When did Wes Anderson stop making movies for Max Fischer?
Nearly a quarter-century ago, Anderson showed himself to be one of America’s freshest comic filmmakers on the strength of his sophomore effort, 1998’s rightly beloved Rushmore. The now-classic coming-of-age comedy starred Jason Schwartzman as Houston prep school student Max, whose consistently awful report cards, lower-middle-class background, and nerdy, diminutive appearance did not dissuade him from becoming an amateur playwright, cheerleader for the restoration of Latin classes, and overeager participant in an assortment of clubs. He sweet-talks a business tycoon called Herman Blume (Bill Murray) and tries to initiate a romance with a teacher named Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams).
At the time, Anderson said that he hoped the film would appeal to teenagers who found common ground with Max, who, like David Copperfield, has a reasonable claim to being the hero of his own life. “If I had seen this movie when I was 15 years old, that would have been my movie,” Anderson said in an interview with Charlie Rose. “It’s like a role model. It shows you a way to be heroic and still be a horrible student and get rejected from all your schools and fail in all kinds of ways but succeed in other ways.”
So Rushmore was a wish-fulfillment fantasy. But for any wish-fulfillment fantasy to work, the wish has to be semiplausible to fulfill. To be sure, the film strained credulity at times. Ordinary adolescent audiences could not relate to the more fantastical elements of Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson’s script, such as Max’s over-the-top extracurricular activities (among his plays are undisguised rip-offs of Serpico and Apocalypse Now) or the ease with which he forms decidedly adult relationships (today, the Max-Miss Cross almost-romance seems likely to make Rushmore a ripe target for cancel culture). All the same, Max’s self-confident, eminently stylish form of rebellion seemed achievable, doable to an average teenager, and his certainty in who he was and who he wanted to become was genuinely fortifying.
Most important, Anderson overlaid Max’s sometimes fantastic story on to something that resembled the real world: One of the film’s main locations was St. John’s School, the Houston school that Anderson had attended. And although the cast was outfitted in the highly stylized ensembles that would become an Anderson signature (and albatross), Schwartzman, Murray, and Williams’s performances transcended their wardrobes. To put it another way, Max was more than the sum of his red beret, green suit, and braceface.
Since I myself was 15 when Rushmore was released in theaters, I was exactly the sort of impressionable, eager-to-be-different viewer Anderson seemed to have had in mind. And on the basis of the following the filmmaker came to acquire, I was not alone. Like few contemporary filmmakers not named Quentin Tarantino, Anderson has a cult of fans who stayed with him as he ventured far from his native Texas — also the setting of his modest, low-key first film, Bottle Rocket (1996) — and gained access to bigger budgets and greater resources in such films as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007).
Yet, when contrasting the modest, human scale of Rushmore with the increasingly elephantine scope of his later films, Anderson’s career seems to be a case of a gifted filmmaker gaining the whole world and losing his soul. The elements that helped make Rushmore credible, the warm performances and kinda-sorta realistic settings, were subsumed in superproductions that sought less to resonate with audiences than to trumpet their maker’s taste in clothes, Rolling Stones songs, and, of course, fonts.
All of this flotsam and jetsam has the unintended consequence of trivializing otherwise serious and sincere films. The Darjeeling Limited means to say something significant about the love that persists among three grown, temporarily estranged brothers. But does anyone believe that this theme matters as much to Anderson as the color scheme of the train the brothers board or the pattern on the embossed luggage they carry? Moonrise Kingdom (2012) has at its core a nicely rendered pre-adolescent love story. But ask yourself whether that story is enhanced or diminished by Bob Balaban’s knit cap-wearing narrator or Tilda Swinton’s cape-bedecked social services worker.
When I study the performances of talented actors in Anderson’s post-Rushmore films, I think of what the great film critic Pauline Kael once said of Meryl Streep: “After I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down.” Kael’s point was that Streep so relentlessly zeroed in on one element of her performance that she neglected to make her character come fully alive. By the same token, when I watch The Royal Tenenbaums, I can’t imagine Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum without her striped dress and dark eye makeup or Owen Wilson’s Eli Cash without his cowboy hat and fringe jacket. In the absence of such visual aids, their characters would cease to exist.
In fact, Anderson’s films have lately ceased to exist as films — “films” being understood as moving pictures that put mise-en-scene and montage at the service of engaging stories and characters. Twice Anderson has ditched real actors for stop-motion puppets — Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Isle of Dogs (2018) — although he is so attached to his regular gang of human performers (including, but not limited to, Schwartzman, Murray, Wilson, Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, and Frances McDormand) that they sometimes resemble puppets themselves. Anderson’s most recent film,The French Dispatch (2021), starring all of the aforementioned people, is a paean to midcentury magazine journalism, but its clanging conglomeration of styles — color, black and white, widescreen, full-frame, animation — suggests a bored artist looking for stimulation, as does the film’s rather unbecoming sexual aggressiveness (exemplified in a gratuitous nude scene with Lea Seydoux).
Like any well-known filmmaker, Anderson is vulnerable to parody — in 2013, Saturday Night Live had one of its best bits in years with its version of an Anderson horror film, The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders — but he seems determined to prove the parodists right. For example, Anderson will soon embark on an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” the tone and aesthetics of which are entirely predictable and the title of which, in the context of Anderson’s filmography, is almost beyond parody. Anderson will soon be 53 — older than John Ford was when he made They Were Expendable and Martin Scorsese was when he made The Age of Innocence.
Wes, it’s time to stop making movies with characters called “Henry Sugar.” Maybe, after Fantastic Mr. Fox, it’s time to leave the whole Dahl bibliography behind. Maybe it’s time to go back to the Lone Star State with a lower budget and fewer props.
We knew once what made Anderson want to make movies: He had a feeling for social misfits like Holden Caulfield and Franny Glass, and he created a great one in Max Fischer. But what moves him now? The sight of stationary and pastry boxes? He is no longer trying to connect with the Max Fischers in the audience, so who is he trying to reach? Film critics? Aesthetes? Former Texans who have become poseurs?
Peter Tonguette is a frequent contributor to the American Conservative, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal.
