale Hollywood productions, including Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, and Cleopatra.
Fellini fell in love with Cinecittà during his first visit to it as a young reporter on assignment (a story he brought to screen in his feature-length love letter to the studio, and his penultimate film, Intervista [1987]). He shot I Vitelloni at Cinecittà , but his association with it truly begins with La Dolce Vita. Moving forward, he forsook the outer world, explaining, “For me, Cinecittà has replaced the real world. I shoot in the studio to express a subjective reality, purified by contingent realistic elements, which are useless: it’s a selected reality.”
This perfectly sums up Anderson’s artistic evolution as well. While none of his early films were remotely “realist,” neo- or other, they still took place within a world recognizably our own. But you see Anderson start to move into more fantastical realms starting with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). The scope of his films became global, as did their productions.
In 2013, Anderson teamed with Prada to produce the charming short Castello Cavalcanti, which stars Jason Schwartzman as a hapless American race car driver who crashes his car in an Italian village that happens to be his ancestral home. An open love letter to Fellini, with homages to La Dolce Vita and Amarcord (1973), it was, appropriately, shot at Cinecittà. (Anderson and crew considered filming 2023’s Asteroid City at Cinecittà as well, before settling on a location in Spain.)
But even as Anderson’s work continued to leave behind any trappings of “realism,” the themes and stories took on weightier subject matter, including the rise of facism, political radicalism and revolution, and, in his latest, the moral reckoning over the destructive effects of industrialism. Despite his proclamations that he didn’t care about politics, Fellini also dealt with similar subject matter, most noticeably in his depiction of the boorish, buffoonish (but still dangerous) nature of Italian fascism in Anderson’s favorite of his films, Amaracord.
Like Fellini, Anderson’s output generally receives positive notice (if not always great box office), but it also brings out complaints that he’s gone too far up his own ass. While I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for simply not clicking with either filmmaker’s style, I truly believe that this reaction comes from a narrow-minded and slavish devotion to false notions of realism, revealing the complainers incapable of locating deeper truth within, as Fellini put it, “subjective reality.”That, ultimately, is their loss. Anderson continues to follow in Fellini’s footsteps as an uncompromising artist of the highest order. He may even become as synonymous with a historical studio as Fellini is with Cinecittà: following the filming of The Pheonecian Scheme at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam—the oldest large-scale studio in the world, and the place where Anderson previously shot Grand Budapest—the building that hosted the film’s costume and production design’s offices was officially renamed The Wes Anderson Building.
