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Record it icon aesthetic8/17/2023 ![]() Yet it’s a movie lodged so far inside its own Wes Anderson-ness that it never comes out the other side. It’s a film that no true Wes follower would miss. ![]() But now Anderson has come out with “ Asteroid City,” which has earned mixed reviews but is in the middle of a staggering opening-weekend box-office performance. ![]() I met the film halfway (it had funny and trenchant observations to make about modern art and the armchair radicalism of Paris 1968), but it was still too much of an overly thought-out thing. Two years ago, “The French Dispatch,” his wildly overstuffed compendium of three short stories, was equal parts beguiling and overwhelming. A rabbit hole of pure insular Wes Anderson minutiae passing itself off as art. Namely: For the first time since the middle-aught days of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and “The Darjeeling Limited,” Anderson seems to be disappearing down a rabbit hole. But it’s precisely as a Wes Anderson skeptic-turned-born-again-admirer that I now want to issue a warning. ![]() I was, with caution, almost willing to call myself one. It was a wildly enthralling Old World caper-thriller-adventure, featuring the most brilliant performance in any Anderson film (by Ralph Fiennes). And then, in 2014, Anderson did something that, to my great surprise, blew me away: He made “ The Grand Budapest Hotel,” the first movie of his that I all-out loved. I liked it better than any of his live-action films. Fox,” an outrageously droll stop-motion animated comedy, which seemed (for many reasons) to be the ideal form for his self-conscious sensibility. In 2009, Anderson did something that delighted me: He made “Fantastic Mr. I still wasn’t exactly an Anderson aficionado, but my hater days were behind me. Three years later, when I saw Anderson’s big follow-up, “ The Royal Tenenbaums,” I recognized that he was actually a wily storyteller who, though he staged a film like a demented museum curator, could devise a character as rich as Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, who gave the movie a rueful spiky emotional center. My hysteria calmed down reasonably quickly. I envisioned an entire generation of Wes Anderson clones, turning movies into cutesy dioramas from hell. My fear at the time was that Anderson, with his relentlessly stylized music-video-meets-Salinger-meets-indie-hipster-absurdist sensibility, represented a virus that could kill movies. So alone did I feel in this perception, so shut out of the Wes Anderson cool-kid club, that as a critic I almost felt like I needed to launch my own club. But the bottom line for me is that “Rushmore,” on some essential chemical cinematic level, was too flip, too ironic, too whimsical, too in love with its cheeky postmodern self, and (yes, let’s use the word! How could we not?) too twee. I mean, I kind of saw what people were talking about: that “Rushmore” was like “The Graduate” for the new millennium, that the Jason Schwartzman hero had a formidable Holden Caulfield-gone-meta-deadpan attitude that was equal parts devious and desperate, that the Bill Murray character seemed the apotheosis of Bill Murray, and other things. I have felt that way from his very first feature, “Bottle Rocket” (1996), and I really felt it at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998 when I saw “Rushmore” - because everyone there did a backflip of ecstasy, already hailing Anderson as the filmmaker of his generation, and I didn’t get it. ![]() When I watch one of his movies, I can’t help but see his talent (the visual wizardry, the debonair lapidary cleverness), but I feel like I’m experiencing something that was made on a different planet from the one I live on. I’ve always been shy when it comes to writing about Wes Anderson, because he’s a filmmaker I rarely connect with. ![]()
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