if i can dream: The Everlasting Boyhoods of Wes Anderson - Review

Film Comment, Jan, 1999 by Mark Olsen

UNLIKE MANY WRITER-DIRECTORS of his generation, Wes Anderson does not view his characters from some distant Olympus of irony. He stands beside them -- or rather, just behind them -- cheering them on as they chase their miniaturist renditions of the American Dream. The characters who inhabit Anderson's cinematic universe, a Middle West of the Imagination, embody both sides of William Carlos Williams's famous edict that the pure products of America go crazy, being, for the most part, both purely American and slightly crazy. Though some might label his people losers, or even invoke that generational curse, slackers, they are in fact ambitious and motivated overreachers, misguided though their energies occasionally are.

Todd Solondz may be the new leader of the arch-irony cult, and therefore the filmmaker seemingly most at odds with Anderson's lighter, nonsatiric touch, but he at least uses his distance to create a shifting matrix of uncertain sympathy and identification. It's filmmakers like Gregg Araki or that ironist old-timer Hal Hartley to whom Anderson is most in opposition. They use an ironic stance to establish their superiority over characters and audience alike. Within their overly referential worlds, the viewer is always left to play catch-up, attempting not only to spot the reference but also digest its "meaning," while characters are reduced to ciphers or signs. In a climate where coolness reigns and nothing matters, the toughest stance to take is one of engagement and empathy. Anderson seems to have accepted the challenge.

Anderson himself seems not so removed from those he portrays, as if his deep affection and sympathy for his characters stems from a glimmer of self-recognition. Both of his films to date, 1996's Bottle Rocket and the new Rushmore, were shot in areas of his native Texas with which he is intimately familiar, and apparently autobiographical elements are strewn throughout. Rushmore, named after the small, fictitious private school in which it is mostly set, was filmed at the alma mater where Anderson languished through his high school years. Still, this is not to imply that his films are psychodramatic extensions of a therapist's couch. Each is an entertainment of the highest order, with a wit, verve, and sincerity largely absent from the contemporary youth picture.

Young Wes, like Rushmore's Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), would, in exchange for good behavior, be permitted to put on plays for his classmates -- hyper-energized, TV-derived scenarios such as "The Five Mazeratis," an Autobahn drama, or a reenactment of the Battle of the Alamo. Anderson also made short Super-8 films -- spy movie knockoffs or new installments in the ongoing adventures of Indiana Jones. After a brief phase as a self-styled "literary type," he majored in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin but wanted to return to moviemaking. Eschewing film school, he got involved with local cable access production in both Austin and his native Houston. He had by this time met up with Owen Wilson, his writing partner, and they set about writing what would become Bottle Rocket, the script Anderson claims at one point ambled its way up to around 300 pages. They began shooting with the intention of filming their way through the script in installments, but ran out of money after completing a modest 13-minute short. This prototype Bottle Rocket and their epic-length script made its way up the moviemaking foodchain until it reached producer-director James L. Brooks, who helped steer more money their way than they had ever imagined necessary for their project.

It's easy to see how the short functioned as a small part of a larger whole, and although it is self-sufficient, it is most interesting in relation to its more fully realized feature companion-piece. For example, while the short begins with two of its characters riffing on Huggy Bear and a particular episode of "Starsky and Hutch," this type of pop culture dialogue -- a fixture of Nineties hip cinema -- is conspicuously absent from Anderson's feature. In its place is an obsessive, endless patter of therapy-inflected self-analysis, aimlessly revolving in circles. Not for nothing does the bookstore robbery that serves as centerpiece of the short remain unseen; instead Dignan (Owen Wilson) and Anthony (Owen's brother, Luke Wilson) recount the details to their getaway driver Bob (Robert Musgrave, who, like the Wilsons, reprised his role in the feature). The action itself is important only in that it gives them something new to talk about, creating a springboard for further attempts at personal insight. If both of his films seem to be about people spinning their wheels, Anderson is interested less in the lack of forward movement than in the kinetic excitement of energy displaced -- life as a colorful pinwheel or, as the title metaphor points to, a beautifully glowing, albeit temporary, roadside firework.

Anthony and Dignan will surely someday be recognized as Nineties archetypes; restless and uncertain about their current life status, they are perpetually in transition. Their essential dilemma is one that faces a lot of contemporary middle-class Americans standing on the verge of full-fledged postcollegiate adulthood; finding the prospects somewhat terrifying, they yearn obsessively to regress into a childhood freedom that is obviously unobtainable. Early in what we might call Bottle Rocket: The Movie, Anthony visits his little sister, Grace, at her private school. She speaks to him with an adult honesty he later calls "cynical," yet she has a far clearer perspective on her brother and Dignan than they ever have on themselves. Anthony, fresh from a voluntary stay at a mental hospital for "exhaustion" (Grace: "You haven't worked a day in your life, how could you be exhausted?"), seeks grace in Grace, a sense of innocence and purity he has lost in himself and in the world he sees.