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.