Wes Anderson’s Impossible Dreams

Formally, the films embody this tension between things as they are and things as we wish they could be. Let’s not forget that, for all his memeable fondness for model-kit precision, Anderson makes a point of shooting on location: a modified World War II minesweeper for The Life Aquatic; a Harlem brownstone for The Royal Tenenbaums; the streets of India for The Darjeeling Limited (2007); an abandoned art nouveau department store in eastern Germany for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). There’s often a sharp contrast in his pictures between his studio scenes and miniatures and his rough location work, and he doesn’t hide the seams. The collision is the point. His protagonists’ efforts are almost always upended—by love, by loss, by UFOs, by the rise of fascism, or simply by the recognition that the more we learn about the things around us, the less we understand them. There is plenty of irony and humor in the way that the best-laid plans usually go awry. But despite the comedy, and the movies’ occasional happy endings, an underlying sadness emerges through their surface whimsy. These cinematic dioramas feel frozen in time, like high-school science-fair projects gone wrong, dreams of worlds that never quite came to be.

Anderson’s early career displays a fascination with the mysterious silence of grown-ups, but this is clearly seen through younger eyes. The protagonist of Rushmore is fifteen-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), an extracurricular workaholic and academic underachiever who longs to seduce an older woman and becomes rivals with a sad-eyed Vietnam-vet businessman (Bill Murray). The ostensibly adult Tenenbaum kids in The Royal Tenenbaums are all examples of burnout and stunted growth. Raised with a toxic mixture of overbearing and unavailable parenting by their comically mismatched mom and dad (Anjelica Huston and Gene Hackman), these former prodigies are now lost among their doom loops, their adolescent desires, their family resentments. The grief of Steve Zissou (Murray again), the Jacques Cousteau–like protagonist of The Life Aquatic, is tempered by the film’s playful storytelling—the toylike set design, the adventure-on-the-high-seas plot, the ornate camera work and fanciful soundtrack—which suggests the perspective of someone younger, someone for whom Zissou’s pain remains a terrifying and slightly opaque object for study. The Life Aquatic is a movie about aging made by a director who was still just in his midthirties, and its portrait of regret has a poetic vagueness to it; we can project our own despair onto Zissou’s deadpan sorrows.

It could be argued that Anderson’s style went into overdrive after his first animated feature, 2009’s beloved Fantastic Mr. Fox, which found the director taking Roald Dahl’s tale of a clever fox outwitting a trio of farmers and turning it into a meditation on Mr. Fox’s struggle with pride and responsibility, and his inability to reconcile himself to his nature. (In later years, Anderson would adapt even more Dahl fables as shorts, giving each a mournful, existential twist.) At the time, an animated feature from this acclaimed indie auteur felt like an odd little one-off, a departure from his usual concerns. Instead, the film proved to be a brilliant crystallization of the director’s stylistic approach and key themes. The idea of a group of animals attempting to navigate the world of humans made for an ideal metaphor for our own gradual alienation from our true selves.

After Mr. Fox, the director’s frames seemed to become even more meticulous, his camera movements more rigorous, his dialogue more composed. The films also gained an extra dimension, as Anderson’s perspective shifted. Before, his pictures could be viewed as the work of a younger man’s anxieties about the perils of getting older. Now they felt like the work of someone looking back and remembering how it felt to be young. How else to explain the twilight mood of Moonrise Kingdom (2012), whose nostalgia is rooted not in the past but in an idea of a past self—a reverie for that moment when the adolescent heart explodes with love, restlessness, and rage. Anderson himself noted, in an interview with Slate upon the film’s release, that “it’s the first movie I made where I had a memory of a feeling that had stuck with me all my life that I’m kind of trying to recreate, which is being twelve years old . . . and being blindsided by falling in love.” He then added that the person he was in love with at the time barely knew who he was. In that sense, Moonrise Kingdom is a fond look back at a moment that never existed—a fact enhanced by its glorious embrace of artifice.

Similarly, The Grand Budapest Hotel is an elegiac romance set in a country that doesn’t exist, on the eve of a war that never happened. But it gathers a dark, familiar charge as soon as we witness the black-coated thugs, the border police asking for papers, the whispers about laws changing. Is this an allegory, a veiled depiction of a real place and time? More than anything, The Grand Budapest Hotel plays like a dream one might have after living through the first half of the twentieth century. (Again, the precocity! Wes Anderson was born in 1969.) Sinister overtones also creep through the lighthearted symbolism of the animated Isle of Dogs (2018), set in a Japanese city taken over by anti-dog gangsters who banish all canines to a trash-strewn island. Racism, authoritarianism, rebellion, injustice—these aren’t just convenient elements for drama; they also echo the social and cultural anxieties of our age. While his early work had been deemed (somewhat incorrectly) apolitical, Anderson now engages more directly with what’s happening around him, albeit still in his own oblique way. The individual episodes of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021) center on uprisings, prison, bigotry, corruption. Meanwhile, Anderson’s style is more mannered and ornate than ever, that anthology film an infinite jewel box of incidents, memories, stories—all reflecting the characters’ ultimate helplessness in shaping the events around them.

Jean Renoir once remarked that every director essentially makes the same movie again and again. Wes Anderson’s cinema has transformed in remarkable ways, but Renoir’s statement remains true. Anderson’s image in popular culture might be that of a perfectionist who creates hermetically sealed worlds, but what he has really done is add new chapters to an ongoing tale of how the real world always intrudes. And as that world has grown more apocalyptic, so, too, have Anderson’s cinematic contraptions become more elaborate. (Indeed, his masterly 2023 feature Asteroid City might be his most intricately structured film to date. Its broad cast of characters could almost serve as an overview of Anderson’s career, with its overachieving children and lovesick adults all wrestling with the infinite and unknowable, be it the mysteries of the universe or elusive matters of the heart.) His style speaks to us of control, but what it really reflects is our own loss of it. His people might seem quaint, even archaic, demonstrating outdated attitudes, wearing unfashionable clothes, obsessing over obscure matters. So why, then, are they so human, so recognizable to us? Maybe because Anderson has located the great paradox of our era: that we are all forever out of step and out of touch with our rapidly changing times. The modern world both infantilizes us and drowns us in responsibility and terror. We have no place in it, yet we can never escape it.

At the end of The Grand Budapest Hotel, decades after the central events, it is remarked of M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the film’s exceedingly courtly and crafty concierge hero, that “his world had vanished long before he ever entered it.” On its surface, the movie has, up to this point, shown us how Gustave’s old-world manners and code of honor were destroyed by the rise of totalitarianism and twentieth-century political violence. Now, this touching line suggests that these values had perhaps disappeared even earlier, and Gustave was merely living in their ruins without quite realizing it. Looking at the broader arc of Anderson’s career, however, we can perhaps understand these words as intimating something even more haunting and profound: that Gustave’s world was never really there in the first place. Like all of Wes Anderson’s protagonists, his compass points in a direction that may have never existed.

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