Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers

An Excursion Into the American New Wave

Derek Hill

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781842433928
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Since the late 1990s, a subtle, subversive element has been at work within the staid confines of the Hollywood dream factory. Young filmmakers like Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Sofia Coppola rode in on the coattails of the independent film movement that blossomed in the early 1990s and have managed to wage an aesthetic campaign against cowardice of the imagination, much like their artistic forebears, the so-called Movie Brats—Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman, and Ashby among others—did in the 1970s. But their true pedigree can be traced back to the cinematic provocateurs of the Nouvelle Vague—such as Truffaut, Goddard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette—who, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, liberated screens around the world with a series of films that challenged our assumptions of what the medium could offer and how stories could be told—all of them snapping with style as much as they delivered on ideas. Highly idiosyncratic yet intricately realized, accessible yet willing to overthrow the constraints of formal storytelling, surreal yet always grounded in human emotions, this new film movement captures the angst of its characters and the times in which we live, but with a wryness, imagination, earnestness, irony, and stylish wit that makes the slide into existential despair a little more amusing than it should be.

WES ANDERSON

‘Watch this space. What does that mean? That he might be something one day.’ – David Thomson on Wes Anderson28

Three sentences. Fifteen syllables. But that’s all it took to land such a dismissive backhanded compliment to one of the most peculiar original voices and visual senses in cinema today. Critic and writer David Thomson, though, isn’t the only one disappointed with the trajectory of Anderson’s career after the praise heaped upon his first two films.

On the other hand, in a 2000 article in Esquire29 magazine, one of America’s most respected living filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, was a bit more laudatory when asked who would be the next… him. On the strength of Anderson’s debut feature, Bottle Rocket (1996), a spry reevaluation of the moribund post-Tarantino heist pictures that had been clogging up theatres and video-store shelves ever since the release of Reservoir Dogs in 1991, and the magnificent, completely assured sophomore juggernaut Rushmore (1998), the great Scorsese selected Anderson as the heir to his celluloid throne.

And why not? Anderson, unlike, say, Tim Burton – another meticulous visual stylist – is not a hollow miniaturist, a glorified model-maker unfortunately saddled with a gaggle of actors to deal with. All of Anderson’s films are in love with actors and dialogue, as well as steeped in a conscious appreciation of the relevance of literature, music, painting, and cinema, as they relate to their human counterparts and shape their realities. It’s a strong trait that he shares with his nouvelle vague progenitors, especially Truffaut, whose strong love of literature often found representation in his films. Anderson’s assimilation of literature into his films, much like his incorporation of theatrical techniques and visual motifs such as mannered framing, theatrical opening credit sequences, use of title cards or chapter headings to denote a segue into a new act, the ‘final bow’ given to his cast of characters (‘a good cast is worth repeating’), is always cinematic, always meant to lend the films an added layer of aesthetic dialecticism that does not exist outside of the frame per se. Anderson’s penchant for artifice is also what so many of his detractors seem to dislike about his films – the recurring motifs, the self-conscious framing, immaculately tailored mix-tape song lists that time and again include music from the 1960s British Invasion, and the wilful desire to encase his characters within what they argue is an increasingly rarefied bubble of whimsy and twee that has started to resemble, with each successive movie, something synthetic, something less about us and more and more about stuff.

In the eyes of his critics, and even his most ardent fans, who feel that this extraordinary talent has simply become much too enamoured of the glimmering cinematic train set at his disposal, Anderson is a brilliant technician who has lost his way along the road to greatness. Whereas the precocious talent from Texas first slipped snugly inside Truffaut’s shoes, Anderson now appears to have gravitated more toward the exaggerated arrangements and eccentric notes of a post-Giulietta degli spiriti/Juliet of the Spirits (1965) Fellini, a time when the maestro of Italian cinema stretched his already strong predilection for surrealism, extravagance, and amplified caricature into hyperdrive with his subsequent work, Fellini Satyricon (1969), Fellini’s Roma (1972), and, at his most hyperbolic, fascinating and ultimately exhausting, the failed II Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976).

It’s unknown whether or not Wes Anderson will, or should, heed the pleas to ‘return to form’ from his most obsessed and disappointed fans. It’s sort of like requesting that David Lynch stop being so weird. Anderson, with his collection of moneyed misfits, broken sons searching for authoritarian yet comforting father figures, need for unity and acceptance within a family unit (traditional or of one’s making), and a surprisingly earnest and heartfelt emotional core that has infused all of his films – including the much maligned and misunderstood Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – has been one of the most consistent and coherent cinematic voices of his generation. His themes, namely those of brotherhood, friendship, fallen-from-grace prodigies and eccentrics searching for redemption, may for some be a limited colour palette to choose from, but it’s no different from that of directors like Ford, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese, and the previously mentioned Lynch, who extracted great insight and meaning out of their own rich and somewhat restricted themes or through repetitive stylistic signatures. But growth is also part of an artist’s worth, and, for many, Anderson has simply not displayed any desire to move beyond the corridors of the familiar.

Anderson was born in 1969 in Houston, Texas to an upper-middle-class family, a background that would provide a rich texture for all of his films – class differences being a major theme throughout, though typically addressed in an off-hand, low-key manner. Many of Anderson’s protagonists are either part of the upper middle class or want to belong to it. But despite their privilege, few of them, if any, are actually happy, whether it’s Anthony (Luke Wilson) in Bottle Rocket, who at the beginning of the film has just left a mental hospital that he admitted himself to, or the entire burned-out Tenenbaum clan of well-off dreamers and depressives who seem desperate to escape the confinements of a tarnished prerogative. Suspended in their privilege and perpetual adolescence, the key to self-awareness only arrives with tragedy, i.e. the death of a close friend or family member.

After spending his teens attending St. John’s School in Houston, where he later filmed much of Rushmore, and where, like that film’s precocious playwright extraordinaire Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), he staged elaborate theatrical productions like The Battle of the Alamo and The Headless Horseman,30 Anderson enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin where he majored in philosophy. It was there that he eventually met Owen Wilson, who was majoring in creative writing, in a playwriting class. Although the two were in the same class, they never actually spoke to one another until their second semester, but they quickly became fast friends once they realised that they shared similar tastes in literature and film. The culmination of their late-night discussions of filmmaking led to brainstorming screenplay ideas, and it was then that the two precocious, budding filmmakers started working on what would ultimately become the short black-and-white film Bottle Rocket.

Wilson’s family was friends with L.M. Kit Carson, the actor/writer who had previously starred in Jim McBride’s classic experimental nouvelle vague-influenced David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and gone on to script McBride’s Breathless (1983) remake and also Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984). Carson became interested in the project and invited both Anderson and Wilson to accompany him and his wife Cynthia Hargrave to the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. McBride and Hargrave would both serve as Bottle Rocket’s producers. Journeying to Sundance that year was an eye-opening experience for the two novices, and luckily they found investors to film the short. Upon completion of the 13-minute film, Anderson and Wilson returned to Sundance hoping to drum up investors for a full-length feature version. Reaction to the film was strong at the annual independent film festival but no offers trickled down their way.

But interest in Hollywood for a feature-length version of the peculiar, skewed take on the heist genre did manifest itself in the shape of the multi-talented Polly Platt, ex-wife and artistic collaborator of director Peter Bogdanovich. Platt, who fell in love with the script’s clever but down-home humour, eccentric, naïve characters and genuine tenderness embedded within what is, in actuality, a ridiculous plot, passed the script on to James L. Brooks, who, with Platt, would become Bottle Rocket’s guiding light and producer.

Bottle Rocket, the feature film, was released by Columbia Pictures in 1996 and would garner strong critical praise. But the studio dumped the film and it would only be through video and DVD that this American comedic gem, one of the true stand-out independent features of the 1990s, would find its audience.

Despite the commercial failure of his debut, Anderson’s future was bright and for his next film his ambition as a filmmaker was broader and more adventurous. Rushmore starred then-unknown Jason Schwartzman as the precociously brilliant playwright/inventor/renaissance teen Max Fischer, a student at the titular private school who vies with his friend, a downwardly mobile, married, middle-aged steel tycoon, played by Bill Murray, for the love of a beautiful new teacher at the school. Audacious and completely fresh, while still paying homage to a wealth of cinematic influences ranging from Mike Nichols’ The Graduate to Louis Malle’s Le Souffle au coeur to Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) to the films of John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Anderson’s second film was a wonderful and unique reimagining of the teen comedy genre and a far cry from the frat boy, gross-out Porky’s throwback of American Pie that would rear up and dominate the box office a year later.

In 2002, Anderson released the exquisitely designed, hyper-realistic fairy tale of a New York that never was, The Royal Tenenbaums, starring a first-rate ensemble cast headed by Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, and Luke and Owen Wilson. Sprawling yet intimate, the film unfurls like a peculiar masterpiece of some kind, perfectly balancing Anderson’s painterly attention to the clear-lined mise-en-scène while delivering sometimes devastating emotional blows. The film would become Anderson’s most celebrated work up to that point, earning praises from both fans and critics. But its ambitious visual scope and leanings toward a more formal – though some would argue a more solipsistic, self-conscious or precious – hermetic design, would also lay the groundwork for what many critics saw as a major artistic stumble.

That setback, for many, would come in the form of his next picture, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Part parody/tribute to the late, great French sea explorer Jacques Cousteau, part surreal though user-friendly peculiarity as remixed by Walt Disney, Life Aquatic is a phantasmagoric, big-budget love letter to the legendary Cousteau, Rome’s famed Cinecittà film studios (where much of it was filmed) and to his lead actor, Bill Murray. Murray played the embittered oceanographer Steve Zissou, whose best days have long passed him by – an Anderson preoccupation – but who is determined to track down the mythical jaguar shark that killed his friend and comrade, Esteban. Fitted with his biggest studio budget yet and access to all of the toys any filmmaker would love to have at their disposal while filming at Cinecittà, Anderson indulged his odd imagination like never before. But Life Aquatic – like many of his films – generated mixed reviews, tepid box office, and reinforced the view held by many of his fans that the absence of Wilson’s participation on the script was detrimental to the film. Regardless of the perceived artistic inadequacies of the film, the negative reviews, or the dissatisfying box office, Life Aquatic has its fair share of defenders, this author being one of them.

In between productions, Anderson has directed several commercials promoting everything from Dasani water to AVON to IKEA furniture. But his most widely seen promo was for American Express, in which the director played himself ‘on the set’ of his latest picture, an action epic starring Jason Schwartzman among others, and that precisely paid homage to François Truffaut’s classic 1973 film about the making of a film, La nuit Americaine/Day for Night. The ad condensed much of Anderson’s visual template with its sumptuously composed frames and fluid camerawork, courtesy of cinematographer Robert Yeoman. Whether people in their living rooms realised it or not, they had just watched a two-minute masterstroke by the most overly praised yet undervalued American filmmaker working today.

In September of 2007, Wes Anderson’s long-awaited follow-up to Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited (along with the 13-minute short film, Hotel Chevalier, starring Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman and described as ‘a short epilogue of one heartbreaking history of love’, which serves as a prologue to the events in the feature film), was unveiled at the 64^th Venice Film Festival. Typically, critical reactions to the picaresque sojourn of three brothers riding the rails through rural India – the dreamland of Kipling and Satyajit Ray – after the death of their father, ranged from the hostile31 to the adoring.32

Bottle Rocket (1996)

Directed by: Wes Anderson

Written by: Owen Wilson, Wes Anderson

Produced by: Cynthia Hargrave, Polly Platt

Edited by: David Moritz

Cinematography by: Robert Yeoman

Cast: Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, James Caan, Robert Musgrave, Andrew Wilson, Lumi Cavazos

‘One morning, over at Elizabeth’s beach house, she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realised that not only did I not want to answer that question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.’ – Anthony (Luke Wilson) explaining why he was hospitalised for ‘exhaustion’.

Peter Pans, men who never willingly grow up until circumstances force them out of their prolonged adolescence, figure strongly in all of Wes Anderson’s films, though perhaps never as amicably or as pronouncedly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• RICHARD LINKLATER
• DAVID O. RUSSELL
• WES ANDERSON
• SPIKE JONZE
• SOFIA COPPOLA
• MICHEL GONDRY
• SINGLE EXCURSIONS
• RESOURCES
• NOTES
• Copyright
• Advertisement