I tend to have strong feelings about pop culture. That’s generally an asset – I am a critic after all. At times though this gets me in trouble. I tend to champion certain odd artifacts and decry other things that groups of people – especially other critic types – unabashedly love. To give one brief example, I’ve never enjoyed the films of Quentin Tarantino, completely apart from other problems I have with him. I know plenty of very intelligent people who love QT’s work, and that’s fine. I really don’t dislike things out of a spirit of contrariness, at least as best as I can tell; I just follow my critical instincts where they lead. But my tendency to be vocal about my likes and dislikes, coupled with what I flatter myself to be a rather caustic wit, has sometimes lead others to accuse me of being a hater. Which is ridiculous, given my unabashed, unironic love of The Backstreet Boys.
I find that the best way to stay honest as a critic is to engage and challenge myself. I know that I can fall victim to sweeping generalizations in my mind, and base conclusions about artists off of too little evidence. Which is why this past weekend I set out to watch two films by Wes Anderson, someone I’ve long publicly decried. For me Anderson – boy wonder of cinema – has always come across as too precious by half, his films a never ending litany of quirky tics and self conscious “uniqueness”. Anderson’s films always struck me as the cinema equivalent of the kid who wears suspenders and sits in the back of class spouting smart ass comments and makes shoebox models of scenes from Invader Zim because he wants everyone to know how incredibly special he is. Because of my scarring experiences with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox, I had long avoided the Anderson film that everyone told me I needed to see, The Royal Tenenbaums. So I picked that film up along with Rushmore, the film which came immediately before Tenenbaums and with it comprises Anderson’s breakthrough one-two punch.
In the spirit of honest self examination I must, in the wake of these two films, admit a painful truth: I was wrong about Wes Anderson. Yes, he’s still precocious, and both these films made me cringe in parts at the forced whimsy of some of his dialogue and situations, but they also filled me with appreciation for his artistic vision. When hitched to the right project, with the right set of circumstances there to balance out his bad habits, Anderson can make films that are full of life and wonder.
Rushmore, a coming of age high school comedy, works as well as it does because it casts a cocked eye at the protagonist, a typical Anderson type named Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), who spends his time as a scholarship student at the titular private school involved in everything but his studies. He heads numerous clubs and organizations, produces acclaimed plays which he has written, and consistently flunks all his classes. Max simultaneously strikes up friendships with Herman Blume (a note-perfect Bill Murray), a bored industrialist and father of two of Max’s lunkhead classmates, and Ms. Cross (Olivia Williams), a new teacher whom Max finds himself falling for. Max struggles to find balance in his life, especially when he ends up expelled from the school he so dearly loves.
What makes Rushmore click is the subtle puncturing of Max the film deploys. Anderson’s affection for the character certainly shines through, but he also doles out a heaping helping of wry observation about the distance between Max’s ambitions and the realities he creates. Max is a fairly typical precocious teenager – he longs to be recognized for being great, but he approaches his actual efforts at greatness half-assedly. He’s the kind of person who gets by on cleverness and charm but cannot disguise (at least from the wise) his relative emptiness. Anderson plays up the ridiculousness of Max’s pretensions, allowing him to make an ass of himself on numerous occasions. He also reveals the darker side of Max’s need to be liked; his romantic fancies for Ms. Cross turn twisted and obsessive when she dares bring him back to earth by reminding him of the gap in age and life between them. In the end the film treats Max the way most teenagers deserve to be treated: with encouragement, yes, but also with more than a dab of eye-rolling.
The Royal Tenenbaums, by contrast, works because it raises the emotional stakes to a fever pitch. It too deals with precociousness, but the Tenenbaum siblings – former prodigies in business, writing, and sports – are now has-beens, crippled by the neuroses leftover from their unstable upbringing. Their father Royal (the always excellent Gene Hackman) re-enters their lives, claiming to be dying, and sets off a chain reaction of introspection and and acting out. Though in parts extremely funny, the film has a current of melancholy running through it that hits the viewer (or at least this viewer) on a gut level. As someone for whom things always came easily in youth, I can relate to the reality check that adulthood brings to precocious children.
It occurs to me that one of the themes Anderson loves to explore is a longing for the innocence of childhood. Surrounded by the tragedy of a dead spouse, or a loveless marriage, or being in love with your (adopted, thank goodness) sister, it is a real temptation for Chas, Margot, and Richie Tenenbaum to seek solace in the security of childhood haunts and habits. But you can never actually reenter childhood – thus the tragedy of being an adult. Royal, meanwhile, deals with the tragedy of the old: the realization that a lifetime of wrong choices has left you adrift and alienated from the people you love. He too longs for a return to simpler times, but his quest is equally quixotic.
These permeated boundaries – this Mosaic looking on the promised land of the past without being able to reach it – make for rich thematic material. Anderson brings a deft touch to both these films, a sensitive ear and eye to examining what works and what doesn’t. Though both have moments where they teeter towards the danger zone of affected whimsy (Tenenbaums especially almost twirls out of control near the end), but both manage to straighten themselves. I still have my problems with Anderson the filmmaker, but these two movies have convinced me that he’s worth giving a chance going forward. I’m going to try to get my hands on Moonrise Kingdom, his latest film, which from what I can tell explores many of the same themes, and I look forward to seeing what he does in the future. Because, like that attention seeking know it all in the back of the classroom, the cringe worthy moments – however frequent – are more than compensated for by the moments of actual, genuine brilliance.
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