[ad_1]
If you’ve been on the internet at any time in the first six months of 2023, you’re bound to have encountered a video or series of images depicting a famous pop culture property filtered through “a Wes Anderson aesthetic.” An easy way to mash up two recognizable cinematic properties to get quick clicks and views, these A.I. creations have garnered lots of views and incredibly justified scorn. It’s staggering just how much these mashups miss the entire point of Wes Anderson‘s movies. These attempts at crossing over pop culture properties demonstrate no love for the thematic underpinnings of Anderson’s directorial effort, not to mention a grave misunderstanding of his most notable visual impulses.
Tragically, these A.I. monstrosities reflect how so many people look at Wes Anderson’s movies as just a bunch of eccentricities wrapped up in ornately organized shots leaning heavily on symmetry. While there’s an undeniable recurring visual aesthetic running throughout the various directorial efforts of Wes Anderson, those kinds of shots aren’t the only thing present in his filmmaker exploits. Gorgeous imagery is just one of the many pleasures that can be uncovered when watching movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Rushmore, and so many others. These projects have become so beloved because of the emotions they explore, the messy characters they focus on, and their willingness to go to dark places…qualities that no A.I. could ever hope to capture.
What Makes Wes Anderson Movies More Powerful Than Any A.I. Could Ever Grasp?
A key thing parodies of Wes Anderson’s works seem to miss is that all the dollhouse-like environments of his movies are meant to contrast the human beings that inhabit these locales. Individual frames in features like Moonrise Kingdom and The Royal Tenenbaums may be intricately organized and staged, but the people in those frames are nowhere near as organized internally. It’s a quality that continues a long cinematic tradition of juxtaposing gorgeous production design with incredibly complicated and fragmented people. Just look at works like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes, which features radiant colors straight out of a dream yet ends on a note of brutal tragedy for its protagonist. These are the movies that serve as precursors to the kind of dissonance Anderson thrives on.
There’s no better depiction of this quality throughout Wes Anderson’s filmography than in his 2009 feature Fantastic Mr. Fox. His first feature-length animated directorial effort, Mr. Fox sees Anderson leaving flesh-and-blood humans behind in favor of a world entirely manmade. The main critters are realized as intentionally artificial-looking stop-motion puppets. Their movements are jagged and the gorgeous sets they reside in eschew any sense of reality. These animals have access to stoves, ovens, and other appliances underground because it’s a story aimed at children, anything can happen. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a movie that works overtime to distance itself from the real world, a welcome visual trait in an age of perfect-looking computer animation.
Yet Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s original children’s book makes time to emphasize small moments where these animals feel as real as you or I. An apologetic display from Mr. Fox (George Clooney) only inspires Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) to remark “I never should’ve married you,” a raw line that feels all the more impactful coming out of such a heightened character. Youngster Ash (Jason Schwartzman) and his complicated adolescent rebellion come off as an accurate representation of youthful angst, they haven’t sanded the repellent edges off this kid just because this movie is aimed at families. Best of all, though, is a scene where Mr. Fox talks to Ash about the night he found out Mrs. Fox was pregnant with their son.
In this anecdote, Mr. Fox recalls himself and his wife frantically digging away from human farmers yet his mind was solely focused on the question of “who is this cub of mine going to grow up to be?” Mr. Fox proceeds to put a hand on Ash’s shoulder and remarks “I’m so glad that cub was you.” The intimate dialogue deliveries from Clooney and Alexandre Desplat’s captivating score all work with Anderson’s writing to make this an unforgettable display of momentary father/son bonding from clearly unreal animated foxes. Anderson’s willingness to emphasize the imperfections within Mr. Fox and Ash and their fractured dynamic has turned something that doesn’t look realistic into cinema that’s emotionally tangible. Not shying away from those darker, rougher character details is what makes Wes Anderson’s films so momentously moving.
Wes Anderson Movies Are More Tonally Complicated Than They Seem
Much of Moonrise Kingdom takes place in luscious locations full of green and yellow foliage, a way of making the outdoors seem like an inviting domain for the adolescent protagonist to run off to. However, in one of the movie’s most moving sequences, Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura Bishop (Frances McDormand), parents of one of those two runaway youngsters, simply lie in their beds in an ordinary-looking room. The production design and soundtrack have gone sparser here as the married couple trade short sentences expressing their internal woe. “I hope the roof flies off, and I get sucked up into space. You’ll be better off without me,” Walt tells his wife, who proceeds to inform him that they can’t feel sorry for themselves because they’re all their ids have got. “That’s not enough,” Walt meekly replies, his inadequacies as a parent and own self-hatred weighing down his mind.
This scene is another instance of the kind of intimate emotional exchange between flawed people that Wes Anderson does so well. The worlds he crafts may look like they belong in storybooks, but everyone on-screen tends to suffer from some kind of relatable flaw or inner paranoia. In this Moonrise Kingdom scene, Walt and Laura’s vulnerabilities encapsulate how our parents are humans too. We may look to them as sterling figures of limitless knowledge when we’re really young, but they’re always just people improvising responses to the world around them. Sometimes, they not only don’t have the answers, they feel hopeless in their abilities as a guardian. Committing to this darker, but incredibly authentic, portrait of parenthood informs some of the most memorably poignant moments of Moonrise Kingdom.
Such scenes emphasizing the universal shortcomings of people inform the more nuanced tone of Wes Anderson’s works, which are far from being a bunch of cutesy quirks and hollow eccentricities. Part of this comes from Anderson’s willingness to let moments like Walt and Laura’s nighttime conversation just breathe as dramatic beats, rather than undercut them with intrusive bits of comedy. Even Fantastic Mr. Fox doesn’t dilute the “I never should’ve married you” line with a comical remark that can soften the edges of that darker revelation. It’s also impressive that Anderson often resorts to a “less is more” approach to these bursts of darkness or vulnerability. While the production design and costumes of his works are highly pronounced, his characters often so bottle up their emotions that they can only express their fears, sorrows, or shortcomings in short bursts of words. They don’t burst into lengthy monologues, they just offer up sentence fragments that still communicate so much.
This restrained approach to dialogue and other expressions of complicated emotions is often masterfully done, as seen in one of the most famous moments of The Royal Tenenbums. This moment concerns a brief exchange between Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller) and his father, Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman). The former character finally tells his father “I’ve had a rough year, Dad,” to which Royal Tenenbaum replies “I know, son.” Short, and simple, but it says so much, especially in how these two finally communicate. Combining restraint with a willingness to go to dark and deeply vulnerable places molds the tonally complicated and rich soul of Wes Anderson’s works.
How Does ‘Asteroid City’ Reflect the Important Darker Elements of Wes Anderson’s Works?
Wes Anderson’s most recent directorial effort, Asteroid City, provides many striking examples of the kind of melancholy and darker elements that make this filmmaker’s artistic exploits so fascinating. A quietly ominous atmosphere is established from the get-go in this feature with a shot of a massive nuclear warhead nonchalantly traveling on some train tracks. In the Atomic Age, nuclear anxiety is so commonplace that a weapon that could destroy the world is shipped on trains alongside Pontiacs and pecans.
In the titular location of Asteroid City, the various parents and teenagers who’ve come for a Junior Stargazers conference are defined by feelings of isolation. Movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) openly talks about how she’s resigned herself to the fact that she’ll eventually end up dead in a bathtub in a motel while scientist Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) reflects on her own loneliness in an off-hand remark about how she sometimes wishes she had children. Protagonist Audie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) trumps them all, though, as he buttons up all his emotions (including those about his recently deceased wife) and struggles to connect to his father-in-law.
Then there’s the interesting metatextual detail about how everything in this movie is part of a fictional in-universe play entitled Asteroid City. Towards the end of this movie’s runtime, Augie begins to question some of his own inexplicable actions, a reflection of how we all search for answers to the most bizarre elements of everyday life. Will finding concrete answers fill the aching loneliness in our souls? That’s what Steenbeck begins to represent towards the end of Asteroid City, a movie that still finds time for plenty of eccentric touches like a vending machine that sells land. Within those humorous beats, though, is a quietly poignant yarn that uses the omnipresent anxiety of the Atomic Age as a springboard to explore a bevy of isolated souls grappling with their individual neuroses.
Wes Anderson’s Movies Are Complicated & Deserve to be Seen as Such
Wes Anderson’s features are truly remarkable. They deliver imagery that could only exist in the movies while exploring emotions and relationships that evoke everyday reality. In works ranging from Rushmore to The Grand Budapest Hotel to Fantastic Mr. Fox to Asteroid City, among many others, Anderson dazzles the eyes, stimulates the brain, and touches the heart, often all at once. Such a deft mixture wouldn’t be possible without his willingness to go to some dark and even uncomfortable places. Ash in Fantastic Mr. Fox, for instance, often seems like a truly cruel child, while a suicide attempt in The Royal Tenenbaums is played with appropriate levels of gravity, ditto the reveal of Zero’s (Tony Revelori) backstory in Grand Budapest Hotel.
The world is a complicated place. So are the people who inhabit it. The astonishingly radiant sets of Anderson’s work may not be locales people encounter every day, but the emotions and nuances his films explore are something we all deal with on a daily basis. Watching features like The French Dispatch or Bottle Rocket doesn’t provide easy answers on how to navigate troubled father/son dynamics or depression…but it can make you feel a little less lonely for a little while. In other words, the movies of Wes Anderson are beautiful-looking reminders that nobody is alone being a deeply imperfect human unsure of what to do “in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” That’s the kind of intricate artistic accomplishment that A.I.-programmed parodies of Wes Anderson movies can never understand.
[ad_2]
Source link
Armessa Movie News