Why you’re wrong about Wes Anderson
There is something I have admitted to friends that has resulted in gasps and raised eyebrows, especially in the context of my job. I turned Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox off mid-way through. I don’t know how the film ends, and frankly I’m not interested.
I’m not trying to be a contrarian – I really wanted to like it, and I’m open to enjoying it in the future, but there’s something about Wes Anderson’s cinematic oeuvre that will always divide my opinion. There are a few movies of his that I think are genuinely great. In fact, watching Moonrise Kingdom when I was roughly 14-years-old helped me to get into cinema (and Françoise Hardy for that matter), and I held it close as one of my favourite movies for years.
After watching The Royal Tenenbaums, I was similarly obsessed, enjoying the odd family dynamics and fantastic soundtrack, and while I wasn’t so keen on Bottle Rocket, I appreciated it as one of Anderson’s first efforts, bearing the hallmarks of a style that he would come to develop. With Fantastic Mr Fox, I just couldn’t connect with the story – the humour and the narration didn’t particularly grab me, although I certainly thought it was a well-made film. It seemed like a turning point for him – while his earlier films seemed to have an innate grittiness under the surface of their stylish exteriors, which weren’t as polished and saturated as his visuals have inevitably become, Fantastic Mr Fox didn’t have this same sensibility.
As Anderson has become more popular, no longer standing as the go-to filmmaker for twee-loving, Tumblr-reblogging teenagers and hipsters between the mid-2000s and 2010s, and instead becoming one of the most acclaimed directors of his generation, he has become lazy and predictable. This isn’t exactly a new argument – when The French Dispatch came out, critics were quick to question why Anderson was rehashing lots of similar character tropes and visual techniques, and then the same happened with Asteroid City.
But again? When I saw the trailer for his newest film, The Phoenician Scheme, land on my Instagram homepage, I thought I was watching clips from The French Dispatch for a second, before realising it was a completely new movie. I was shocked. How many times can Anderson be given several million dollars to call up the same actors (including those with sexual assault allegations like his beloved Bill Murray), and emulate the same camera angles and the same themes with the same sense of humour and ‘quirky’, often detached style?
There are so many filmmakers out there, particularly from marginalised backgrounds, who will never get the funding to make a movie, but Anderson has free rein to make the same movie over and over. It’s depressing. His movies are coming to feel increasingly parodic, relying on techniques he initially stole from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and cranking up the intensity metre as far as it can go. The fact that it was a trend on TikTok to make Anderson-esque videos, which simply involved users standing in front of the camera awkwardly, using symmetry, and doing something a little offbeat, is proof that he’s got a formula nailed – but that’s not exactly a good thing.
It’s tired and uninspired, and it makes you wonder if Anderson is capable of actually writing a diverse range of characters or working in a multitude of genres. He certainly has a case of style over substance, whereas his earlier films had so much more authenticity and bite to them. His films feel like faux-arthouse cinema, with many audiences treating Anderson’s films like they’re super indie and experimental pictures compared to your average popcorn flick. While yes, Anderson’s films are more visually stimulating than most Marvel movies or big-budget blockbusters, they’re still just as formulaic.
It would be nice to see Anderson go back to his roots, or at least work with some new (and more diverse) actors. It would also be great to see him develop his characters with more complexity rather than consistently working with large ensemble casts – now that would be far more interesting.
