As if engaging with Anderson's fizzy formalism, the characters' sadness emerges when the camera, the actor, the dialogue, the film itself, becomes still and quiet. An early work, "Rushmore," follows the antic extracurricular activities of high school student Max Fisher, whose increasing grandiosity has him expelled. Retreating to a still and silent shot at his mother's grave, Max reveals himself to be a lonely, despondent child. A mature work, "The Royal Tennenbaums" confronts suicide directly when a character cuts his own veins on screen. Even "Isle of Dogs," an animated film ostensibly for children, has a canine character consider suicide.
Anderson's most recent film, "The French Dispatch," is full of violence and vice. In the opening sequence, bloated corpses float in a polluted river--later, grieving parents bathed in otherworldly, painterly light learn that one of the bodies is their son-- the camera seems to float gently above them for a fleetingly quiet, poignant moment. In another sequence, an incarcerated painter contemplates suicide, while exhibitions of his paintings incite riots. In an animated sequence, a child is kidnapped and held hostage. It is a stylish and substantive film.
Anderson's forthcoming film, "Asteroid City," promises to share themes of death and grief in the guise of sherbet-hued postcards from the desert of the American West.
There is one recurrent motif, one I think of as "double love," that still escapes me. In several films, parallel love stories unfold between parents and between their children (and in "Isle of Dogs" between the dogs and between their owners). I can observe the motif, but I can't quite explain it.
Both stylish and substantive, Wes Anderson's films delight the eye so well that moviegoers and critics alike often fail to observe the superb screenwriting at work. Going forward, I argue for a more rigorous dramaturgical reading of the weighty themes presented on the screen. Meanwhile, I will look forward to catching "Asteroid City" on the big screen!
