Wes Anderson: the Writer's Director
It was a rainy and cold day in Roxborough when my future husband, Dave, and I went to see a new movie at our local movie theater, Rushmore, the first film to be in wide release from director Wes Anderson. I was already pretty loaded in on our relationship because my husband wore Doc Martens, wrote and drew satirical comics, and liked some cool music. When we came out of the movie I felt even more in love, with my husband, with life, with the world in general. I was vibrating.
So, there was no question of what I was going to do last weekend: I was going to go see Anderson's newest movie, The Phoenician Scheme. It was everything I could have hoped for, weird, hopeful, sad, funny, well-acted, well-written, and the set was amazing, as were all the props, details, etc. The postcards were absolutely gorgeous, and how many films have you been to where there are postcards?
I will say this, having seen The Phoenician Scheme, I do think Wes Anderson is making movies for me. And for my husband. And for the weird kids who grew up in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. If you weren't in K-12 during one of those decades, maybe his films aren't for you, because the things I recognize, from the postcards to everyone eating a dinner of tinned fish directly from the tin, is something that's not really happening anymore. But I remember those things from my childhood. I remember my grandmother treasuring postcards and cards she received as if they were gifts. I remember my father and brother and I having a couple of tins of kippers or sardines for dinner if my mom was working that night. I remember the weird remedies for what ails you: Mercurochrome, black salve, mud, strange bandages made of cloth. I remember taking the train to New York City with my mother, my brother, my cousins, and my aunt, because there was a train, and they felt we should try it out. I remember we went sightseeing, including climbing the 354 steps of the Statue of Liberty, dressed like we were going to church, because you did not go on a train in your regular clothes. Years later, when I went to France with my high school French class, as the first person in the family to go on a plane, I had two new dresses, one to wear on the plane, and one to wear to Notre Dame on Easter Sunday. It was important to family honor that I looked nice, that I looked like a kid who knew how to act. And, of course, the whole family was in the airport watching us line up and board, and my grandmother was teary-eyed because she was certain I was going to die on the plane, or in the foreign country. Mais ni l'un ni l'autre n'est arrivé.
I'm not bemoaning that kids don't overdress or eat tinned fish, by the way, but, as for the fish, they don't know what they're missing. Although I don't think we worried about bad breath back then the way we seem to today. We ate some stinky foods on a regular basis! I remember our tour guide in France dressed very chic, for the ten days or so we were there, and had about four outfits she rotated through, and a tight bun up on her head, and I thought she was awesome, and held onto the pole next to her on the Metro, and she grabbed the pole up high, and she smelled of body odor in a way that no one put together or dressed well had ever smelled in my life, and somehow it was part of the mystique.
The Phoenician Scheme is funny, and engaging, and outlandish. I wonder, every time I see a Wes Anderson film, about Anderson's father. Wikipedia tells me this, "Wesley Wales Anderson was born on May 1, 1969, in Houston, Texas, to Texas Anne Anderson (née Burroughs) [6], a realtor and archaeologist,[7] and Melver Leonard Anderson, who worked in advertising and public relations." Sounds about right. The mothers in the films are often either absent, or icy, and the fathers are outlandish, and often cause all the troubles, but somehow are more beloved than the mothers. I can imagine that for a realtor mom and an advertising dad. Benicio del Toro stars in the movie, and he is also of our certain age (Anderson and I), and he is magnificent as the larger-than-life father to one precocious daughter, who he loves as much as a self-aggrandizing father can, and a gaggle of sons, some adopted, who he ignores completely. In fact it is his daughter who humanizes him: she makes him include his sons in his life, acts as a surrogate wife, both dealing with his messes and standing up for him while she runs his larger life, and adores him in that way we children of those eras adored our fathers.
I think the problem some folks have with Anderson's movies is they are looking for some sort of connection to the rest of the movies we see come out of Hollywood. I was shocked to see someone call The Phoenician Scheme gory, because the only gore, by current standards, is clearly cartoonish. Without giving anything away that you don't learn in the first few moments, De Toro's character has been (by a very slim margin each time) unsuccessfully assassinated somewhere in the neighborhood of seven times when we meet him. So the violence, Del Toro holds a glob of something (looked like liver to me, having had a mother who used to enjoy eating it) against his stomach, and says it is a vestigial organ that he is trying to push back in, and remarks, about putting it back in, "It's not as easy as it looks." That's something that, in my view, comes right out of the Pythons' playbook, "Can we have your liver?"
Anderson's movies are not meant to be serious, but they are earnest. They are not meant to be "normal," but they do have much to teach us if we can let them seep into us, like Colgate toothpaste was supposed to seep into our teeth in the 1970s. And I think what we are supposed to find, when we open the package, is a box of treasures from a certain era of childhoods past: one shoelace from our old school shoes, magic shells from that time at the beach, an old matchbook, the empty Sucrets tin from when we had scarlet fever that lead to the tonsillectomy, the postcard our great aunt sent from her trip to Chicago, a few marbles, the key from an anchovy tin, the autographed baseball, a torn train ticket, the order page from an Archie comic you had planned to use to buy the spy camera if you could have saved enough pennies, the impossibly tiny plastic doll with removable shoes, and all the memories we're toting around to this day that both weigh us down, and cushion the blows life throws.
This movie, The Phoenician Scheme, was great, and I cannot wait to see it again. My personal favorite, though, still remains The Darjeeling Limited. My own mother is a cold mother who would not do things that mothers are very much supposed to do because she just didn't want to, and a father who was just too amazing for his children to ever hope to find a way to measure up to, let alone exceed. My father was handsome and extremely masculine with no effort, and could fix anything. I remember a Sunday at my grandmother's, all of the family up one story on her row home porch in Southwest Philadelphia, when my cousin, always getting into trouble, and about seven years old, ran into her street unexpectedly, and was hit by a car and knocked down. The street was so tight and tiny that the car had only been able to go fast enough, maybe ten miles per hour, to knock him off his feet, but his father, the brilliant cardiologist who had married my aunt, stood there on the porch, mouth agape, and my father, the eighth-grade dropout, leapt over the railing, and sailed over the hill of front lawn, down to the street, where he scooped my cousin up, and simultaneously tore open the door of the car. My father won life in that moment. Who could top that? The cardiologist could never hope to compete, and neither could any of the kids watching that Superman-like feat. My brother and my cousins were forever trying to match him.
So, if you were born beyond the 1980s, Anderson's films may not hit you the same as they hit me. I think Anderson is a writer's director because he is adding in all of the details a writer would put in a book: the sets, the clothes are meticulous. If you want to know, as an author, how to describe someone, watch an Anderson film, and do this exercise: choose a character of your choice from the film, and describe the character's looks, clothing, attitude, job, voice, manner of speech, etc. Or, pick a favorite scene from one of Anderson's movies, and list off the things(props, details) you see in it. Nothing is left out.
Anderson doesn't just write film-fiction. He also writes film-poetry, and if you want to see what I mean, I refer you to this post: Asteroid City: Wes Anderson's first poem.
I also found this very interesting interview with Anderson, in which he pretends to explain his films, and is cagey in the most unassuming way, and doesn't explain them at all.
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