A commentary on filmmakers Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Alexander Payne, originally published in the Brown University/RISD College Hill Independent.
Martin Scorsese told me in an interview earlier this year that his favorite new American filmmakers are Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Alexander Payne.
This might be the typical answer you’d get from any cutting edge filmmaker or film enthusiast at the moment.
Baloney. I would argue that these filmmakers are the kings of modern, male, morose, misfit movies. Let’s examine the Andersons, Jonze, and Payne—the four cinematic iconoclasts of the late 90s and today—in an effort to determine whether or not their art is of lasting significance.
Wes can be more
Wes Anderson, the co-writer and director of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, is an Austin, TX wünderkind whose emotional palette is that of troubled quirkiness. The secret to understanding Anderson’s films is to determine which character is the auteur’s counterpart: it is Anthony Adams (Luke Wilson) in Bottle Rocket, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) in Rushmore, and Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) in The Royal Tenenbaums. All restless, all lost, all lonely, all searching for a self-identity. In Bottle Rocket, the sadness was tempered by very funny humor: Bob Mapplethorpe the getaway driver, Owen Wilson’s hilarious performance as Dignan, and the haywire execution of the climactic heist made it quite a delightful movie. Yet, by the end of the film, the viewer recognizes what a troubled character Dignan is beneath his charming naiveté.
The relationship between Anthony and Dignan parallels the friendship presented in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets between Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro). Like Bottle Rocket, Mean Streets is about a man who is trying to lead a stable, moral life but feels obligated to take care of his screw-up best friend who keeps getting them both into trouble. Both films explore the way one can be drawn to distraught rebels whose fearless drive to live on the edge of life is so contagious it makes you want to be around them despite your sneaking suspicion that their unquenchable ailing will eventually spell ruin.
Rushmore is a film that takes depression to magnificent heights by getting down on its characters for being so down on themselves. Wealthy businessman Herman Blume (Bill Murray) is so over-the-top pathetic, it makes you laugh—and also realize how inappropriate it is to let yourself get to the level of hopelessness that Blume so egregiously wallows in. Blume and teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams) admire the persistence of prep school student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), whose uses tenacious activism to relieve himself of a deep sadness and isolation. Because he keeps on keeping on, Max has figured out the secret to recovering from life’s hurdles.
The Royal Tenenbaums attempts to track down the root of depression, concluding that it results from an unloving family that failed to nurture children properly. Yet this idea is not complex or original enough to fully make the film meaningful. Anderson spends too much time depicting his characters’ moroseness—subjecting the viewer to downbeat Nico songs and shots of his characters blankly staring into space—and not enough time creating humor. The movie is obsessive about getting details right (note the fetishistic costume and set design), but it lacks the kind of perceptive self-scrutiny that was so apparent in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore.
Anderson’s films are clearly inspired by French New Wave director Francois Truffaut. Max Fischer is a modern-day American version of the Antoine Doinel character from Truffaut’s seminal autobiographical work, The 400 Blows. Antoine is a reckless youth who hates school, hates his home life, feels confined and misunderstand in society, and wants to escape to live freely in the wild wide-open world. Anderson has consistently constructed maladjusted movie heroes—all of whom are relentlessly independent yet starving for an emotional connection to a like-minded individual. Very much like Truffaut’s child-like heroes, Anderson’s heroes want to run free during the day and come home to a mother who will spoil them to pieces.
The valley guy
Paul Thomas Anderson is the audacious San Fernando Valley, CA filmmaker who would like to think he’s Robert Altman reborn. Anderson’s Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love hurdle forward with impassioned characters who are depressed, aimless, and angry—yet the films frustratingly fail to interpret these emotions. Boogie Nights uses the porno film industry to explore the meaningless of the late 70s, but because the film does not explain why this conclusion is relevant, it is little more than a brilliant exercise in filmmaking technique. Magnolia is so bizarre, convoluted, and chaotically edited, it would make a dreidel dizzy. But how is the film’s message—that although life may seem pointless sometimes, an inner order actually underscores every action—any different from a million other movies about having hope? Anderson’s work, set primarily in his hometown and obviously based on real-life experiences (the porno industry was big in the Valley in the 70s), has not yet articulated the broad commentaries on American life that are buzzing in his brain.
A hot (Spike’s) dog
Spike Jonze, the Washington D.C., skateboarder-turned-filmmaker who has directed Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, should be admired for his willingness to push the oddity envelope, but criticized for the ultimate triviality of his work. What is the point of Being John Malkovich? How awful our everyday lives are, how we try in vain to escape from reality, how what we desire remains unattainable? But these ideas are only flirted with in a screenplay that also hurls at the viewer an office that exists on a half floor, a couple of women realizing they’re lesbians, and animals crawling all over Craig Schwartz’s (John Cusack) apartment. Granted, these scatterbrained ideas may be funny, but what do they have to do with the film’s main themes? Ultimately, Being John Malkovich succeeds only as a dark metaphor for self-loathing.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Jonze’s next project was Adaptation, the story of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), who tries in vain to adapt the book The Orchid Thief into a movie. The odyssey of a self-pitying character tirelessly aware of his grossness, the lowest point is when Charlie masturbates on-screen. The ending, in which viewers are supposed to realize not only how much they actually long for formulaic movies, but also how pathetic they are for letting this formulaic junk move them to tears each and every time, made me think that a better title for this movie would have been Condescension.
Debatably, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are more the creative offspring of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman than Jonze. Both scripts are great ideas that are not developed to full potential. Movies need to be about more than a portal into someone’s brain or the lack of a good idea for movie—these concepts are not ends in themselves, but should be thought of as ways to examine human nature. But instead, the work of Kaufman and Jonze seems concerned merely with what the filmmakers perceive to be their personal shortcomings.
Payne-ful satire
Omaha, NE native Alexander Payne’s films, Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt, grow increasingly ambitious, but decreasingly funny and meaningful. How can Payne be the acute social satirist of the American heartland that every critic says he is when his targets are so easy and unimportant? Election informs us that the Midwest is dull, high school elections are won by the go-getter that everyone respects but no one is friends with, and high school teachers actually hate their jobs. Like, duh. The movie tries to suggest that the Tracy Flicks of the world are running politics, but somehow I don’t quite believe it. Tracy lacks the necessary charm for politics, though she would make a good corporate executive or movie studio chief. The true lesson to be learned from the sea of unsatisfied individuals surveyed in Election is that instead of defining ourselves in opposition to people and systems that we hate, we should strive to define ourselves by that which makes us happy.
About Schmidt offers a similar message, though it’s hardly as engaging a film. The life of unpleasant Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) simply does not merit two hours of my time. It’s odd that the film expects us to identify with such a nasty person, but to brush off the delightful, life-affirming Roberta Hertzel (Kathy Bates) as a weirdo. If we’re talking social satires, I’d prefer to watch the hilarious, humanistic Clueless, to Payne’s increasingly condescending, stuffy efforts that reveal more about his ambivalent attitude toward the Midwest than trends in American life.
High art vs. emotional outpour
Depression, restlessness, isolation, anger, self-loathing, and nastiness. Judging from the cinema of the Andersons, Jonze, and Payne, these feelings are prevalent today. Whether these filmmakers are actually tapping into the current zeitgeist or merely expressing themselves as 30-ish men who grew up in the rather unloving late 70s and 80s remains to be seen. The more important issue is whether or not the supposed top-tier filmmakers of today attempt to make sense of the emotions they so openly explore.
The themes prevalent in the work of today’s iconoclasts have certainly been explored before in American film, to most recent acclaim in the 70s by filmmakers such as Scorsese, Altman, and Coppola. Yet the disturbing feelings expressed in Taxi Driver, M*A*S*H, and The Godfather rise above the personal expression of the artists, representing a larger cultural-social milieu. Films of the 70s were more willing to ponder how these feelings might be linked to landmark social events, most notably Vietnam.
But what has produced the high anxiety on display in the work of today’s auteurs, and how do we deal with it? To be significant works of art, movies must transcend the personal emotions of the artists who produce them. To make art that is more than mere autobiography, a filmmaker must ask scrutinize his story, attempt to understand what motivates his characters’ actions, determine what makes them representative of a universal life experience, and appreciate what can be learned from them. If the Andersons, Jonze, Payne can meet these challenges, we will know that they have created art to stand the test of time.
