The Young Person's Guide to Wes Anderson, Part 2

Suzy (Kara Hayward) on the lookout in Moonrise Kingdom.

Some artists have to stumble on their great subjects; but Wes Anderson (as I discussed in the first part of this critical diptych) always seemed to have at least a rough idea of his ideal canvas - or rather his  two ideal canvases. He has always been drawn both to the miniature, and the rambling fable - an odd combination, frankly, and one that has usually led to ungainly movies.

But in Moonrise Kingdom, I'd argue Anderson has balanced these two impulses at last, and found the perfect scale - and frame - in which to work his magic.  I think Moonrise will quickly be seen as a landmark in his oeuvre; but whether it will actually open up new horizons for this rather self-satisfied filmmaker - well, I'm less sure of that.

But first, why Moonrise marks an artistic apogee for him; it has to do with his love of the miniature, and his constant flirtations with faux-naïf artifice.  Anderson likes to remind us that we are always watching a movie in his movies, and what's more, that its sensibility is limited - the way a prep schooler's evocation of life would be.  He does this, I think, to remind us that beneath the faux-naïf is a real naïf; he himself lacks the experience or wisdom to draw human beings as they actually are.

Such stances, however, lead to trouble when they seed their own twee self-satisfaction - when a movie self-consciously avoids truths that the audience itself is mature enough to guess. Thus the edge of smugness that presses against the surface of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; we have a pretty good idea what's wrong with the people in these movies, even if a twelve-year-old wouldn't - and we have a pretty good idea that Wes Anderson has a pretty good idea, too.

But the pen-pal protagonists of Moonrise Kingdom, Sam and Suzy, are only twelve or thirteen themselves, and so the film's innocence feels real, and its central idyll - when they escape to an enchanted isle to conjure what they imagine is romance - casts a spell over the whole picture.  Their evocations of adulthood can only go as far as Anderson's own; suddenly, in this miniature landscape, everything they do resonates with everything their director wants to do, too.

Sam and Suzy play at romantic sophistication in Moonrise Kingdom.

They're too young for actual sex, of course (indeed, when they cuddle poor Sam warns Suzy he has been known to wet the bed).  But they have their ideas of what love should be like; Sam (Jared Gilman), in his Davy Crockett hat and corn-cob pipe, sees himself as the pioneer type; meanwhile Suzy (Kara Hayward) styles herself a knowing, wounded sphinx.  Thus she introduces Sam to the mournfully whispered Gallic pop of Françoise Hardy, and they spend their afternoons dancing with hilarious beatnik solemnity (above) to her favorite 45's (on a record player with seemingly endless battery power).  That is when they aren't gazing into each other's eyes with pen-pal ardor, or Sam isn't piercing Suzy's ears with fish-hooks (yow!).  They're not aware of their own blankness, of course - nor of the fact that they're probably mis-matched.  The brief congruence of their very different, but self-aware, sensibilities is enough.

There's another level of resonance to this encounter, of course - it occurs in '65 or so, après le déluge, before the pop innocence of the 60's toppled into the druggy squalor of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. Thus the world around Sam and Suzy is still very much ordered in the manner of the 50's (and even the 40's), and quite sure of its own benevolence, and of course it comes looking for them.  Sam has escaped from Camp Ivanhoe, a "khaki scout" enclave (yet another variant on Anderson's prep schools) run by another perplexed innocent - in shorts, no less - Edward Norton, who spends his days diligently optimizing everything, even the flush of the camp latrines (until he encounters our own Marianna Bassham, who has a charming repeat cameo in the movie).

And again as usual in Anderson, the innocence of this virtual boarding-school is balanced by the darker world of the damaged people who send their kids there: Suzy's parents, for instance (Bill Murray and Francis McDormand) are two lawyers so romantically alienated they call each other "Counselor" in bed - and the movie hints that Suzy's rebellious melancholy has been sparked by her knowledge that McDormand has taken up with the local policeman, Captain Sparks (Bruce Willis).

Here lies the rambling side of Anderson's fable, often rendered with an awkward mobile camera - but still tinged with storybook magic (and accompanied, with perhaps a nudge from the director, by Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra"). For dysfunctional as these folks may be, they hang onto their flawed humanity - unlike the super-competent child welfare authority (Tilda Swinton) who is outraged by error of any kind, swoops in to take charge of Sam (who is, as fairy tales demand, an orphan).  With her pale beak and predatory eyes, Ms. Swinton is quite a frightening administrative matriarch, and apparently shorn of all empathy (she's actually named "Social Services," and speaks calmly of "shock treatments - if necessary!"). Obviously, she's Anderson's version of that other fairy tale perennial - the evil stepmother.

Lost and found - Edward Norton and his scouts get a glimpse of romance.

Fear not, Sam is saved from her clutches (although he winds up getting shock therapy from a lightning-strike), and he eventually finds his natural home at the quirky hearth of Captain Sparks, an obvious father-in-waiting.  Indeed, as sometimes happens in Anderson's fairy tales, local society is set to rights at the end of Moonrise Kingdom - but only after a literal déluge, a flood also accompanied on the soundtrack by Benjamin Britten (whose charming Noye's Fludde is heard throughout  the movie - particularly its choruses for children, appropriately enough).

To be honest, it seems to me that Anderson loses control of his film a bit toward the finish - there are almost too many chases, and witty as they may be, the film begins to feel cluttered and rushed.  But it really doesn't matter, because by then the movie has a quality which is rare in millennial film: resonance.  This used to be one of the hallmarks of great dramatic or cinematic art - and yet resonance is all but extinct today (so I'm not actually sure whether what we're getting out of the millennials is really art at all, or something else).

Part of the reason for this collapse lies in the millennial love of genre - which can seem resonant at its birth, but which by definition is quickly defined and broken down into constituent parts.  But resonance depends on submerged connections and symbology - as soon as its connections become explicit, they're no longer resonant.  And perhaps it depends on something else, too - the materials of actual life.  Wes Anderson is a highly self-conscious filmmaker - and yet his work is generally sourced in his own experience, which perforce, like any life, has its own mystery.  Indeed, as a child Anderson performed in a production of Noye's Fludde, and of course all his films are littered with the touchstones of his actual adolescence.  He has been working and re-working this material for years - and sometimes, as in Moonrise Kingdom, when his children's theatre comes into alignment with actual children's theatre, something magical happens.  But this is what makes me think of Moonrise as more of a culmination than a new beginning.  Its pitch is sometimes perfect, but its tune is quite familiar.  To reach this kind of peak again, Anderson may have to mine his life for something new - maybe even something that happened after prep school.

Children's theatre within children's theatre - the cast of Noye's Fludde in Moonrise Kingdom.

The Young Person's Guide to Wes Anderson, Part 1

Let's take a good look at Wes Anderson, shall we?  (A scene from Moonrise Kingdom.)

Wes Anderson went to prep school in my hometown, Houston, and sometimes it seems that, at least in artistic terms, he never left.

Indeed, Anderson all but admitted as much in Rushmore, his breakout film - which was partly shot at St. John's, the River Oaks prep school he attended, and which climaxed with "Heaven and Hell," (below) a stage production by Anderson's avatar in the film, "Max Fischer" (played by Jason Schwartzman).

In "Heaven and Hell," this budding director attempted to conjure the Vietnam War on the stage of a high school auditorium, with Anderson positing actual flamethrowers erupting amid papier-mâché palms as young Max mashed up Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket), Coppola (Apocalypse Now) and Stone (Platoon) along with all the other pop sources familiar to a smart prep schooler utterly innocent of anything like actual battle.



The sequence was highly amusing, but what was truly striking about it was how clearly "Heaven and Hell" operated the way Psycho did for Hitchcock, or 81/2 did for Fellini - it was an act of self-criticism more trenchant than anything yet written about its creator.  Indeed, everything about Anderson's later oeuvre was apparent in Max's production in embryo: the sweet, if arch, artificiality, the adolescent masculine bravado, the nutty conflation of classroom references ("Semper fi, buddy.""Yeah, sic gloria transit."), the "diversified" white-upper-class milieu - all of it marinated in an obnoxiously privileged political cluelessness, and all of it watched by a dysfunctional cadre of wealthy, sympathetic adults.

But what's particularly striking about "Heaven and Hell" is that Anderson posted it not as a talisman of hard-earned self-knowledge, but rather as a kind of manifesto. This is what I loved to do when I was 17, he essentially declared at the climax of Rushmore, and this is what I'm going to keep on doing, only on a larger and larger scale.

And so he has - even with budgets in the millions, his movies cling tenaciously to the stagey artifice of "Heaven and Hell."  Luckily for Anderson, his brand of sweet, immature self-consciousness touched a deep chord in the millennial audience.  The self-aware distance, the cultural well deeper than any contact with actual life, the ability to construct a private simulacrum of reality - these would prove perhaps the keystones of millennial experience, and Anderson only rarely strayed from them; even as he has edged toward middle age, he has remained a determined faux-naïf.

Indeed, again and again - in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and especially Fantastic Mr. Fox - Anderson has returned to more or less the same formula, conjuring yet another variation on the boarding school, with unhappy, inscrutable grown-ups and their damaged children wandering through an idealistic (sometimes even paradisal) environment that is beset by an absurd - but pervasive - militarism.  The main characters - i.e., the kids - have yet to begin to deal with, or even process, their own flawed natures; and their parents, though accurately, even acidly, rendered, are likewise internally blank, and accepted without judgment.  Indeed, if anything, they're pitied by the young, who are still pure of heart (and whose innocence often serves as balm to the adults' broken souls).  And thus the battle that would normally ensue between adolescents and parents in most similar scenarios can never actually get off the ground in Anderson, because the combatants have been separated into different, uncomprehending camps, and actual emotional intimacy (even with one's self) is all but impossible.  The kids can't quite penetrate their parents, as they're hidden behind a benignly regimented screen; and while bad things sometimes happen to Anderson's young heroes, they are generally spared the pain of authentic self-discovery, as the director is always careful to hold his young charges back from the shadows in their own souls.

Fantastic Mr. Fox - for once, the dollhouse was populated by actual dolls.

These precepts, rigid as they may be, have reliably yielded quirky comedies of manners in which everyone seems to be dreaming with their eyes open - hence the familiar surrealism of Andersen's imagery, in which settings float between the real and the fake (like the jungles of "Heaven and Hell," they're imaginary gardens with real flamethrowers in them), and where the cinematography swings between the self-consciously symmetric (above) and the self-consciously skewed.  Some critics have begun to bristle at Anderson's prep school puppet shows, it's true - but I'm increasingly struck by a deep cultural problem that his work quietly, but persistently, states, which might be summed up as - "If my audience is in a state of permanently arrested development, shouldn't my movies be, too?"

In other words, are Anderson's twee dollhouse dramas actually the genuine article, given who's watching?  Are they the best this generation can do?  Or to ponder these questions even more deeply - is the culture in which we live now operating as a kind of giant, virtual boarding school?  Have we been separated from our own upbringings (in our dual-career households), and doomed to basically play with ourselves rootlessly, growing ever older while never quite attaining adulthood?

This is a very weird and troubling question, frankly, and one that I think will always cling to Anderson's work - but as it is a question for his audience as much as this artist, I doubt it will ever be articulated by the mainstream critics.  And at any rate, under some circumstances the troubling dimensions of Anderson's art can all but be elided.  Fantastic Mr. Fox was one such instance, because its dollhouse universe was peopled by actual dolls (above).  And now we have the charming Moonrise Kingdom, which may be the most delicately rendered (and highly detailed) of all Anderson's works.  Poised somewhere between The Catcher in the Rye and The Little Prince, it casts a bemusing and lingering spell - I don't think it's too much to call it truly haunting; like Mr. Fox, it could well prove a minor classic.

But we'll ponder its virtues (and occasional flaws) more fully in the second half of this critique.  To be continued.