Wes Anderson names the best movie of 2022
During the heated discussions of the best films released each year, it’s extremely rare for Wes Anderson to be excluded from the conversation. Having established himself as a unique visual stylist in the landscape of modern cinema, the American auteur has developed a loyal global following, and they love all his artistic idiosyncrasies.
Last year, Anderson found himself at the centre of the conversation once again with his latest effort, The French Dispatch. Designed as a love letter to journalism, the film utilised Anderson’s cinematic style to perfectly capture the mystique and magic of local journalism. Although it wasn’t as effective as some of his previous works, The French Dispatch was a strong start to the decade for Anderson.
This year, Anderson has been absent from the end-of-year discussions because he is currently preparing for the release of his next project. Titled Asteroid City, the film is set in a fictional American town during the 1950s. Starring the likes of Tom Hanks and Margot Robbie, this highly anticipated film will be released in June of 2023.
While we all wait for Anderson’s next movie, the director has shared his opinion about the best film of 2022. In a piece published by Variety, Anderson revealed that he considers Noah Baumbach’s recent adaptation of Don DeLillo’s celebrated novel White Noise to be the greatest cinematic achievement of the year.
Anderson wrote: “Noah (in my experience/observation) writes directly from his own life and finds the funniest, saddest, most memorable, most moving things to transform and reinvent and turn into scenes and movies. Not this time: his inspiration is a book! But, somehow, while it’s Don DeLillo — it’s still him. This is perhaps the most literary (and language-oriented) gigantic semi-science fiction blockbuster-scale movie ever made. College professors lecture. Academics debate. Grocery shoppers dance in the aisles. A giant toxic cloud is an existential threat; but first and foremost, it’s a metaphor.”
Starring revered actors like Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, White Noise is set in the 1980s and revolves around a family whose world changes after an air contamination incident. Although some fans of the novel felt that Baumbach didn’t capture DeLillo’s sentiments, Anderson maintains that the adaptation deserves merit.
Anderson concluded: “This movie is dazzling and mysterious and poetic and wildly entertaining. It’s a completely new concoction from one of our most original voices, who has refined and developed his talents in ways we can only stand back and admire (and enjoy). As I recall, François Truffaut explained to his actress: ‘Every film is a brick in the wall’; and she (Isabelle Adjani) answered in her stunning youth: ‘No. Every film is the wall.’ This wall is unlike any other we have ever seen — and every brick was built to last.”
