Looking Back at Wes Anderson’s Films

There is a difference between a movie and a film, and Wes Anderson is a director of the latter.

Hollywood makes movies (as movies also make Hollywood), and they have one purpose: to entertain. Movies are a pleasant distraction, blockbuster confections that bring people together with buckets of popcorn in 90-minute intervals of detached reality.

Films are for little movie theaters, not big ones, and their purpose varies. Some, like movies, are for distraction and entertainment. Others are made just to look pretty, while still others are made with a message — either poignant or pitiably soapbox-esque — in mind. Some are made because nothing else quite like it has been made yet, and there is something irresistible about the inimitable absurd.

Anderson’s films best fit this last category, although no one who has seen the “Grand Budapest Hotel” can deny that perfectly-symmetrical shots of a salmon-pink castle hugged by Austrian mountains are anything but animated art. For that matter, no one who has seen “Moonrise Kingdom” and its idyllic shots of New Penzance (or simply Suzy Bishop’s knee-high socks and impeccably-ironed dress) can deny their artistic appeal, either.

Anderson specializes in films that have not merely strayed off the beaten path, but rather have taken a left-turn into the ocean. What other director, after all, would make a film that chronicles a madman’s manic documentary pursuit of a shark that devoured his best friend (“The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”)? Or a film about a group of dogs in post-dystopian Japan carving out a living from Trash Island (“Isle of Dogs”)?

Anderson was born in 1969 in Houston, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in philosophy, and his first ambition was to be a writer, not a filmmaker.

His desire to write stories, rather than to show them, is clear throughout his filmography. Anderson has written and directed nine films. All are utterly bizarre, and all read with a distinctive narrative style that belies a director who does not view a film as a film at all, but rather as a novel that unfolds itself across a screen.

Although Anderson’s films vary wildly in their premise, they are all characterized by the writer-director's characteristically dry, deadpan sense of humor, his narrative style (almost all of his films have an omnipresent narrator, a more weighty version of Ron Howard’s commentary in “Arrested Development”), and his frequent collaborators. Of Anderson’s nine films, eight feature Bill Murray, seven Owen Wilson, and six Jason Schwartzman. Others have smaller, but still notable, recurring roles in his films: Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, and Wally Woladarsky and Anjelica Huston appear in four, while Adrien Brody has starred in three.

Anderson’s films are meticulous. Visually, Anderson takes every detail into account, be it geometry, colors, or prop placement. The Instagram account @accidentallywesanderson, which boasts almost one million followers, has dedicated itself entirely to photographs that mimic the director’s style: pictures with two or three pastel colors, flawless symmetry, and an odd sense of perspective. Many of Anderson’s films — particularly “Moonrise Kingdom,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” — feature shots that seem to project directly from the gaze of the viewer, like an augmented virtual-reality experience.

Part of what makes Anderson so paradoxically compelling is his habit of making films at once too odd to ever happen in real life and too realistic to belong in a theater. “Moonrise Kingdom,” for example, deals with the pen-pal relationship between two adolescents and their decision to run away together. Most of the movie is about the tediousness of summer camp and adolescent woe — the kind of everyday emotions happily left behind by most in middle-school. “Moonrise Kingdom” is just weird enough to make for a story, but the premise itself is not wholly out of the ordinary. Anderson specializes in this particular dichotomy: stories that reflect real life like a funhouse mirror, a resemblance stretched at the edges a centimeter or two beyond believability.

Anderson’s tenth film, “The French Dispatch,” hits theaters this July. The film is inspired by the New Yorker, and deals with the staff at a French magazine, student protests, and a love affair. (Like most movies made by Wes Anderson, “The French Dispatch” has an affinity for multitasking.) The movie also features frequent collaborators, including Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe, and Anjelica Huston.

Over the course of his storied career, Anderson has gained a cult following and numerous accolades. Most notably in 2014, he won a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) for “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, five BAFTA awards, and six Golden Globes.

Twenty-four years after his first film, “Bottle Rocket,” Anderson is a pillar of the film industry, one of few directors whose films appear in theaters both big and small. He has found the overlap of the relatable and the unfathomable, the beautiful and ugly, and he has made an indelible impact on an ever-changing, perpetually-unimpactful industry.

— Staff writer Emerson J. Monks can be reached at emerson.monks@thecrimson.com.