Paul Risker on the cinema of Wes Anderson…
Known for brandishing his pen and camera to create a quirky brand of cinema, with the check-in date upon us for the whimsical delights of his eighth feature film The Grand Budapest Hotel, the imaginative auteur Wes Anderson looks to bring his cinema full circle.
From Royal Tenenbaums to Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has compiled a collection of whimsical family dramas. Habitually creating films that are of the opinion that cinematic realism is a fabrication; Anderson’s cinema echoes the infamous words of Jean-Luc Godard: “Film is 24 lies a second.” Affording his films trademark honesty the self-conscious and whimsical language defines him as one of American cinemas leading auteurs.
Creating his cinematic worlds with an independent logic to those of his contemporaries, Anderson is not following tradition by asking us to suspend our belief. By openly acknowledging the lie of cinema, his films unshackle themselves from the attempt of creating an imitation of reality that feels naturally authentic. Instead his interest lies predominantly in the creation of a whimsical and self-knowing reality.
Caught between animation and live action, Anderson’s scenes resemble single drawings in a box. Shooting in the style of an animation even his characters are framed and positioned in such a stylistic vein; the colourful palette illuminating the cartoonish comedy.
The interiors of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Grand Budapest Hotel resemble a Victorian doll house; the camera’s rigid vertical and horizontal movements framing both the Belafonte and the hotel from the point of view that one would perceive the inside of a doll house.
His use of the space allows a self-conscious imagination to thrive, a childlike whimsy in which even his characters speak with a poetic and unnatural vocabulary. The music picks up the fanciful beats of the dialogue as does the cinematography and the understated and straight performances which are void of natural emotion.
The whimsical label overshadows the familial theme which Anderson has laced his films with; equal to his fanciful approach to narrative. The Royal Tenenbaums is a natural progression from Bottle Rocket and Rushmore; Anderson making the transition from a story of friendship and of a ménage à trois love story to the tale of family reunion. All of Anderson’s films have a comical edge with an alternative point of view on the familial. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou the family narrative would be merged with a re-imaging of Moby Dick, whilst The Darjeeling Limited would place the reunion of three brothers within the context of a road movie, and Moonrise Kingdom as a coming of age and escape story.
There is a certain intimacy within these four films, and bucking the convention of an original screenplay as was and still is his forte, he would adapt Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox as a live action animation and use it as the basis of his communal patriarch story.
If there is a beginning then there must be an end, and The Grand Budapest Hotel whether coincidental or not finds Anderson breaking his focus on the familial and Bergmanesque scenes of a family. With his latest endeavour he returns to the less familial dramas of Bottle Rocket’s story of friendship and Rushmore’s love story.
Predominantly a story of friendship, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a potential closing chapter with a tidy bow on his career, leaving Anderson with an opportunity to explore his cinematic language and creativity through new avenues. But these stories of families fractured through divorce and estrangement are potentially filtered through his personal experiences as a child of divorce. The family theme is likely to remain an integral thematic thrust for Anderson regardless of the new avenues, the only question whether he will he lose his way as Tim Burton seemingly as – his work becoming a caricature of itself. Even Fantastic Mr. Fox which on the surface appears to be a dream of the wholesome family is under threat, as dream turns into nightmare.
Anderson habitually embraces the comic and the tragic; the tragedy swirling like treacherous undercurrents. In The Grand Budapest Hotel this comes in the form of the loss of a wife of whom the hotel is a means of remembrance as Anderson continues to explore the narrative device of the fractured family. A cinema filled with a self-conscious awareness, the thematic concern is offset with an emphasis on it from our side of the screen. Through his cast of regular actors and those newcomers that arrive with each new film, alongside Christopher Nolan, Joss Whedon and Robert Rodriguez who are infamous for their cinematic families, Anderson himself is and has been in the process of putting together his own.
Anderson intertwines his family of characters and actors with the whimsical, and his latest entry in his ouevre is a moment that whether conscious or not sees him bring his career full circle. Of course it is done with his usual playfulness, inventiveness and absurdity that imbues it with a certain theatricality and as David Jenkin’s wrote a “whimsical fabrication of reality”.
Paul Risker is a freelance writer and contributor to Flickering Myth.
Originally published March 27, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
