WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE DARJEELING LIMITED

Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at The Film Temple to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.

Loren Greenblatt: Wes Anderson’s fifth film is a bit of an odd duck. It’s actually two films, a short film and then a full feature which he made later. The short, Hotel Chevalier finds Jason Schwartzman, for the first time in an Anderson film since Rushmore, pulling a geographic. He’s a perturbed man who’s run away from his problems in a French hotel. He learns that an old flame played by Natalie Portman has tracked him down and is coming to see him. There’s a nice little stretch where he sets about making the room up, sprucing himself up, finding exactly which song he’s going to play (“Where to You Go To My Lovely by Peter Sarstedt) in anticipation of what he hopes will be a romantic event.

Max O'Connell: Yeah. It’s pretty extraordinary that we don’t know the full details of their relationship, but we can tell by the intonation in Schwartzman’s voice and in his body language that this is someone very important to him who’s hurt him. He’s trying to do whatever he can to get things in order and keep his life together, but when we see him for the first time, he’s retreated from the world. He’s in this nice warm place where everything is bright yellow, and he’s wearing a bright yellow robe. He’s watching Stalag 17 on TV. And when she calls, that shield from the rest of the world comes tumbling down. It becomes the kind of melancholy we’ve seen from Anderson before, but much older and deeper.

LG: There’s this really nice moment where they open the door, and they come into an embrace. Schwartzman goes in for the kiss, but Portman goes for his shoulder, immediately drawing of the lines of how they feel. They don’t really dwell on this moment, so it’s one of those quick little things. It is an older melancholy, and less whimsical film than we’ve seen from Anderson. The film is sort of about that song. A lot of the film takes place with the song playing seemingly in its entirety under the dialogue. The song is about this man who’s pining for a lost woman, and he knows all these great details about her but can’t quite get inside her head. The film is almost a music video, or as close as Wes Anderson has ever gotten.

MO: In part because it is so much shorter, and it does feature the song very heavily. So much of it is so wonderfully choreographed to that song, particularly near the end after they’ve decided to have sex, and you can tell they have a lot of feelings for each other, but it’s leftover affection for something that’s clearly not working and has not worked out. We don’t know the full details of her character – she has bruises, but he’s surprised to see them, and they haven’t been together for a while – so it’s a kind of thing that she’s equally damaged if more enigmatic. The way Anderson frames them, for the most part, it’s in a long shot to imply the emotional distance between the two or a tight close up. I love the intimacy when they finally embrace, start kissing, and he starts undressing her. They’re so close together, but so far apart because they know this is the end of it, because he doesn’t want to see her again after this.

LG: Yeah, and he’ll double back on this in the feature film, but it’s not looking great. She tries to repair their friendship, but he’s not going for it. He flat-out says that he doesn’t care she didn’t mean to hurt him, that he never wants to be her friend, and that he’s OK with her feeling like shit if they fuck. There’s a sense of finality at this point.

MO: And of bitterness. It’s not self-pity, necessarily, but it’s something we could understand. It’s a wallop of a short, and it ends beautifully. It’s so confident that a lot of people felt that the feature paled a bit in comparison.

LG: To some degree, I think that. We should talk about how this connects to The Darjeeling Limited. Wes Anderson at the time was wishy-washy on whether or not he wanted this to be a part of the film or not. He shot it earlier, didn’t have a script for Darjeeling so much as an outline. Initially it was not attached to the film theatrically. On limited release, it was left out and released on iTunes. On wide release, it was attached.

MO: Which is how I saw it.

LG: So there’s a question of whether or not it’s part of the film. It’s billed as “Part I of The Darjeeling Limited” in the credits, but how should it be consumed? It’s still not definitively answered. For this rewatch, I saw Darjeeling first to try to take them as separate films. I could definitely understand seeing them together, but they’re also separated by style. Hotel is very much a summation of the Wes Anderson style to this point, where Darjeeling departs from it in very important ways.

MO: Yes it does!

LG: The opening of Darjeeling is done in media res, which is unusual for Anderson, who’s given to gentler, storybook introductions. We open on an unnamed businessman played by Bill Murray trying to make a train in India. The cab is rushing, there a lot of chaotic whip pans and handheld shots. Murray makes it to the station as the train is pulling out, and he chases after it. We get this gorgeous slow motion tracking shot set to The Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow.” And there’s a much younger man, Peter (Adrien Brody), who overtakes him and makes the train as he’s left behind. I don’t see the film as one of his best, but the opening is so masterful and full of subtext and symbolism that I wonder why the rest falls so short for me and a lot of people.

MO: It’s an interesting question, though I’d like to double back a bit. You said it’s not totally resolved on how that short connects to the film. We’re split on this. You’re torn, I think as soon as he did end up continuing the story (the short’s events are mentioned in the film, and Schwartzman’s character is one of the film’s protagonists alongside Brody and Owen Wilson). For me it’s a definitive part of the film. The difference in style is important because Darjeeling was at a point where people started knocking Anderson not stepping outside of his aesthetic (which is a stupid criticism, but whatever). Hotel Chevalier sees him doubling down on that style for a character who’s receding into it. The feature is still recognizably Anderson, but it is a bit of a departure (ironically, people still complained that it was too Wes-y), because it’s about trying to get into something new. The in media res opening, which I see as a whimsical homage to The French Connection, is about trying to break away from that. It’s very purposeful.

LG: It’s not that Anderson has completely left whimsy and storybook trappings aside. That opening is very storybook but in a different way, but it’s not as booklike. This is the first film he’s done since Bottle Rocket without some sort of chapter heading or curtain raise at the start of every new section. His bright color pallet is still there, but he utilizes shallow focus and long lenses to much greater extent and he moves the camera in new ways. He’s very much taking for a new set of influences. He acknowledges Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir’s film The River. There is a sense of stylistic exploration. I just wish it happened to more interesting characters.

MO: We’re going to disagree about how interesting they are, but let’s get into the style. It’s interesting how he’s sort of trying to have a lighter touch and mix the poetic realism of Renoir and Ray with his usual aesthetic. It’s still very colorful, and he does something with music that he had only hinted at before. Michael Powell had a theory of the “composed film,” where every element, from the designs to the actors to the music moving together and going together in a sort of synchronicity. Anderson played with that in the past, but it’s a lot more obvious here, particularly whenever he choreographs characters to music in slow motion to the Kinks with “Strangers” or “This Time Tomorrow” or “Powerman,” and I also think of the use of an underrated Stones song, “Play with Fire.” He’s choreographing to music pretty much the entire time, even if it’s just background music of Satyajit Ray’s films.

LG: His use of music has always been strong, but he does use it a little differently here. He let’s a lot of the pieces, particularly the non-English ones, play more atmospherically than in the past.

MO: Like the use of the Debussy piece when they’re around the fire.

LG: Or the stuff on the trains. It’s a huge stylistic choice, but it’s allowed to be more in the background than in the past. There’s a confidence to that.

MO: Something else that’s interesting: on the train, he’s using anamorphic framing for much tighter spaces. No matter how they try, these characters can’t really get away from each other. It’s a nice metaphor for how the family binds them together.

LG: We should actually talk about the plot. Jack (Schwartzman), Peter (Brody), and Francis (Wilson) are brothers, with Francis as a bit of an older, more damaged version of Wilson’s Bottle Rocket character, Dignan. These guys have been estranged for some time, and Francis has made a plan to get them back together in India, and they’re going on a spiritual journey because that’s what White people think you do in India. Francis has this very planned out with lists and itineraries, which are all laminated, and has a secret plan to bring his brothers to this place where their estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) is working as a missionary. But I don’t think these characters are as interesting. They have nice moments: I like that immediately as they arrive on the train, they bond by comparing the various illegal painkillers they’re on. But I thought a lot about The Royal Tenenbaums, which also has an estranged family trying to figure out if they want to be a family again. That film showed us what forced this fissure. Here, Anderson and his co-screenwriters Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola skip over that for the sake of narrative efficiency, but they end up doubling back, and a lot of the first half of the film feels like exposition to me in a very irritating way.

MO: You’re going to have to elaborate on that, because I don’t understand that criticism at all.

LG: There are all these running gags that inform us how they related to each other over the years. There’s a scene where one brother confesses a secret to a brother and asks for secrecy, and he’s immediately ratted out to the third brother. They do this seemingly endlessly and it got old for me pretty quick. Their bickering becomes more trying than interesting. These characters become more poignant by the end with the help of some really good filmmaking, but I think it’s the thinnest script he’s ever done and don’t find any of them compelling in the first half.

MO: They are to me. Part of it is me seeing them as all being connected to previous Wes Anderson characters with the wind knocked out of them by life: you mentioned Francis as being connected to Dignan, I see Jack as a sadder, more mature Max Fischer who’s retreated from the world –

LG: But Max Fischer has passions and interests. I don’t think Jack is that into being a writer. I think Owen Wilson has some sort of an education job, but it’s not explicitly mentioned…I don’t know who these people are outside of bickering.

MO: Huh. You don’t think Schwartzman is into writing? I don’t get that.

LG: He’s a writer who’s fallen back to just transcribing his life. That’s actually one of the gags I like. Every time he shares a story with his brothers, they’ll comment on how they like how they like that their characters did this or that, and Schwartzman will insist that the characters are all fictional.

MO: It’s not about falling back. It’s about how our art, however much we insist it doesn’t, reflects what we’re going through and who we are. Wes Anderson is a very private person, so we don’t know all the details, but so much of it is his addressing that his work reflects the struggles he’s gone through. And I do see him as being his into his writing. It’s his way of processing his grief, his melancholy, his problems, which is how many of us channel and understand our problems. He’s not admitting what he’s doing, though, so it doesn’t allow him to heal until later in the film.

LG: Part of it is that he’s such a depressed character in the short. The first image we get of him is him sitting in a bed, not moving much. All of these guys are on intense sedatives, so maybe that’s where I got that he isn’t into his work as much. And there’s also a sense in all of Anderson’s films after Rushmore that these characters wonder if they’re past their prime.

MO: Yeah. And I do see a bit of that in here, but that still connects him to Max Fischer to me in a really interesting way. Brody, meanwhile, hadn’t worked with Anderson before, but I see a lot of Margot and Chas Tenenbaum here, both in his secrecy and his prickliness. Where Schwartzman is mopey and Wilson’s trying to force the whimsy and spirituality (I love his insisting that everything around him is beautiful or incredible as a way to convince everyone, which will never work), Brody is the one who will lash out.

LG: But the thing is that you can describe the interplay between his characters in other films, but it also feels like a new thing. In Life Aquatic, the character relationships are among the most well thought out in the Anderson canon. I’ve always kind of felt that this was written more on the fly, a bit scrappier and ramshackle. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he wanted it in India, on a train and with these people. I think these are his flattest set of characters since Bottle Rocket.

MO: Hmm. I’d agree that they’re a bit more sketched out, and that is why this is probably his weakest film, but I view them more collectively than individually. Their relationship is the main character. It’s less about one of them and more about how they’re essentially symbiotic, whether they want to be or not. I also find the bickering funnier, and admittedly connect more to the characters than you do.

LG: You actually have siblings, I don’t.

MO: That could be part of it. And because it’s about a real family, it’s going to be at least partially in Tenenbaums’s shadow, and I think that’s why so many people are down on Darjeeling. I appreciate that we don’t get the full backstory, we just have to pick up from the way they act around each other what happened to them in the past. We get a bit about their mother’s distance, or about their father possibly having a favorite, without seeing it in a flashback or something. They’re so affected by how their parents have raised them, as with his previous film, but I appreciate that this film trusts us to pick up the cues.

LG: In theory, I agree with you. On paper, I understand that in terms of efficiency. But I don’t think it works with these particular characters, Though there are more moments of life as the film goes on like a wonderful reminder for how Anderson works with dialogue where Francis describes their mother: “She’s been disappearing all our lives.” That’s a wonderful line. When we meet her at the end of the film, that’s a fantastic moment. But there’s this shift midway after they leave the train and we’re meant to empathize with them more and it doesn't work 100% for me. They try to save three kids who fall into a river, and one of them dies. It becomes this sort of literary metaphor where the funeral for the Indian boy stands in for their father’s funeral, which they missed, and there's a greater metaphor where this exotic new land stands in for the alienation they feel living in a new world without their father. Which isn't completely invalid (Lost In Translation does something similar), but it's also a bit problematic seeing an entire country, and in this case a dead child, used to stand in for a dead white man. None of this is outrageously underlined in the film and it's not as big a problem as it could be but there’s a few people who point to Anderson’s treatment of race and point to this film as crossing a line and using Indian people as props and while I don't think it's as cut and dry as that, it's hardly invalid either.

MO: I do think that criticism is more merited here than in the past. Part of it is about these guys being ugly Americans abroad and not appreciating what’s around them, not being respectful of or interested in the culture except as a form of exoticism (which is something a lot of people knocked without realizing that the film is being autocritical). And they are more than props. I like the two major Indian characters on the train: The Chief Steward (Waris Ahluwalia), who’s furious with the brothers for their reckless behavior, and Rita (Amara Karan), who’s treated similarly to Inez in Bottle Rocket but more successfully.

LG: Because they can understand each other. Schwartzman goes after her because she’s hot and Indian, but back in reality, she’s clearly got some shit going on, and is in a complicated relationship with the train’s head steward that may or may not be on the rocks. That’s a very humanizing moment, but I wish we saw more of that character. She’s the one who reminds me of Margot Tenenbaum, not Adrien Brody. I really wish she could have shown up near the end. I could have seen a movie about her.

MO: But that’s not what the movie is about. It’s about these guys getting perspective. By the time they part, he realizes that she’s just as filled with life (and just as messed up) as he is, and that she’s not just some exotic object to be obtained.

LG: Then there's the way he shoots India. This is the most location based film he’s worked on at this point, there are still artificial sets, but less than in his previous few films, I do get the sense that he’s trying to portray India as a place that exists in reality rather than sticking purely to his normal fantasy diorama mode. But at the same time, I think he’s trying to have it both ways with how he portrays this foreign culture.

MO: That’s fair. I think she’s handled well, as is the head steward. His reactions are funny, he’s the straight man to these out-of-control characters, but he’s also the most reasonable person in the film. The only point where the film does have some problems for me is the death of the Indian boy, which is used as a way to bring them together and realize the importance of family. It ties into the film’s tendency to rely on big, literary symbols, like their fathers’ baggage that they cart around standing in for the baggage they carried over from their parents, or the physical scars Francis bears on his head from a motorcycle crash standing in for his emotional scars. It’s a bit much, and the boy’s funeral is an extension on that with the added problem of accidentally trivializing his death to bring them together and call back to their father’s funeral. It’s trying to be humane, it’s just a bit off in execution.

LG: The thing I wondered about probably around halfway through the film is, considering that this film is much more somber than most of Anderson’s work, is whether this film is meant to be a comedy or Anderson’s first drama that just happens to have comedic moments?

MO: That’s a good question. It’s certainly more somber than his previous work, it’s tipping towards drama, but there’s too much of Anderson who’s a comedic stylist to cancel that out. It’s closer to a pure drama than anything he’s ever made.

LG: I do feel that even though the film is indulgent in a lot of ways, he is trying to break out of his Wes Andersonisms, even though in doing so a lot of people think this is the most Andersonian thing.

MO: People who made the criticism that it was schtick rather than an aesthetic, which, no. It has different drawbacks, though I don’t think they’re as problematic as you do. Now, do you think it does gain cumulative power by the end? It might be a more personal thing for me, since I do have siblings and I do view them collectively rather than separately.

LG: Absolutely I do. There’s a lot of stuff that works, but I also found myself wondering whether it would be more powerful if it happened to the Tenenbaums or the Belafonte crew. Their dimensionality gets added in, but it doesn't totally make up for how much I was twiddling my thumbs in the first twenty minutes. But it does have some of his most masterful moments of filmmaking. We mentioned the opening, but there’s also a great flashback to them almost missing their father’s funeral (set within one of Schwartzman’s “fictional” stories). And when they finally meet their mother, Huston shows up in another wonderful role. I love these two together almost as much as I love him with Bill Murray. There’s a line where she suggests that they can have a connection better without words, if they say everything with glances. It’s a little cloying, but then it goes into one of Anderson’s most interesting sequences, set to “Play With Fire,” where there’s a tracking shot through all of these little vignettes between these different characters they’ve encountered, and it’s all shot as if they’re connected on a train, but it’s looking into their houses, their airplanes, their bedrooms. It pans off of it to this tiger in the jungle, a bit of an overt symbol, but very powerful when combined with the music. That got me. That always gets me.

MO: Here’s the interesting thing about Huston’s character: it’s a smaller role than we’ve seen from her in past collaborations with Anderson, and it’s a different role. In the past, she was a warm and giving mother figure or at very least the person who maintained a sense of order amidst the chaos. Here, she’s removed from them. She’s had the same effect on them that Royal had on his kids. She was absent at their funeral, but when we first meet her, her behavior echoes that of her sons. She’s very controlling about what they’re going to eat and do, like Wilson, but she also insults the flower pot that Brody’s wife made, which is interesting because it’s the kind of behavior that Brody does. And she’s retreated from the world, much like Schwartzman. That’s how much he’s reacted, he’s tried to get away from them just like she did.

LG: And up to this point, the questionable parent in Anderson’s films has usually been the father. Here, they lionize their father and have an issue with their mother.

MO: There’s a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to this film regarding Owen Wilson. The same year this was released, Wilson attempted suicide after a relationship broke up. In the film, he claims to not remember the details regarding his motorcycle accident that smashed up his face and body, but we later learn it was intentional.

LG: I think it might have had a tougher overtone had he co-written the film, but it’s hard to watch without that extratextual knowledge. Obviously it wasn’t intentional.

MO: Which is also why the blatant symbol of Wilson removing his bandages and seeing that, in their words, he still has “some more healing to do,” is groan-worthy on one end but still very moving. I’m still shaken by how affected he is by everything he’s been through.

LG: Anderson and Coppola have worked together since, but Coppola also directed a little movie called CQ, which has an amazing score by Mellow but the film is just okay and clearly a Wes Anderson wannabe. It features a prickly artsy-fartsy guy editing a sci-fi movie who has daddy issues and want’s to assert his creativity in a meaningful way. They have the same cinematographer, Robert Yeoman. It’s interesting to see Anderson take in an imitator. Anderson wrote Darjeeling with Schwartzman and Coppola, which is interesting because both Schwartzman and Coppola are part of the Coppola family, with one as the son of Francis and brother of Sofia, the other as the son of Francis’s sister Talia Shire. It’s almost like Anderson is a lost Coppola cousin, considering the subjects he takes on.

MO: I hadn’t considered that, but it’s an interesting thought, considering that two members of a big, famous family are writing about family. It’s also worth considering that so much of this is about the possibility of losing a sibling, and Roman Coppola’s brother Giancarlo died in a boating accident in the late 80s.

LG: When there’s three screenwriters, we don’t know who’s responsible for what, and I don’t want to theorize too much.

MO: Me neither, but it’s an interesting parallel, and as I said, your art inevitably reflects your life to some degree. And that Schwartzman’s character acknowledges that by the end, that’s interesting to me. And I love the final gesture: Wilson, the controlling brother, tries to give back the passports he took from his siblings, and they trust him to keep them.

LG: That got me. That’s one part that got me that made me feel that it had to be those characters, and I wish they were just more interesting before that point. Also, there’s a very powerful snapshot as they let their baggage fall away.

MO: A shot that’s so well handled and set beautifully to “Powerman,” but it still kind of bugs me for the over-the-top symbolism.

LG: Maybe. But that final moment does tie back to their bickering well, yeah. I do think this is his weakest film, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff even if it’s minor. 

GRADES (SHORT/FEATURE)
LOREN: A-/B-  
MAX: A-/B+

That concludes our discussion of Hotel Chevalier and The Darjeeling Limited, if you agreed or disagreed, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas on Facebook by clicking here.

Roundtable Directory:  
Bottle Rocket (short and feature)
Rushmore
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou
Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Moonrise Kingdom
Shorts and Commercials
The Grand Budapest Hotel

WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU

Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at The Film Temple to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.
 
Loren Greenblatt: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is Wes Anderson’s fourth film, and not his best received. Some might view it as his One From the Heart or New York, New York. It’s heavily stylized and he had more creative freedom, but it wasn’t well liked on its initial release.

Max O’Connell: Well, people think the reviews were worse than they were. They were highly mixed with a lot of disappointment, but it wasn’t seen as a disaster by as many people as the story tends to go.

LG: I can see why this film turned some people off, though. I wasn’t crazy about it on my first viewing (a bad projection didn’t help) but it’s grown immensely for me on repeat viewings. My initial complaints do line up with what the some of the critics said at the time. The film feels very arch and removed, and as stylized as The Royal Tenenbaums was, this is so much more. I can see a lot of people viewing it as hipsterish or ironic: it starts off with a film-within-a-film of oceanographic explorer/filmmaker Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) brings his latest documentary to a festival, and the credits for the main film appear within the documentary in this 4:3 aspect ratio, with curtains on the side of the screen to emphasize that we’re in a movie. I can see how this turned some people off.

MO: Yes, but it turned off people who were previously fans, too, and of his archness. I wonder if it might be that he has a different screenwriter this time. For his first three films and his first short, Anderson co-wrote it with his longtime friend Owen Wilson. Wilson has the second biggest role in The Life Aquatic, but he was also becoming a more prominent comic actor at this point, and he didn’t have time to work as a co-screenwriter, or so I understand. Anderson instead brought aboard Noah Baumbach, a director who at that point hadn’t worked in seven years. He made a big splash with Kicking and Screaming, followed by a pair of indifferently received comedies (Highball, Mr. Jealousy), and Anderson is the one who brought him back out, first with this, then as producer for Baumbach’s best film, The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach is a much more abrasive collaborator than Wilson.

LG: It’s not like Anderson’s past characters were warm and cuddly, but Steve Zissou is by far his most prickly protagonist. In terms of archness, this is Anderson’s first big attempt at world building and on paper, the 60’s high seas adventure trappings make it look lighter and more rompish than his previous films. He’d get to making lighter films in the future, but here he actually doubles down and presents a world that under all the whimsy is darker and more bitter than anything he’d done until now. We meet Zissou, a washed up Jack Cousteau type who looses his best friend/right hand man Esteban (Seymour Cassel) when he’s eaten by a “Jaguar Shark” who Steve now hopes to track down and kill. Between the stop-motion sea creatures, rival ships and pirates, I don’t think any of us really expected to see this middle-age, hard to like control freak in the lead, even if that type of character is 100% in keeping with both Anderson’s AND Baumbach’s style.

MO: But oh, the wonderful things around him! How delighted are we by those?

LG: Pretty darn delighted! It’s telling that for Anderson, actual sea life isn’t sufficiently whimsical, so instead he invents sea life in stop motion creatures made by Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.

MO: The stop-motion is really wonderful. It helps accentuate the fantasy of this world, they remove us from reality, the handmade quality of the whole thing, right down to the sets. They’re very lived in, but they have a dollhouse feel.

LG: He turns Zissou’s boat, the Belafonte, into an actual diorama. There’s a wonderful scene that’s maybe the most Andersonian scene ever, in which Anderson cuts the boat in half on a set so we can see all of the characters walking through the various rooms and we can see all the gadgets they have.

MO: There’s also a scene later that shows that diorama view where Steve has a fight with Ned (Wilson), the man who’s possibly his son, and there’s a long shot following the two as they argue. As they’re doing it, Steve stops the argument to address whoever he passes, and he’ll either lash out at them or, when he runs into the one intern who didn’t quit, he’ll swing to overwhelming praise and say, “Awesome, you’re getting an ‘A’,” followed by a slap on his injured shoulder. It’s a long take that shows the intricacy of the set, but also how Steve’s moods can swing from one moment to another. And it’s a case where I can’t picture it being done better than the way it was done with those dioramas.

LG: There’s a key moment in the film for me where they’re in Italy, and Steve is completely dominating Ned, the son he never wanted but now needs to micromanage. He changes his name to “Kingsley,” he orders wine for him, and he pushes away any sense of individuality Ned might express. And that’s interesting because he has this sort of Bill Nye/Jacques Cousteau profession where he’s supposed to foster individuality and imagination, but he actually stifles it.

MO: Yes, and Ned is willing to go with it for a while because he’s found a new father figure after having lost a lot personally (his mother killed herself after she found out she had terminal ovarian cancer), but after a while Steve micromanages to the point where he pushes away the one man who’s still on his side. Whenever Ned ad libs on camera, Steve is annoyed. The first time, Steve pretends to like it, and the second time he chastises Ned and demands that next time he whisper his idea in Steve’s ear so he can say it in front of the reporter, Jane (Cate Blanchett). Ned goes with it until it gets to this great scene where they’re underwater in scuba gear, and Ned asks Steve if he can call him dad. Steve quickly suggests a different nickname, “Stevesie.”

LG: And I like that it’s in scuba gear that obscures their faces and lets Wilson express his pain through his voice, his eyes and body language, and then the camera drifts away in a very expressive shot.

MO:  You talked about how Steve’s supposed to promote individuality while collecting all of these weird and wonderful misfits on his crew.

LG: That’s right, he doesn’t just do this to Ned, he has an entire crew of people to bully around. The crew of the Belafonte is like this big, dysfunctional version of the Enterprise.

MO: They’re also like a surrogate family that could fall apart at any moment, because they’re working at the whims of a very inconsiderate man. There’s Anne-Marie (Robyn Cohen), the script girl who’s casually topless, which seems to get no attention from anyone.

LG: It is Europe! But what I love about that character is that she’s kind of like the bratty yet very responsible sister, the only one who will tell Steve that his plans are going to get them hurt. Something I noticed is a dichotomy between the old and young in the crew. The young include Anne-Marie and Pelé (Seu Jorge), but then there’s the old, who in the documentary-within-the-film, are given ages that are way off. No way that Klaus (Willem Dafoe), Steve’s eternally loyal German second-in-command, is 45. Nor is the sound guy in his 40s. This is another part of Steve’s control over his world: he’s is living in the past, and not acknowledging their ageing he gets to avoid acknowledging his own. There’s a sense that these guys were once big (this is a world where oceanography and documentaries are big). In the 80s and 90s, they were big enough to have merchandising in the form of Adidas endorsements, action figures and pinball machines. But that’s halted. Steve admits, “I haven’t been at my best this past decade.”

MO: To which his estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston) plainly says, “That’s true.” It’s interesting considering Bill Murray’s background: onetime comic megastar who, in the 90s, started appearing in low-rent movies before Wes Anderson revitalized his career.

LG: And it’s easy to be on Eleanor’s side, because as they say, she’s the brains of the outfit. There’s a montage where we see everyone doing their job, and Eleanor’s crossing off things that they have planned that are too impractical, like “Skydiving into a volcano.”

MO: One of the interesting things about this movie is that it’s only Wes Anderson’s fourth movie, when he was in his 30s, yet it’s about middle-aged failure. It’s almost like he’s making a movie about not only what he could turn into, but what he could turn into soon enough following these massive successes.

LG: I don’t know how much he intended it, but there is a very meta angle to that.

MO: Owen Wilson is still there in a major role, but it’s interesting that he’s gone as the co-screenwriter in a film in which a man loses his right-hand man in the beginning. The other interesting thing is that there’s a concern about losing your touch by fakery. Steve is clearly affected by Esteban’s death, but he didn’t capture it on camera, so he restages it. That’s become a regular part of his movies, fakery, but here’s a point where it reaches its most egregious. He knows he doesn’t have it anymore, so he’s just going to fake it. And this is a point in Anderson’s career where some felt that it was a lot of fakery and not enough heart (which is absurd, but whatever).

LG: And there’s a classic Wes Anderson thing of people using fantasy to insulate themselves from the real world. Steve is dealing with tough stuff, so he uses the fact that he’s in a film to shield himself. Any time he starts to feel something, he asks if it’s being caught on film. That, for me, is him pushing away something real. That might have turned people off, too. There is a sense of remove, and Bill Murray’s performance is very minimalistic. At first glance, it seems like he’s not doing much, but he’s actually doing a lot. There are little tonalities that are very important. There’s this one moment near the end where he’s reading a letter he wrote to Ned many years ago, and the way he emphasizes, “I remember your mother…” is very subtle, pointed, and effective.

MO: Not just in emotional ways, because this is one of Anderson’s saddest movies, but Murray is also really funny in this. His timing in this is great. I love in the opening scene where he’s being interviewed by the press about his latest film, and his pauses for every answer are priceless. “What would be the scientific purpose of killing the shark?” (long pause, then very matter of fact) “Revenge.”

LG: I also love the autograph scene, where an older fan has around 20 posters that he wants Steve to sign (based on a real event Anderson saw Murray go through). After so many signatures, he just says, “Just sign the rest yourself.”

MO: To be fair to Steve, at that point, I might lose my patience as well.

LG: Let’s talk about the music. Every Wes Anderson film is somewhat anchored by one particular musician or style: British Invasion in Rushmore, mainly varying kinds of folk for The Royal Tenenbaums, etc. Here, it’s anchored by David Bowie songs, but not just the originals. Seu Jorge’s crew member plays acoustic David Bowie covers in Portuguese, and they’re wonderful. Bowie even prefers some of them to the studio versions.

MO: It’s interesting how he uses Bowie for key emotional scenes. The use of “Life on Mars?” when Steve first meets Ned, and later on the use of Seu Jorge’s version when Ned first realizes how awful Steve can be, it’s a terrific emotional standpoint.

LG: I love the use of the “Space Oddity” countdown by Jorge as a group of pirates arrive on the Belafonte in a really interesting shot as they emerge from the fog. And Anderson does have a proper rock star doing his music. This is the last score Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo did for Anderson, and the best. I hope they’ll work together again today.

MO: Now, what do you think is the major difference between Steve and his rival, Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum)? It’s interesting how there’s a bit of an Indiana Jones/Belloq thing, where neither of them are necessarily great guys, but one of them is our guy.

LG: Hennessey is the more successful one. He’s just been made a knight in Portugal! I want to become a knight in Portugal!

MO: Hennessey is much more confident than Steve, but he’s also much slimier. Steve, at least, you know where you stand with him. Goldblum pretends he doesn’t hate you.

LG: He’s also a character who isn’t a complete villain, which is something about Wes Anderson films that I love. No matter what, there’s always a moment of empathy. Even with the Jaguar shark.

MO: Yeah. It’s funny when Hennessey is kidnapped and the pirates sink his ship, but it’s also moving when they do rescue him. He does seem genuinely a little touched that Steve took the time, because he knows Steve doesn’t like him.

LG: Yeah. The pirates killed his crew, and more hurtful to him, made soup out of his research turtles. I don’t know why but the way that line is delivered, it always registers to me like they might as well have been cannibals. The character relationships in this film are very interesting. Dafoe plays Klaus beautifully against type, more childish than scary. He’s competing with Ned to have Steve as his father figure, despite the fact that they’re clearly about the same age. And the reporter, Jane, has a difficult thing with Steve, who fancies himself as a bit of a stud and hits on her, but she’s not having it. But she develops a romance with Ned. So we gotta a a weird love triangle with a father figure/son fighting over the same woman.

MO: There’s a lot of stuff with father figures. Ned has a new father figure for the first time in his life, then finds out that he’s not a very nice man. Steve never wanted to be a father because he hates fathers, which implies something painful in his past. Jane finds a surrogate father for her child in Ned after the real father essentially abandons it. And Klaus sees Steve and Esteban as father figures.

LG: Wes Anderson maintains that he and his parents have wonderful relationships, but it’s much more interesting to write bad dads. There’s actually an ongoing art instillation at Spoke Art in San Francisco covering his work that was even titled “Bad Dads.” It’s a common trope in his work that also links him to Spielberg in a lot of ways.

MO: There’s a good dad in Rushmore in Seymour Cassel’s character, but they’re very rare.

LG: I’d like to believe that’s what his dad is really like. One of the things that still doesn’t 100% work for me is the implication that Steve has faked the death of Esteban, which I think the film plays with a little too long. There are a few moments that imply that Esteban is still alive somewhere.

MO: I didn’t think that. I thought it was more a thing where he’s taking advantage of his friend’s death.

LG: Eleanor says at one point that she doesn’t want be around because one is already dead, and it’s played as if he forgot or doesn't know what she’s talking about.

MO: Yeah, no, I didn’t get that at all. For me, Esteban is conclusively dead throughout, he just restaged it because he didn’t get it on camera and that’s kind of the person he’s become.

LG: It’s one of the lingering things that doesn’t 100% work for me.

MO: There are a few things that don’t work 100% for me. It’s odd, because there aren’t too many scenes that feel like they’re not there for a reason, but this film feels a bit flabbier compared to Anderson’s previous work. It doesn't move quite as well.

LG: For me it moves very well, but I understand, it does stop for whimsy a lot.

MO: An example would be the scene where Steve points out the radios they have in their headsets. It’s a funny bit, but it’s like, “We’re gonna stop now for a joke.”

LG: For me, it’s a transition to another scene, but I understand how you might think that.

MO: It’s an awkward transition for me. There’s a handful of those. And I think Anderson has talked about this, but the shootout with the pirates is not terribly well staged. I feel like he’s trying to go for chaos and clumsiness, but accidentally makes it more trouble than it’s worth.

LG: “John Woo I ain’t,” I believe was his quote. I actually like that scene. There’s a very handmade aspect to it. Like it was made by a bunch of energetic kids who just went out and grabbed some shots. It’s a cute action scene. I also love the gag where Bill Murray uses the unpaid interns for cover.

MO: That is funny, it’s just the directing of that scene is a bit clumsier than it’s supposed to be for me.

LG: I kind of felt it was going for clumsy.

MO: It is, but the execution is off.

LG: The weird moment where they pause for the Northern Lights does bother me.

MO:…yeah, I don’t know what that’s there for.

LG: I feel it's a "tide has turned and nature is with us" thing, it's just awkwardly done.

MO: Hmm. Maybe.

LG: It’s also one of his most overtly New Wave films – oodles of jump cuts, bright, saturated colors denote this as a “movie-movie” in a very New Wave way and when Ned dies at the end, there’s flashes of red and white frames that feel straight out of a late 60s Godard film.

MO: Not just that, but it’s at a point where Steve has come to terms with being a bad father and is trying to rectify that. It comes through on the raid in the pirates’ compound, and he tells Klaus how much he means to him, and he apologizes to Ned. Ned has become a full member of Team Zissou, and he’s extended the olive branch to Klaus, effectively becoming a surrogate brother. So much of this film is about not taking for granted the things that really matter, because they could be gone at any point, and Steve connects with Ned just as he loses him. There’s this great montage of Ned’s life flashing before his eyes as he dies in the helicopter crash. And that scene is shocking, but it’s not out of nowhere, because they do mention how the helicopter wasn’t in great shape earlier.

LG: And there’s a running gag with Klaus where he’s supposed to be the guy who fixes things but never does, and just as Klaus becomes friends with Ned, he loses him because he didn’t fix the thing. There’s two things I thought about in that scene. First, there’s a moment where Jane sends him a letter to Ned’s bunk before he leaves, and for me, I feel like that’s a marriage proposal, or an invitation to be the father to her child.

MO: Oh, you know what, that sounds about right. And this is the death that Steve doesn’t exploit, and he puts it in his film respectably, and he’s changed at a terrible cost. It’s brought back emotional honesty in his work.

LG: And I love the ending, the happy 80s Buckaroo Banzai homage where, out of the ashes, a new crew has emerged to go on new, presumably happier adventures together.

MO: Here’s the thing: we talk about all of the great David Bowie songs in this, including “Queen Bitch” over the end credits with the Buckaroo Banzai homage, but my favorite use of music in this film isn’t a Bowie song. It’s the use of the Zombies’ “The Way I Feel Inside” during Ned’s funeral. That’s a moment that’s almost as moving as “The Fairest of the Seasons” for me.

LG: That one gets me every time. There’s a really interesting touch in that ending, though, where as they’re walking to “Queen Bitch,” as they finally board the ship, Ned, despite being dead, is on top of the ship as a spirit of Team Zissou. That’s a very unusual, borderline surrealistic touch. You might not notice it the first time.

MO: I didn’t notice it until this time. That’s stuck in right at the end there. I love how accepting this film is. Even Bud Cort, the prototypical Wes Anderson character in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, plays a bond company stooge who’s in Steve’s corner, not just a bond company stooge. “No bond company stooge would stick his neck out like that.” And everyone who’s still alive is accepted into this big family when they finally see the jaguar shark. It’s wonderful how he uses that great anamorphic framing in a small space there to get it more intimate, to use density to imply togetherness.

LG: I know when he was making the film, he wasn’t always very clear what that jaguar shark scene meant to him. I think, it is a very interesting scene. A lot of people put Moby Dick stuff on it, because of surface comparisons, but that never really held a lot of water for me.

MO: I think it is there, in that it’s a revenge story where our Ahab realizes, as Matt Zoller Seitz suggested, killing his friend was “nothing personal.” Death comes for us.

LG: I don’t think of it as “nothing personal,” I think of it as Steve staring death in the face and seeing it as something big and awe-inspiring, which is kind of what he probably got into this business for in the first place. The world is so big, and beautiful and strange and more fascinating than we think.

MO: And uncontrollable. He’s tried to control nature in his documentaries, and now he’s accepted that he can’t, and here comes the most moving moment he’ll ever be able to capture. He’s encountered this thing that’s responsible for the death of one friend and tangentially responsible for the death of his son, since they died while searching for it, and he’s able to just let it wash over him.

LG: He lost his spiritual brother and spiritual son.

MO: It’s maybe not the cleanest thing Anderson has ever done –

LG: I don’t think it needs to be. Sometimes it’s better to be messy.

MO: Sometimes it’s messy to a fault, but it’s also messy to wonderful degrees, and it’s one of his most thematically interesting and adventurous films, which is why I’m glad it has found a cult following in the years since. Its most passionate defenders stuck by it.

LG: It’s one that’s gotten better on repeat viewings. All the stuff that bothered me fell away, and all of the stuff I was missing popped up

MO: It’s struck me as much richer on each repeat viewing.

LOREN'S GRADE: A-
MAX'S GRADE: A-

That concludes our discussion of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, if you enjoyed it, feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow Screen Vistas on Facebook by clicking here.

Roundtable Directory:  
Bottle Rocket (short and feature)
Rushmore
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou
Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Moonrise Kingdom
Shorts and Commercials
The Grand Budapest Hotel

WES ANDERSON ROUNDTABLE: BOTTLE ROCKET SHORT/FEATURE

Every now and then at Screen Vistas I like to team up with Max O’Connell over at The Film Temple to tackle the work of one of our favorite directors. This time we’re looking at comedy stylist/master of whimsy Wes Anderson.

Loren Greenblatt: The thing that strikes me about Wes Anderson in comparison to the other directors we’ve talked about is that while Cameron and Del Toro are certainly very stylized, they are also among the small percentage of directors with public personas that are separate from their films. Cameron is famously prickly and arrogant, whereas Del Toro is a happy 10-year-old on a sugar binge. Anderson, on the other hand, has a sort of invisible persona. He does interviews galore but I feel the general public knows him primarily as an extension of his visual style than as his own person, and I think that’s by design. 

Max O’Connell: Well, he’s a very private person, and I think he wants to be known for his work more than his personality. And his work is well known: for a while in the early 2000s, he spawned more imitators than anyone on the art house scene since Tarantino. It also makes his work ripe for parody, both good (Wes Anderson Spider-Man) and terrible (SNL’s The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders, which makes references in place of jokes). But before Wes Anderson was the most idiosyncratic comedic director working today, he was just some kid from Austin, Texas.

LG: He went to University of Texas where he met two of his most important collaborators, Luke and Owen Wilson. Soon, they started planning a feature film called Bottle Rocket, which eventually became a delightful 13-minute short. The short is self-contained but it’s meant to be part of a larger story. The idea was that this was part one, and they’d keep making them, like installments in a serial. The story centers on Dignan and Anthony (Owen and Luke Wilson, respectively), best buddies planning a house burglary. 

MO: The short played at Sundance, where it got them noticed by a lot of people, most noticeably Polly Platt (the ex-wife of Peter Bogdanovich who had worked as a writer or production designer on most of his notable films) and one of her frequent production partners, none other than James L. Brooks.  And it’s easy to see why. Clearly Anderson and co are on a budget, and it’s much rougher and looser than we’ve come to expect from him, but I love how from the beginning of his career, he mostly knows what he’s doing. The editing is really crisp. Everything feels very exact. 

LG: It’s rough, but it derives certain energy from that roughness. His music choices are already really interesting; the use of jazz throughout almost makes it feel like a more high-energy Woody Allen movie. Also you can already see a lot of his personal quirks – there’s already his very peculiar type of close-up and insert shots and his whimsical, freewheeling characters, particularly Owen Wilson (who co-wrote the short). 

MO: You talked about his visual quirks. Obviously, he doesn’t really have the money to do those dioramas or the anamorphic widescreen he’s known for, but he’s also got a lot of throwbacks to a number of French New Wave movies he’s a fan of. I’m fond of a shot near a pinball machine that deliberately evokes The 400 Blows, which has similarly likable (if much younger) troublemakers. But there’s also nods to more peculiar influences: he uses Vince Guaraldi’s “Skating” theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas when the characters have target practice. And that’s really charming, because it gets to the heart of these characters – they’re crooks, but they’re essentially a bunch of kids. 

LG: It’s a very interesting juxtaposition: these people are setting out to do something dangerous that does have victims, but they approach it with childlike innocence. It hints at the reality/fantasy struggle that defines many of Anderson’s films. I wish that idea was fully explored in the feature, but it is clearly there in both incarnations of Bottle Rocket, like many of Anderson’s characters, everyone in here is either bigger than life, or trying to be. 

MO: To me, something that struck me in the fantasy/reality divide is how much they’re playing at bigger than life. We don’t see the bookstore robbery that’s shown in the feature version, but they’re kind of playing themselves up as cool criminals, but the movie ends with them betting on a race and Owen Wilson’s character cheating. They’re just a couple of innocent goofs at heart, really. 

LG: I really like that scene. It really encapsulates something essential about this material and I wish there were some version of it in the feature. 

MO: What are the differences between the short and the feature that strike you, aside from the fact that the former is in black-in-white and the latter is in color.  

LG: Well the most comparable section is the feature’s first act, which is more or less a remake of the material in the short. The main difference is that the feature tells that part of the story with more focus. Again, we get Luke and Owen Wilson planning the house robbery, but it’s colored by a new scene where we see Anthony leaving a mental institution. In the end Anthony is much more stable and down to earth, though melancholy, where Dignan is the goofy, wildcard dreamer who’s introduced trying to break Anthony out of the institute, hilariously not realizing that it’s a voluntary stay. Of the two, Dignan is also the ringleader who has a 50-year plan on how the two will become internationally renowned criminals.

We get a better sense of their dynamic. There’s this sense of obligation between the characters. You get the sense that Dignan is doing all this intense planning not just to satisfy his own boyish urges, but to pull Anthony out of his funk in a very misguided way that Anthony doesn’t really want or need. Likewise Anthony goes along with Dignan because he thinks it’ll be good for him, but it in the end it really serves no one and that’s the gag. This complicated tension isn’t there as much in the short, which features a long conversation where they argue over the details of a Starsky and Hutch episode which has a more aimless flavor we associate more with Linklater and Tarantino than Anderson and while it’s fine for the short, it’s ultimately one of the more fortunate casualties of the focus the team brought to the film version.

MO: Yeah. You get hints of it in the short where they start talking about the plans they’ve got, and Dignan compliments Anthony on the things he thought of that wouldn’t have come to mind for Dignan. That’s great, but here, the plan is comically exaggerated. Wes Anderson’s characters always make elaborate plans to try to get themselves out of trouble or sadness. I feel like the diorama thing that we joke about, while we don’t see it visually in Bottle Rocket – 

LG:  Which might be because he hadn’t come into that as a style. He’s become much more confident over time. And initially, he wanted Bottle Rocket to be much grittier, more like Mean Streets or Drugstore Cowboy (both of which have whimsical touches but aren’t thought of as whimsical films) but as it went along, the writing got more whimsical. 

MO: But I feel like during the writing process, he found what worked for him, and I feel like he found his voice more than you do, I think. What I was getting at with the planning was that it’s a kind of way for Wes Anderson characters to make sense of their lives that don’t necessarily make sense. It’s a way for them to try to control things that they can’t really control. Dignan’s 50-year-plan…it’s absurd that he could possibly plan that far ahead, and with purpose. 

LG: I think we can identify with that. We’ve had that, “OK, we’re gonna start lifting weights and do that thing we’ve never done,” and it’s a nice exaggeration.

MO: As with a lot of other Anderson narratives, this is to some degree a sad story, because while Dignan’s a big kid, he’s a big kid with a lot of failure and no direction. Anthony’s sister says he’s a liar and worries that if he follows Dignan, he won’t end up going anywhere. His plans don’t really work out, ever. It’s because of the playfulness of Anderson’s style that this isn’t completely downbeat throughout. That’s always been to his credit. Some of that playfulness comes through the music. The target practice scene isn’t as striking, because they don’t have “Skating” again, but some of the other songs are really delightful. They use a song called “Zorro Is Back” after they buy firecrackers after a successful robbery. There’s such life to it. They’re getting a kick of bringing themselves up. 

LG: The thing that I think doesn’t work about Bottle Rocket is that undercurrent of melancholy. There’s a little bit of it there, but it’s so much more present as a counterpoint to the whimsy in his later films, where the whimsy is about masking the melancholy, and there’s this cycle of joy and depression, and there’s some teeth to that. I don’t think they get into that enough here. A lot of the characters here are just much flatter than most Wes Anderson characters. 

MO: I don’t agree. Granted, it’s going to grow in his next films, but Dignan especially works for me. He’s always been the most loyal friend to Anthony (and vice versa), and as soon as Anthony finds more direction in his love interest Inez (Lumi Cavazos, in a very sweetly handled subplot), Dignan reacts to that very negatively. It’s not just that he’s jealous – Anthony’s the only one who’s there for him. Their other friend, Bob (Bob Musgrave), is sort of part of the gang, but he’s much less committed and much less willing to put up with Dignan’s need to control things. 

LG: Also, I get the sense that Dignan doesn’t really like him, that they’re only friends because of Anthony, and he never quite settled in. 

MO: I don’t think Dignan dislikes him; they’re just clearly not as close.  

LG: I think the trio is well developed, but when I say some of the characters are flat, I mean a lot of the tertiary characters don’t feel like they’re there at all. Every other film he’s made is so deliberately an ensemble that it’s kind of disappointing coming back to his first film and not seeing that. I feel I’m watching a film that could have been so much richer. 

MO: Okay, I see what you mean. Some of them are types, like Bob’s brother “Future Man”, who’s funny in bits but is kind of a cartoon asshole. That’s not terrible necessarily but not at the same level he’s going to operate at later. 

LG: How about in Rushmore, where we have another bully who has a humanizing moment or two. 

MO: Yeah. And here’s the thing: that bully has a similar turnaround as Future Man, but Future Man’s is off-screen and isn’t as convincing because we get less of him. 

LG: Exactly. 

MO: What do you think of James Caan’s character, Mr. Henry, the landscaper/thief who mentored Dignan once upon a time? 

LG:  He didn’t make much of an impression on me, as a character or a performance, which is a problem because he’s built up so much as this bigger-than-life father figure to Dignan that he wants to be emulate. 

MO: And for me, it’s a bit of an odd complaint, because most of these sketched characters are funny, but they’re not at the level we hold Anderson’s later works at. I do think a lot of the style is still there, though. The conversational rhythms are classic Wes. Like right before the bookstore robbery, where Dignan puts a piece of tape over his nose, and his friends look at him and ask, “Why are you putting tape over your nose?” His answer: “Exactly!” And then during the robbery, he loses patience with the bookstore owner and calls him an idiot, and when the man gets touchy over being called an idiot, he’s sincerely sorry about it. Because he really is just a big kid playing at being the tough guy. So much of it is there, he’s just growing still. 

LG: That part is fantastic and it’s important to note there were a lot of issues during filming that might have inhibited what Anderson/Wilson were trying to do. In my research I got the sense that it was a contentious production between Brooks and Anderson. For instance, Anderson wanted to shoot it in the anamorphic widescreen format that’s become his signature outside of Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom (and the upcoming The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is at least partially in Academy Ratio), but wasn’t allowed to because the process is more expensive and would have slowed down the production with the added lighting concerns. 

MO: And it’s understandable that Brooks might balk, but it is clearly something that’s missing from Bottle Rocket, and it limits what he can do, visually. 

LG: One of the things that his particular use of that aspect ratio signals is that they don’t take place in the real world, they take place in Wes Anderson Land, this magical, primary colored place, where everything is dioramas, fantasy and depression. This film, you can see bits of that style peeking out, especially in the final heist, which is the most Andersonian bit in the whole film. But it’s not all the way there. It’s on the border of Wes Anderson Land.

MO: A little bit, yeah…I think part of it is him still figuring out his style and working on a budget. But I feel like the primary characters and the relationships are there. A lot of the influences are there, too. We mentioned Truffaut, which is still there, but I also see a lot of J.D. Salinger. I see a lot of that in the more withdrawn, sad aspect of the characters, especially Anthony. He’s trying to protect his younger sister, his sister’s cynicism takes it out of him… 

LG: I do like that the little 10-year-old sister is clearly the more mature of the two. It’s a fun bit I wish there was more of. 

MO: It’s a fun bit, and it’s indicative of what Anderson’s going to be doing for a long time with these people who are stuck because of emotional trauma. With Anthony, we hear bits about a bad relationship that sent him to check into a mental hospital. It’s nice that he’s able to get taken out of that. Dignan’s version of getting out of arrested development is being able to pull off – well, not pull off, because it’s a total failure, but he tries, damn it. 

LG: I do love Kumar Pullana, the older Indian actor who Wes Anderson cast a lot before his recent death. He plays an old safecracker who can’t remember how to crack the safe. 

MO: My understanding was that he never actually knew, which to me might be even funnier. 

LG: I get the sense that he’s done it before. I do love the exchange, “I lost my touch, man! I lost my touch!” Dignan: “Did you even ever have a touch?” To me that’s one of the more interesting exchanges in the whole film. As he goes on, he gets better with subtext and dialogue. I feel in the better version of this film, “Did you ever even have the touch” would be the thesis statement for a few of Anderson’s films, including this one.

MO: Maybe, but that’s an older man’s movie, and this is a younger man’s movie, so I don’t think that really fits. I see a lot of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson in the whole tale of upstarts trying to break in and one of them wondering if it’s even for him. It’s a nice parallel to them trying to break into Hollywood and not knowing if they’re going to make it. 

LG: Absolutely, it’s hard not to view it that way. It’s a first film about people trying to make it in something and struggling to do it. It might have not been conscious, but you can’t help but take it from there. 

MO: Are there any other things that are formally impressive to you? It is a pretty striking debut.

LG: Oh, absolutely. I don’t think it’s all there, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. He’s starting to use these dolly shots, colors are a big thing, I really love how he creates insert shots. There are these themes of mental illness and arrested development that he’ll continue to develop. And outside of Martin Scorsese, there are very few filmmakers who use music as surprisingly. It’s not just that he uses a Rolling Stones song. He uses “2000 Man”, a really wonderful song from Their Satanic Majesties Request, probably one of the least regarded classic-era Stones albums. It fits so wonderfully.

MO: I love the use of “Over and Done With” by the Proclaimers when Dignan and Anthony have to leave Inez behind. That brings me up so much, to the point where it almost feels like “Judy Is a Punk” in The Royal Tenenbaums. It makes me so happy that he has such imagination on how to use songs and finds the perfect commentaries on his scenes. 

LG: The other thing I really love is Owen Wilson. That character is the most successful thing in the movie. He’s such a Wes Anderson character, right up to the animal noises he makes for signals, or the line “Let’s get lucky!” that he shouts before robberies. It’s infectiously joyous. He and Luke Wilson haven’t been served well by Hollywood as well as they should have. He’s a wonderful presence on screen. To me, there are some other things that are off. It’s a bit aimless structurally, and not in a way that really works. And you like that romance more than I do. There’s a sweetness to it, but it is a relationship where they sense each other’s innate sweetness and dignity, but because there’s a language barrier they’re doing a lot of projection onto each other. That’s something a more mature Wes Anderson might have gotten into more. 

MO: Maybe, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much. Maybe it’s because they’re less complicated characters, but it’s a simple thing of lonely souls connecting for me, I think. At any rate, Anthony’s relationship with Dignan is more important, it’s the conceit of the film. One of them has outgrown this goofball stuff, where the other knows he won’t have much left when his friend moves on. That leads to a lot of great moments. Much as I like the romance, the stuff that comes out of it is a lot more interesting. There’s a great shot where Wes plays with deep focus: Dignan is in the background playing pool while Anthony and Inez are romancing on the front porch. And then in the background, Dignan gets the shit kicked out of him, and Anthony isn’t able to protect him. And then there’s a great cut to Dignan having to put ice on a bloody lip, and there’s a growing distance between the two. I also love Dignan’s reaction of pure, tantrum anger after Anthony gives the money they stole to Inez. He throws a rock, punches a friend, and fumes. It’s understandable, more so because Anthony is moving away from his plans. 

LG: And I don’t think Anthony was ever that committed. He’s doing it for his friend. There’s a great bit in the beginning where he sneaks out of a mental hospital he voluntarily checked into, because he wants Dignan to feel like he’s helping him escape. One thing I do want to make sure we hit is that visually, it doesn’t fit into Wes Anderson Land, but conceptually, it’s one of his more archly stylized pieces. In his other films, especially his next two, his characters are living with a recognizable reality in some way. In his later films, the balance tips back the other way. They’re deep-sea divers or something dealing with real problems. Fantasy trappings for real problems, and there’s something similar going on here, we got this fantasy gang of wannabe crooks who are sorta dealing with real issues. He won’t try something this out there again until he reaches a more confident place. 

MO: Hmm. I see it being more archly stylized, maybe, because Dignan’s trying to escape the realities of his life. 

LG: But we never see those realities. 

MO: Yes we do. He has nothing else to live for. When he goes back into town after making up with Anthony and he’s planning to pull off a big job, he’s got that great yellow jumpsuit that feels like it belongs in a Wes Anderson movie. Future Man comes along and mocks him, saying he looks like a rodeo clown or a banana, which stings because Dignan actually really likes this getup. And Future Man mentions that Dignan used to mow lawns, which he doesn't anymore. Dignan couldn’t make it in the real world. This is his way of getting out of that. 

LG: Yeah, but he was mowing the lawn as a front for the robberies. He couldn’t do that right. That’s a nice bit, but I never felt enough of that simmering pain. 

MO: You talked about how Dignan’s robbery is one of the best bits. How about his sacrifice to save Anthony? 

LG: By the end, it’s become a proper Wes Anderson film, but a lot of the rest is phasing in and out. Some bits are there, some bits don’t hit like they should. 

MO: Then I’m also curious how you interpret the last shot. Anderson does that great slow-motion thing at his films’ endings or in another key moment. Here, the film ends on a slow motion shot of Dignan, in prison, being led back in after Anthony and Bob visit him. He’s looking back at his friends, and I feel like now he’s dealing with the real consequences of his fantasy, even though he did get to do something good for his friends. How do you interpret that shot? 

LG: Huh. You know what, you’re starting to change my mind on this movie as we talk about it. There is this really sad moment, I don’t know if it’s him facing the consequences, or just being sad because he’s separated from his friends. He’s doing it for them, but there’s also an interesting selfishness in his need to help his friends that I’d have liked to see more. That is an interesting moment, part of the proper Wes Anderson film it turns into at the end. 

MO: Okay. Anything else you’d like to add? 

LG: I do like it. It’s not my favorite of his works by a long shot, but it is a nice film. For me it falls squarely into the category of messy first films by great directors that show a lot of promise but are still figuring things out. 

MO: I feel like had we seen this before his later films, we would’ve been over the moon for it. He’s so confident, and so clearly on the verge of even better things. I’m more impressed with it I think in part because the Dignan character is one of my favorite Wes Anderson characters, and he’s the heart of the film. I think Wes really nails it there. 

LG: I’m watching it on mute as we talk here, I agree with you. Dignan makes the movie. The film didn’t do very well, it tested poorly, it was dumped in theaters. But I’m glad Anderson got another shot. Even in this flawed first feature, you can tell this is someone worth watching. 

MO: How do you think it compares to the short? 

LG: I kind of like the short better. Even though it’s less focused, and the feature does some things better. But I’m so surprised to see this rough style in the short, and that really floored me.

MO: I like the short for the same reasons, but the emotional content of the film does get it for me.
 
GRADES (SHORT/FEATURE)
LOREN: A-/B-  
MAX: A-/A-

Roundtable Directory:  
Bottle Rocket (short and feature)
Rushmore
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissiou
Hotel Chevalier / Darjeeling Limited
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Moonrise Kingdom
Shorts and Commercials
The Grand Budapest Hotel