‘An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn’: The best Wes Anderson film not made by Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson’s latest outing, The Phoenician Scheme, felt like a final failure of a slow decline. Asteroid City wasn’t bad, The French Dispatch wasn’t unwatchable, but for a long time, it’s felt like Anderson has been too busy playing the caricature of himself to actually tell a good story.
Perhaps it a classic case of the pioneer being overtaken. When Anderson first started up, his style was new and gorgeous. It was whimsical and nostalgic and heavily referential to French New Wave flicks, but with a fresh approach. However, they were also great stories with real heart. The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou especially were complete tearjerkers as his style was more than matches by substance.
That’s what’s lacking now. Instead, Anderson’s latest films merely feel like him ticking the boxes of aesthetic and failing to actually have a plot to back it up. There’s little to grip onto, and when it came to The Phoenician Scheme, there weren’t even really laughs to lighten the load of a 101-minute run time that somehow felt like forever. But that’s enough bashing. What is the point of criticism without a solution, and so here, I offer you one – An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn.
Admittedly, I’m late to the party. Jim Hosking’s wry comedy was released back in 2018 and has an all-star cast of the best in dark humour, including Matt Berry, Jemaine Clement and, most notably, Aubrey Plaza. They bring the darkness and the dry ridiculousness that used to populate the best Anderson films. They bring the sharp one liners and moments of complete stupidity delivered with a straight-face.
On the other side, you have Craig Robinson playing the titular Beverly Luff Linn, who spends the majority of the movie only grunting. To be able to be so funny with only grunts, groans and other wordless noises, that’s a triumph, and it’s a triumph supported by a cast where every player is moving in the same direction, clearly so zoned in on the niche vision here.
That’s Hosking’s vision is clear, even though the film itself feels tough to define. It has what Anderson used to deploy, which is a super-simple plot. This is a movie about a woman stealing from her husband and running off to a hotel on a mission to meet Beverly Luff Linn, just as Moonrise Kingdom was simply about two kids in love on the run. The simplicity of the plot leaves space for the rest.
You can get hooked into that, but there’s still room for hyper-stylised cinematic aesthetics, extended moments of silliness and the back and forth of a well-written script that leads with a specific brand of dark humour and wit. It also exists in the same timeless worlds that Anderson so often draws up, as there’s no marker to any one era beyond a general sense of nostalgia.
The word off-kilter comes to mind, or eccentric. That, paired with the style of it all, used to be Anderson’s calling card, so if you’re disappointed with the turn he’s taken, turn in here instead for a movie with the same feel, but more energy than the man himself seems able to offer anymore.
