Wes Anderson Shines

Cinema is, above all, a visual art. Yes, there is the screenplay, the music, the acting, dancing or singing, but ultimately we are drawn to the images on the screen. There is probably no master of the visual art in cinema among today’s directors like Wes Anderson.

I have not written about Anderson before because sometimes it takes one movie to bring to the forefront the majesty of all of an artist’s work. In my case, it is his latest film The Grand Budapest Hotel which has done this. Like with many of his other movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, and, to a lesser degree, Rushmore (I’ve yet to see Bottle Rocket), it is my feeling that Wes Anderson movies are to other great drama films or comedies much what naïf art is to classical art, in more ways than one.
 

Moonrise Kingdom

To begin with, the stories in Wes Anderson’s movies are metaphors to reality. His characters are eccentric and idiosyncratic sometimes to the extreme. Some of the situations and people are silly or ridiculous to a fault. Yet, even in his comedies there is an undercurrent of darker, deeper themes. We find reality by approaching it from the bizarre.

In many of his movies, the eccentricity of the characters hides deep loneliness and alienation, which are recurrent themes in Anderson movies. This is pretty evident in The Royal Tenenbaums, especially in characters like Margot, but also in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The character of M. Gustave, played brilliantly by the great Ralph Fiennes, carries the loneliness in his expression and in the always short-lived relationships with which he has filled his world. It is no wonder that Bill Murray is an actor that has appeared in most all of Wes Anderson’s films, for who is a more deadpan comedian than Murray, who can convey more sadness and desolation with his eyes? Owen Wilson, an Anderson collaborator from the beginning, is much the same. Certainly Anderson knows how to bring out the best in these actors.
 

Bill Murray in Rushmore, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited

Yet another certainty we find in Wes Anderson’s movies is that there is always someone who will come to the rescue of such loneliness. M. Moustafa, the bell boy and heir to M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest; Suzy to Sam in Moonrise Kingdom; Herman Blume and Max Fischer in Rushmore. Eventually, the characters in his films form a “family” of sorts, even if it is a clan of concierges from the different hotels of Europe.
 

The Royal Tenenbaums

So to this backdrop of eccentric characters (none more so than in The Grand Budapest), a tangled and creative story line is woven. But the final touch of genius to his films are the images. Anderson is a visual master. His shots are incredibly meticulously prepared. Each shot is a tableau, with amazingly creative set design, fascinating color schemes and tremendously precise camera movements. Wes Anderson’s obsession with symmetry has become common knowledge, yet it does not detract from how much work is put into every frame, quite the contrary.

Darjeeling Limited

All this visual mastery is never more apparent than in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Because of the time period, because of this work with sets and colors, and because in this film Wes Anderson shifts frame sizes (the movie went out to theaters with instructions on different aspect ratios), at times it feels as if we’re watching a zoetrope (those devices that produced the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures). This movie sparkles! It is hard to take one’s eyes away from the screen for an instant.

Oh how right M. Gustave is when he says, in The Grand Budapest Hotel: “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” Without a doubt, Wes Anderson’s movies are among these glimmers.

Hitch

I went to see Rear Window last night, during one of those “Classic Movie” showings at the local movie theatre. I have most of my favorite Hitchcock movies on disc, but nothing beats seeing one of his films on the big screen. And that’s kind of the beauty of this director’s work, because his films are so very visual and yet they are all about the interior, the person’s mind in all its terrifying complexity. His art lies in devilishly taking us into his characters’ thoughts and feelings, while weaving a suspenseful and vibrant film around them.

Alfred Hitchcock seems to be making a comeback these years, in biopics like The Girl or Hitchcock, and series inspired by his movies, like Bates Motel. He certainly is present by means of his influence on directors like Pedro Almodovar or Darren Aranofsky. This might just lure the younger generation of movie goers to his films; or maybe not, given young people’s appetite for blockbusters.

The Rope - Dial M for Murder - Marnie

Alfred Hitchcock is the anti-blockbuster director par excellence, yet his movies provide more thrill and suspense than any of the multi-million dollar, loud and flashy modern day films of this type. Many of Hitchcock’s greatest films take place in a room or similar confined space; they are all about the acting, the sets and location and his singular camera angles and movements. And they are not movies made to simply entertain, nor are they the type that take on broad social or political issues; his are movies that deal in the everyday person, in their psyche and in deep human relationships.

In Rear Window, with the first wide-screen shots of James Stewart’s face, his beautiful blue eyes, we are drawn into his feelings and thoughts and move through the movie seeing everything this voyeur sees from his room, where basically all the action takes place. Spellbound, The Rope, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rebecca, Marnie and, of course, Psycho all have this common thread of the action and thrill being the protagonists’ minds and the tension between the dark and twisted mind of one of the characters as seen by the other, which is us, his audience, caught in the terrifying grip of those tangled minds.

Salvador Dali designed dream in Spellbound

Even those other famous films, the suspenseful ones that deal more in the story of the wrong person at the wrong place and time, like North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew too Much, The Birds or Notorious, strong human relationships are still at the core. 

North by Northwest

And though he dealt with the everyday man and woman, in reality the Hitchcock protagonists of the films I’ve mentioned are not really ordinary folk, unless you consider people that look and act like Cary Grant, Lawrence Olivier, James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Ingrid Bergman or Tippy Hedren ordinary. Yet he sort of made them so. He was able to draw these beautiful, yet great actors into his movies more than often; Cary Grant and James Stewart both made four films with Hitchcock, and Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman made three each.

It is well known (or rumored) that “Hitch” was sexist, quite harsh with his female actors and never gave enough credit to his wife and long-time collaborator Alma Reville. Also that he showed preference for “cool” blondes. While this may be true, if one hadn't read these rumors, we could easily think the opposite, because the female leads in Hitchcock’s films are not just beautiful, they are strong, intelligent, witty women; none of them are “housewife” like. They are not “the other” in his films, they go tête-à-tête with the male characters. In fact, in many of his films, like The Birds or Rebecca, they are the main protagonist.

Grace Kelly-Kim Novak-Tippy Hedren in Hitchcock films.

The male and female relationships in his movies, while many times very romantic, are light years away from the sorry ones we see in “rom-coms” today. They are mature relationships, these are adults, they are complex, and at the same time, they are full of humor and in no way dull. They are also not easy. Vertigo, of course, comes to mind as the most complex of all, but in Notorious or even in Rear Window, the romantic relationship between the protagonists is real and deep. These are not cliché romances.

Hitchcock directed 69 films. He considered Shadow of a Doubt his favorite. This movie, which starred Joseph Cotten, had a screenplay by Thornton Wilder and the author of the story, Gordon McDonell was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story. This was another art of Hitchcock: to bring out the best in the writers and the actors that worked with him. Many of the most famous films of the Hollywood legends mentioned were made by Hitchcock.

It speaks volumes of Hollywood that despite his contributions to cinema, Alfred Hitchcock was never awarded a Best Director Academy Award. He was nominated five times and Rebecca won Best Picture (so the producer got the Oscar), but Hitch only got the “lifetime” kind of awards. No matter; forty-four years after he directed his last film, Family Plot, his influence is everywhere and his fine director’s eye is still on the big screen.

Leaves of Grass

Comentary on the 86th Academy Award nominees posted on The Oscars tab (in Spanish).