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Thursday, March 28, 2024
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The worlds of Wes Anderson

So, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” came out and I saw it, but before we get to that I’d like to take a minute to frame the film with two masterpieces from last year.

2013 saw three of our greatest filmmakers produce works that looked at the lives of their creators in painful, almost heartbreaking detail. In the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” it isn’t just the artistic struggle of the protagonist that makes him tragic, it’s the profound, all-encompassing loss he feels throughout the film.

Trying hard not to spoil too much of the film, it’s very easy to read it as Joel imagining life without Ethan and vice versa, and in the framework of a creative partnership the whole thing is really tragic and makes me really, really worried about the Coens.

Also in the vein of brilliant artists making me sad about them, Hayao Miyazaki created what will hopefully be his last ‘last film,’ not because I want him to stop working but because he created the most perfect swan song an artist could ask for.

“The Wind Rises” is a gorgeous reflection on a life spent in the pursuit of realizing inspiration. It looks at our dreams, how we chase them and what happens when we finally catch them. Miyazaki practically handwrites “good-bye” across every moment of his nearly auto-biographical film.

I bring these two films up because I think “The Grand Budapest Hotel” both fits into this idea of ‘artists making films that are not-so-secretly about themselves’ and expands it into ‘artists making films about why they make films the way they make films.’

Anderson’s films are defined by their artifice. The dollhouse look, the diorama style, the actors pinned in frame like butterflies in slides—it’s all deliberate work done to create entire worlds founded on order, form and perfect, rigid structure.

This strikes us as being affected or too stylized or ‘off from reality or whatever, because it is. The beautiful order of his worlds stands in contrast to the absurdity, the chaos, the senselessness of the universe we live in and the tension between the two—the conflict between ordered and random, the loss of this control over your world—is at the heart of much of his work.

And this conflict is hinted at throughout his work, played with in regards to whatever larger themes he’s working with at any point. A friend is very fond of pointing out Anderson’s penchant for bashing noses and tousling hair, little ways to disrupt his order, play on this contrast between a world as it should be and the world as it is—messy, scary and random.

It’s this thread that Anderson brings front and center in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” both explaining and exploring the role it plays in everything he’s done thus far. It’s his most violent film, it puts sex on display, and while it is maybe the most quintessentially ‘Wes Anderson’ film he’s ever made—the symmetry, the patterning, the color palettes, it’s all turned far past 11—it’s also the film most at war with its structure and order.

There isn’t time to go too far into detail, but there is at one point a shootout that perfectly exemplifies this conflict. The chaos and noise, the messiness, the violence of the shootout all raging inside of the perfectly clean, constructed space, the pinnacle of Anderson’s form and organizational creation, exemplifies the conflict between his worlds and the worlds outside of them. And beyond that it’s gorgeous—the madness set in beautiful frames, shots matched so well they’re practically jump cuts somehow accentuating the perfect order of the film while jolting us out of it. My jaw literally dropped.

I could (and almost definitely will) go on at length about all this, but the short version I gave my friend after we saw it was, “Wes Anderson understands the world will never be like the little dioramas he makes, which he finds terrifying and sad, but he’s going to keep making them because they’re very, very beautiful.”

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For me, this is what his films have always been getting at—the loss of control we all experience as we abandon childhood, the narrowing of the world as it grows scary and falls apart, and trying to get back to that point where all the pieces fit together, usually framed around families, loss and belonging. He’s complicated, he’s my favorite, and for him to make a film that directly addresses not just his feelings about himself as an artist, but about his art and the world, why he makes his art the way he does, to examine the hows and whys of everything he does, is remarkable.

Just a final thought on his framing. He has always used framing devices to distance his stories, to create the gap between his worlds and the world we all live in, but in “Budapest” he stacks frames like matryoshka dolls, going deeper and deeper to get closer to the truth.

The conversations between two characters that are the basis for most of the film are presented in extreme widescreen, while the adventures of Gustave M. and Zero all occur in a standard four-by-three frame which seems to almost literally place them in a box. They’re sectioned off and defined by the “real world,” they’re an acknowledged fantasy, and the worlds themselves are toys.

Which brings us to the end—we telescope back out through a series of frames to arrive at what we’re meant to understand as the “real” world, our world, but even this is presented as a box—a little demonstration of what this world is to Anderson—the final frame showing a young woman, surrounded by a graveyard, completely lost in the world of her book. Breath = taken.

Have your own thoughts about Anderson’s latest film? Share them with Austin at wellens@wisc.edu.

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