Week 9 - The Voice of Wes Anderson

I watched “Fantastic Mr. Fox”, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”, three films by director Wes Anderson. Each movie showcases Anderson’s authorial voice, Budapest and Mr. Fox more-so than the Tenenbaums. These two movies are completely fictionalized, while “The Royal Tenenbaums” is in a more traditional building in a real city. Anderson’s later movies, one a piece of stop-motion animation and the other featuring a make-believe hotel, lend themselves to more imaginative situations, and therefore lends more freedom to the filmmaker to make many more creative choices with the filmmaking. In a world or a structure where the viewer is unfamiliar with the ‘rules’ of the universe, more can be done directorially before immersion is broken.

This is important, because Anderson’s actors always behave strangely. By strangely, I mean speaking curtly and often formally, with long pauses. The dialogue is very secondary to the visual storytelling. It’s used to supplement the visual comedy in his movies, and all of his movies are quite comedic. Every beat, even if occuring during a serious event, is staged, shot, and edited so that it doesn’t quite occur the way the viewer expects. For example, one moment in “Tenenbaums” features a character slitting their wrists. Instead of showing what the character does, and create a serious tone, Anderson gives us flashes of the character’s motivation, and by the time we appear back in the present the deed is already done. It happens off camera and before it’s expected, and Anderson adds a button on the end of the scene by having a boy discover the attempted suicide and scream, but he cuts the audio during that time. Instead, only music is heard as the boy opens his mouth. An earlier Anderson work, it’s still stylistically distinct but the direction still has to fit within the confines of city living. This is not the case in the later two movies, which are completely constructed and therefore relatively unconfined. In “Mr. Fox”, the entire production is fabricated and Anderson has complete freedom to move the camera how he wants around the scene, and how the characters move. This leads the movie to look very artificial but again it is still believable because of how unrealistic the subject matter is and because of how cohesive and consistent Anderson is with his direction and voice. In all of Anderson’s movies, the music takes priority over other sound in a scene. It communicates the bulk of the mood, and ties Anderson’s somewhat disjointed dialogue and camera movements into a cohesive whole. Anderson’s filmmaking is extremely linear, like the telling of a storybook, and both the characters’ acting and the cinematography reflects this. The camera moves deliberately, showing one thing in a scene before revealing another piece of information. The latter is revealed either in service of story progression or as a stylistic/comedic button on a scene. Many of the shots are symmetrical in Anderson’s movies, and this serves as a frame to characters, further making a space for the action of a scene to occur within and creating a sense of visual cohesion to all shots in his movie and his entire body of work.

All of Wes Anderson’s visual and directorial choices aim to sustain the tone of the movie. He lets nothing get in the way of that one simple feeling he is trying to communicate, even if this means creating a sense of surrealism through artificial editing, camera movement, and sound. Dialogue, even serious, is said with a light tone just to keep the sense of momentum in the movie. No one moment has too much emotional weight laid on it, and this is part of why all Anderson’s movies have a warm or nostalgic feeling. The diffusion and separation from emotion, taking it away from the actor and placing it within different elements of the entire scene give Anderson’s movies a tonal strength and keep the pacing quick enough to keep the viewer entrapped by the hypnotically symmetrical framings and dreamlike colors.