Into the Wes Anderson-verse

Note: AI was used for the purposes of proofing, editing, and occasionally used as a thesaurus (some of the bigger words are not part normal vocabulary. Haha!). The writings, ideas, structure, and themes are ALL mine.

What I discovered watching three decades of Wes Anderson, from Bottle Rocket to The Phoenician Scheme

There is a moment that occurs when you spend enough time watching Wes Anderson movies when the Wes Anderson-ness of it all begins to disappear. The symmetrical frames stop announcing themselves. The candy-colored rooms no longer seem unusual.

You stop wondering why a telephone from 1963 is sitting next to something that looks like it was invented in 1987. The immaculate costumes, chapter headings, lateral camera movements, miniature buildings and deadpan conversations simply become the natural laws of the place. You have crossed the border. Your passport has been stamped. You are now living in Wes Anderson’s world, and after a while the strange thing isn’t how artificial that world looks. The strange thing is how recognizably human the people inside it become.

That wasn’t really what I expected when I decided to work my way through Criterion’s Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years. I knew Anderson’s movies, of course, and I had seen many of them before, but there is a difference between occasionally visiting a filmmaker and temporarily moving in with him. I watched the live-action films in order, setting aside Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs because I want to watch the animated movies with my daughter. When I reached the end of the Criterion set, I kept going with Asteroid City and eventually returned to The Phoenician Scheme, which I had already seen theatrically. Somewhere along the way, what began as a movie marathon turned into something closer to an excavation. The deeper I went, the more the movies began talking to one another.

At first, I was watching for the obvious evolution of a filmmaker’s style. Bottle Rocket is particularly fascinating from that perspective because the Anderson universe hasn’t been fully constructed yet. You can see pieces of it scattered around the workshop, but the finished machine isn’t there. The characters already possess that peculiar Anderson quality of taking absurd ambitions completely seriously, but the visual language is still forming around them. I enjoyed the movie and could see the filmmaker who was about to emerge, although I didn’t particularly care for many of the characters. That emotional distance kept my score at an 86, which, as it turns out, would be my lowest rating of the entire journey. Not a bad floor to have.

Two years later, with Rushmore, somebody flips the switch. Suddenly the machine works. Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer is almost a perfect prototype for the kind of character Anderson would spend decades exploring: a kid who is absolutely devoted to Rushmore Academy while being spectacularly bad at the academic portion of attending Rushmore Academy. Max doesn’t love school. He loves his idea of school. He loves clubs, organizations, activities, theater and the sense that he can construct an entire little society around himself. Schwartzman is amazing, Bill Murray seems to discover a new version of himself as an actor, and Brian Cox is perfect as the perpetually exasperated Dr. Guggenheim. I gave Rushmore a 96, but what stayed with me even more than the score was Max’s compulsion to create a world he could understand when the real one proved less cooperative.

That impulse turns out to be everywhere in Anderson’s work. His characters create clubs, plays, expeditions, hotels, newspapers, scientific gatherings and business empires. They organize things. They label things. They wear uniforms. They make schedules. They build systems. Watching the films together made me wonder whether all that famous Anderson precision isn’t merely a visual signature but an extension of the people he writes. Life is chaotic, grief is chaotic, families are catastrophically chaotic, so perhaps the natural response is to straighten the picture frames and put everyone in matching jackets.

Then I reached The Royal Tenenbaums, and another door opened. Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum is funny, selfish, manipulative, charismatic, occasionally cruel and somehow still capable of inspiring affection. He is also a lousy father. Anderson doesn’t seem particularly interested in prosecuting him for it, nor does he let him off the hook. Instead, he allows Royal to remain contradictory, which is much closer to how families actually work. The people who hurt us are rarely monsters dispatched from Central Casting. Often they’re funny. Sometimes they’re charming. Sometimes we love them. Sometimes that’s precisely what makes the damage complicated.

I gave The Royal Tenenbaums a 98, my highest score of the marathon, and initially I thought Royal was simply one extraordinary character in one extraordinary film. Then I met Steve Zissou again. And the Whitman brothers began talking about their dead father. And later there was Stanley Zak in Asteroid City. Finally there was Zsa-zsa Korda in The Phoenician Scheme. The imperfect father kept returning in different clothes, sometimes physically present, sometimes absent, sometimes trying to repair the damage and sometimes barely capable of recognizing it. Anderson seemed to be turning the same object over and over in his hands, looking at it from different angles.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou gave that flawed-man archetype a ship, a red cap and an entire mythology. Steve has constructed perhaps the ultimate Anderson environment around himself. There are uniforms and branded equipment, a loyal crew, a vessel presented to us almost as a cross-section of a dollhouse, and a public identity that may be more coherent than the man underneath it. Bill Murray is terrific, but so are Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston and Owen Wilson, and the Seu Jorge performances of David Bowie songs make the movie feel even more gloriously displaced from ordinary reality. I gave it a 92, while becoming increasingly fascinated by Anderson’s refusal to locate his worlds cleanly in time. The technology might belong to one decade, the clothes to another and the architecture to a third. Eventually I realized that asking what year it was missed the point. The year was Wes Anderson.

Then The Darjeeling Limited caught me somewhere more personal. My father died when I was 22, so watching three brothers stumble through India in the aftermath of their father’s death inevitably brought some of my own history into the movie. Peter’s attachment to his father’s belongings made immediate sense to me. Objects become strange after someone dies. Their practical value can disappear completely while their emotional value becomes enormous. This was his. He touched this. He wore this. Suddenly an ordinary possession feels almost archaeological, physical proof that somebody occupied space in the world.

Anderson makes that emotional baggage literal by giving the brothers an absurd amount of their father’s luggage to drag around. I figured out the metaphor early, perhaps earlier than I would have liked, so when the brothers finally throw the bags away to catch the train, the moment was more satisfying confirmation than revelation. Still, it worked. I also became fascinated by Bill Murray’s businessman at the beginning of the film, running for the train and failing to make it. I wondered whether he might function as some faint echo of the absent father, another older man who disappears as the brothers continue without him. Meanwhile, Owen Wilson’s Francis is desperately trying to occupy the vacant paternal position himself, organizing his brothers’ lives as though a laminated itinerary might hold the family together. Darjeeling earned a 93, but more importantly it was the point when this project stopped being merely an appreciation of Anderson’s craft. I had begun bringing my own baggage onto the train.

By the time I reached Moonrise Kingdom, I had stopped resisting the artificiality altogether. Anderson’s world was no longer something surrounding the story. It was the story’s natural habitat. I loved the way Sam and Suzy navigate that world, particularly because Anderson grants children an unusual amount of dignity. They are awkward and inexperienced, but they aren’t stupid. They’re discovering independence, romantic love and identity while simultaneously discovering the unsettling fact that the adults around them don’t necessarily know what they’re doing either. The children form their own relationships and little civilizations while the adults quietly unravel around them. I gave the movie a 95, and another recurring Anderson idea came into focus: children frequently seem more capable of building community than the adults responsible for them.

That idea would return in Asteroid City, but first came The Grand Budapest Hotel, where Anderson’s obsession with order reaches something close to its ideal form. Ralph Fiennes’ Monsieur Gustave H. is a man attempting to preserve a code of civilization while civilization itself is collapsing around him. He is mannered, meticulous and absurdly proper, which makes the bursts of profanity especially funny. Anderson has certainly used profanity elsewhere, but here it feels almost perfectly engineered. A vulgar phrase detonating inside Gustave’s carefully manicured world is funny precisely because everything around it is so refined.

What I loved most about Gustave, though, was his resourcefulness. He isn’t an action hero. His weapons are intelligence, charm, competence and relationships. Put him in prison and, remarkably, he essentially turns prison into another hotel. He learns the people, understands the system, makes himself useful and begins constructing a community. Eventually that community helps him escape. Again and again throughout these films, assistance arrives from unexpected directions because someone, somewhere, has made a human connection. Anderson’s worlds may look obsessively designed, but people survive them through other people. I gave The Grand Budapest Hotel a 96.

The movie also made explicit something I’d been noticing all along: Anderson doesn’t merely use filmmaking techniques to tell his stories. He makes the physical form of the movie part of the storytelling. Grand Budapest changes aspect ratios as it moves through different periods. The screen itself becomes a time machine. Anderson doesn’t just tell us we’ve entered another era; the walls of the theater appear to move. That playfulness with form becomes even more pronounced later, but by now I had stopped seeing it as decoration. Anderson’s technique and his subject matter were becoming inseparable.

The French Dispatch tested that relationship in an interesting way. I gave it a 94, so clearly I loved it, but I experienced it differently. I felt less emotionally embedded in the characters and more like a passenger being carried through an extraordinarily elaborate machine. Surprisingly, I was perfectly happy being the passenger. My favorite section was the first story, with Benicio del Toro’s imprisoned artist and Adrien Brody’s art dealer. I already enjoy watching del Toro, but the segment also revealed another personal attraction I hadn’t really articulated before: I love watching artists create. There is something fascinating about the process itself, the mysterious transformation of an idea into an object.

I also found myself trying to decode The French Dispatch. Why was this part black-and-white? Why did that moment become color? What was the rule? Eventually I realized I might be looking for a cipher that wasn’t there. Sometimes Anderson’s formal decisions operate more like the layout of a magazine than the grammar of a conventional movie. A photograph is large because the editor wants it large. A splash of color appears because it belongs there. Not every choice needs to resolve into a tidy symbolic equation. That realization was oddly liberating. I could stop trying to solve Wes Anderson and simply watch him.

That became especially useful with Asteroid City, which I gave a 91. Here Anderson doesn’t merely remind us that we’re watching a constructed story. He builds constructions inside constructions. We watch a play, move backstage, enter another level of reality and eventually begin wondering which level deserves to be called reality in the first place. It reminded me somewhat of Rushmore, where theater was already an important part of Anderson’s vocabulary, but now the idea had expanded into something much larger.

Jason Schwartzman’s Augie and Scarlett Johansson’s Midge are both performing in different ways, and both are carrying private pain. Augie is grieving his wife. Midge rehearses, performs and transforms emotion into something she can manage. At one point, something that initially looks alarming turns out to be rehearsal. Performance itself becomes a coping mechanism. Once I noticed that, I began seeing versions of it throughout Anderson’s films. People create art, adopt roles, put on uniforms and construct identities because sometimes pretending you know how to proceed is the first step toward actually proceeding.

The children in Asteroid City fascinated me too. These young geniuses gather together and almost immediately begin exchanging ideas, feeding one another intellectually and forming relationships. The adults form connections as well, but theirs are more fragmented, complicated by grief, loneliness, marriage and history. The kids just start talking. Tom Hanks’ Stanley, particularly in his interactions with the children and his handling of his daughter’s ashes, brought yet another variation of the father figure into the marathon. By this point, I was no longer merely noticing recurring themes. I was waiting to see how Anderson would rearrange them.

Which brought me, finally, to The Phoenician Scheme.

I had already seen it in the theater, and I liked it. What surprised me was how much more I enjoyed it the second time. Perhaps spending all those hours inside Anderson’s previous films had changed my eyes. Whatever the reason, on the revisit the movie seemed richer, funnier and more multifaceted than I remembered. I gave it a 94, and even now I suspect I may need to watch it a third time.

Benicio del Toro’s Zsa-zsa Korda brings the imperfect father roaring back to center stage, but Anderson changes the equation again. Korda has nine sons and one daughter, Liesl, and it is the daughter who matters most. Her decision to become a nun gives the relationship a wonderful tension. She is attempting to orient her life around faith and morality while her father has spent much of his life treating morality as an inconvenient obstacle to business. Then he brings her into his world. Suddenly these two opposing forces are traveling together, negotiating together and exerting pressure on one another. His lack of morality and her moral seriousness begin to balance the film, and neither character emerges completely unchanged.

The movie is also extremely funny. On my second viewing, the climactic fight involving Benedict Cumberbatch and del Toro landed especially well. Yet the sequence that really stayed with me comes almost immediately afterward. Anderson gives us a long tracking shot as the characters work in the restaurant, finish their tasks, close the place and eventually settle down to play cards. The choreography is beautiful. The camera glides through the space while the actors move in and out, everyone hitting marks, actions overlapping, the entire thing unfolding with the effortless appearance that only comes from an enormous amount of effort.

Watching that shot at the end of this particular marathon felt strangely appropriate. I had spent weeks examining Anderson’s machinery, and there it was operating at full precision. Camera movement, production design, blocking, performance, timing and physical space all functioning together. Yet the result wasn’t cold. It was warm and communal. After all the elaborate schemes and attempted murders and moral arguments, we end up watching people finish work, close a restaurant and play cards together. Maybe that is the key to the whole thing.

When people talk about Wes Anderson, they inevitably talk about control. That’s understandable. Few directors exercise such visible control over every inch of the frame. But after watching his live-action career unfold from Bottle Rocket through The Phoenician Scheme, I came away thinking his movies are actually obsessed with the things we cannot control. We cannot control death. We cannot make our parents into the people we wish they had been. We cannot prevent our children from becoming independent people. We cannot keep marriages intact through organization. We cannot schedule grief. We cannot guarantee that someone will love us back. We cannot make the train wait while we decide which pieces of our father’s luggage we’re willing to leave behind.

So Anderson’s characters respond by creating order wherever they can. Max Fischer organizes clubs. Steve Zissou organizes expeditions. Gustave runs a hotel according to an almost sacred code. The French Dispatch turns the chaos of life into stories and columns. Scientists gather in the desert. Korda constructs an enormous scheme. Artists paint. Writers write. Actors perform. Children build camps. Families develop rituals. Everyone is trying, in one way or another, to put a frame around something that won’t stay still.

Anderson does the same thing behind the camera. His frames are straight because life isn’t.

That, more than the colors or costumes or symmetrical compositions, is what I took from this marathon. I had always appreciated Wes Anderson’s style. I hadn’t fully appreciated how much emotion he hides inside it. The precision doesn’t eliminate the messiness. It contains it. Behind all those immaculate sets are fathers disappointing children, brothers mourning parents, widowers trying to function, lonely people reaching through windows toward one another and artists desperately making things because making things is how they understand being alive.

Perhaps that is also why Anderson’s children are so often interesting. They haven’t yet learned all the elaborate adult mechanisms for concealing confusion. Sam and Suzy simply run away. The young scientists in Asteroid City simply find one another and start sharing ideas. Adults require hotels, expeditions, corporations, newspapers, plays and carefully packed luggage. Kids sometimes just need another kid who understands.

My scores tell part of the story. The Royal Tenenbaums remains at the top with a 98, followed by Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel at 96, Moonrise Kingdom at 95, The French Dispatch and The Phoenician Scheme at 94, The Darjeeling Limited at 93, The Life Aquatic at 92, Asteroid City at 91, and Bottle Rocket at 86. What’s remarkable to me is that the lowest score is still an 86. Across nearly thirty years of live-action filmmaking, there isn’t one movie here I wouldn’t consider good, and several I now consider great.

But the numbers aren’t really what I’ll remember about doing this. I’ll remember watching the world gradually become more recognizably Anderson until, paradoxically, I stopped noticing the style at all. I’ll remember realizing that the flawed fathers weren’t isolated characters but an ongoing conversation. I’ll remember recognizing my own experience in a set of dead father’s suitcases. I’ll remember children repeatedly proving more adaptable than adults, artists turning pain into things, and communities appearing in places where nobody thought to look for them. And I’ll remember that magnificent restaurant sequence near the end of The Phoenician Scheme, the camera moving through a perfectly choreographed room until the work is finished and everyone sits down together.

I started this project thinking I was going to revisit a director with a distinctive visual style. I finished it thinking about fathers and children, grief and memory, art and performance, loneliness and community, and the strange little systems human beings invent to survive things that can’t be fixed.

What I hadn’t understood until I spent all this time inside them is that he fills those dollhouses with people trying desperately to make a home.