![]() ![]() Where Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums included multiple beats of emotional disclosure-immediately endearing us to each film’s fairly pathetic protagonists- Budapest and Dispatch tease out an emotional landscape with subtlety in dialogue and gesture. His narrative style, though, has become more restrained. Moonrise Kingdom © Focus Features/Everett Collection.Īs time goes on, Anderson’s visual style stays consistent. Holding a tumbler of liquor and softly teetering in an orange muumuu at the front of the stage, she dismisses the audience’s shock, and then swiftly returns to her lectern. Berensen ( Tilda Swinton, playing a character inspired by art insider and lecturer Rosamond Bernier) bluntly reveals, during a presentation at a Kansas art center, that she was sexually harassed and attacked by the artist she’s lecturing about, Moses Rosenthaler ( Benicio del Toro). In another vignette from Dispatch, J.K.L. ![]() ![]() ( Bill Murray), who tells him, “It’s the best part of the whole thing.” But even this moment of recognition is an aside Wright includes this passage in the piece he’s writing for the titular publication only at the insistence of his editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. You see, I’m a foreigner.” Wright can relate like Nescaffier, he’s neither white nor French-born. One of that film’s vignettes finds prison chef Nescaffier ( Stephen Park) revealing to writer Roebuck Wright ( Jeffrey Wright) that he’s willing to risk his life by eating a poisoned radish because he “didn’t want to disappoint anybody. His stylistic signature lays groundwork for more expansive, often troubling ideas that poke at the surfaces his images project. Once we understand film as its own medium, and not just as a conduit for other kinds of storytelling, Anderson’s style reveals itself to be much more than the contents of a Pinterest board, “inspo” for design obsessives worldwide, or clever play by a wealthy man-child. But dismissals of Anderson’s work as “twee” or “cold” or “precocious” reveal a kind of disinterest in the ideas that images-and not only speeches and interactions-put forth. A visually beautiful film, of course, isn’t necessarily good, either. Ugliness, we’re told, is realistic, salt of the earth-and therefore authentic.īut film is a fundamentally visual medium-one where even ugliness or unevenness is a choice, a signifier that, in plenty of films, replaces actual character development or thoughtfulness. In the U.S., and surely elsewhere, highly perfected stylistic presentations can strike a nerve they seem bourgeois, inaccessible, pretentious at best and empty at worst. They’re not adorable, but symmetrical and severe-adhering to strict dictates in color, pattern, camera movement, pacing, props, animation, costume, and performance. The same can’t be said of Anderson’s films, including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and his latest, the New Yorker–magazine–inspired The French Dispatch, which is currently in theaters, and which Ganz took issue with specifically. Truly precious, precocious films stick eccentric bows onto conventional packages- Michel Gondry may be accused of as much. ![]() Really, Anderson has nothing to do with the world of twee, a term defined by a slightly askew adorableness. But his take, and others like it-the sort that have dogged Anderson for years-are not critical elucidations of Anderson’s work so much as a series of imprecise, or lazy, readings. Ganz, a self-declared onetime fan of the director, now sees Anderson as an old man cosplaying as a “precocious child,” a director who artificially inserts his own sense of cleverness in his films. It’s the same impulse for unrigorous comparison that leads us to evaluate the oeuvre of Francophile American filmmaker Wes Anderson as twee, cute, precious-even increasingly lacking “objectivity,” as John Ganz noted in a Gawker lament this week. We tell ourselves not to compare them-but given how often those reminders come, it seems many of us can’t resist. ![]()
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