Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously.

I don’t think “realism” is a super-interesting aesthetic goal. It’s a legitimate goal, certainly, but far from the only option and rarely the most compelling. But Movies, especially since the 70s, have had an attitude that that “realistic” means “for grownups”, and anything fantastical or stylized means “for kids”, with certain carve-outs for “surrealism” that mostly only apply to David Lynch.

Which is one of the reasons I love Wes Anderson’s movies so much, as he’s one of the people who seem to be actively thinking about “what can we do other than make it look real, though?” There’s a running joke that every Wes Anderson movie is “the most Wes Andersony movie yet!” but that’s not quite right. He’s got a set of techniques, tools, and he keeps refining them, finding new ways to hone the point.

Anderson always gets kind of a strong reaction in certain corners of the web, which is funny for a lot of reasons, but most of all because the kind of people who don’t like his movies tend to also be the kind of people who are mad everything looks like a Marvel movie now, and it has a real quality of “we want something different! No, not like that!”¹ That said, people mustering the energy to actually hate something is a pretty strong signal that you made Art instead of Content.²

It was a stacked year, with two releases, which I watched in completely the wrong order.

Asteroid City

It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.

Anderson has always leaned heavily into artifice as a storytelling technique, and here he pushes that about as far as possible. Even within the terms of it’s own fiction, it’s all fake: a fake performance of an unreal play, made for a TV broadcast which isn’t real either, and then proceeds into what is absolutely not a play. It’s a strong move to open with “none of this really happened”. That’s implicit in all fiction, but rarely is it foregrounded like this. The movie gets a couple of things out of this.

It results in maybe his all time best opening; black and white, a non-widescreen aspect ratio, and Bryan Cranston doing a Rod Serling impression as the host of the TV show from the 50s. He describes the play we’re about to see, and then introduces the writer (Ed Norton) who steps out onto the stage and introduces the plot outline, the characters, and then walks through the layout of the scenery, and the camera angle cuts around showing the “actors” in their street clothes, and then each piece of fake scenery. The camera pulls back, the lights turn off, and them—bam—we’re a color widescreen, following a train into Asteroid City, where the camera carefully shows us each of the pieces of the set around town, now both more and less real.

It’s Shakespearian, but not the way people usually mean it—instead it’s the opening of Henry V rendered in the language of TV.

And the movie proceeds in the multiple layers, moving back and forth between the Host and his TV show, the actors and writers of the “play” working on it, and then the “play” itself. This also means many of the actors are effectively playing more than one part, the “actor” and the “character”.

But we also get the layers bleeding into each other; the host accidentally entering the scene at the wrong time, actors leaving the play to talk to the director or to each other. Rushmore and Barbie meet up behind the stage and perform the scene that was “cut for time” roughly where it was supposed to go. Characters talk about ideas for how to stage scenes that are coming up. The structure of a play is maintained, with title cards popping in to remind us which act or scene this is.

The cast, as always, is stacked and excellent. Just about the entire Anderson rep company is in this, with actors who would normally get top billing showing up here to stand in the back of scenes with no lines, and then deliver one word or two. There is a Bill Murray–shaped hole that Steve Carell does about a good a job of fulling as anyone could. (Originally, I assumed the Bill Murray role was the one taken by Tom Hanks, but knowing that it was actually the hotel manager makes that character make a lot more sense.)

There’s a lot of thematic material churning around about loss and acceptance and moving on and human connections and art, but it’s also a movie where the characters openly talk about the fact that the don’t understand what it all means. Anderson likes to leave some blanks for the audience to fill in, and this might be his best deployment of that technique. I know what it all meant to me, but it feels like cheating to say.

Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

But, now that we have all that out of the way, let’s focus on what’s really important: this is an incredibly funny movie, full of incredibly good actors, doing incredibly silly things with incredibly straight faces.³

It’s less of a movie and more a series of skits performed completely deadpan. All of Anderson’s movies are like this, but in some ways this as close as he’s ever gotten to the full Airplane!.

From the opening where Matt Dillon describes the two possible problems with the car and then discovers a third, followed by the three girls disagreeing with the waitress that they are princesses, the movie is continuously funny, and I pretty much laughed out loud the entire time.

Which, of course, is the secret to all the thematic and structural stuff I spent all those words on up front—it’s not that they don’t matter, but they’re there to set up a bunch of really funny jokes, and to do some slight of hand to keep you from noticing that the joke is coming, until, like the UFO, it’s right on top of you.

I loved it, by the way.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

People love faces.

I could make an argument here invoking evolutionary biology, or some deeper philosophical point, but this isn’t that kind of review so I’m going to skip all that and say that most storytelling boils down to being fascinated by other people’s faces.

And so we come to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which centers on “what if we had some really good actors look the camera dead in the eye and tell the audience a story?”

In a lot of ways, this quartet of stories feels like the endpoint of the increasing artifice Anderson has been working in since at least French Dispatch. My take is that this is less about artificiality for its own sake than it is borrowing visual storytelling techniques from other mediums and deploying them in a movie, where they look more fake compared to the default “realist” style.

A very early example of this is the scene in Life Aquatic where camera pulls back to reveal a cutaway side view of the Belafonte as Steve Zissou narrates a tour of his boat. The boat isn’t literally a cut-away, but the scene plays as “here’s how we would do this if it was a comic.”

Here, it’s using using techniques and tricks from the theatre, but remixed in a way you could never do live on stage. So, we have stagehands handing props to actors on screen, actors sitting on prop boxes to simulate levitating, pieces of scenery sliding in and out of frame as scenes reorient. Except the scenery moves in ways it never could on stage and the stage hands come from places they couldn’t have come; this is the visual language of a play deployed in a way that could only work in a movie.

The first segment starts with Ralph Fiennes in character as Roald Dahl himself, looking very much like the real thing, settling into a fairly accurate recreation of Dahl’s real-life writing hut. he settles into his chair, fusses about with his pencils, the heater pops and hisses. Bright colors non-withstanding, it’s realistic—we’re in the real world, watching Roald Dahl getting ready to write a story. There’s a naturalism to it, a sense of authenticity; this is probably what it really looked like when a roughly 60-year old man sat down to write. He settles into place, pulls the the writing surface into his lap, puts pencil to paper, and then…

…the whole tone changes. Fiennes continues to talk, narrating the story, but his aspect shifts; he’s the narrator now, not an old man writing; he pushes the paper away, stands up, walks out of the hut with a completely changed demeanor as the scenery changes behind him. We’re not in the real world anymore, we’re explicitly in the Land of Story now. It’s one of the most marvelous transitions I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in essentially one shot.

The story plays out as a series of nested stories, Roald Dahl’s outermost narration, Henry Sugar’s discovery of the book, the book’s contents as narrated by the doctor, the story told by the old man of how he learned to see without his eyes, and then back out again until we unwind back to Roald Dahl in front of his shed again. The narration passes hands, and the actors narrating play a kind of double role, both as a character on screen and then turning towards the camera to deliver an aside to the camera.⁴

I found it compelling almost to the point of hypnosis.

As with Asteroid City, the artifice is the point. Did this really happen? Of course it didn’t, it’s a short movie on Netflix based on a Roald Dahl story made by the guy who did Royal Tenenbaums. Does it matter? The end hits the same either way.

Anderson has never come close to matching the emotional punch at the end of Royal Tenenbaums of “I’ve had a rough year, dad.” He’s spent a lot of time trying to recapture that hit, never successfully. While he’s moved on from trying, he does like to end his movies with a punchline. “And that’s what I have done” is one of his best.

This is exactly the sort of experiments that 1) short movies, and 2) streaming should be used for. It’s outstanding that this was what finally won Anderson his first “big boy” Oscar.

Some stray observations on the other three stories:

“The Rat Catcher” was always one of Dahl’s slice-of-weird-life stories, where things keep getting more uncomfortable without ever being overtly dangerous. Here, it turns into an acting clinic between Ralph Fiennes finding new ways to be menacing, and Moss from The IT Crowd finding new ways to look horrified.

“The Swan” always bothered me as a kid, Dahl always had mean streak, and this was one of his meaner stories, the sort of story where only bad things happen. It also had a strangely ambiguous ending, especially for Dahl—what really happened there? Did the boy escape? Is he dead? Is the thing that happens at the end metaphorical for dying? And it’s ambiguous in the sort of way you can get away with in prose, since the reader can only “see” what the author describes. I was very pleased that they found a way to keep the ambiguity intact despite the audience now being able to see everything that happened.

Also, it’s hilarious that Rupert Friend was absolutely mesmerizing in this at the same time he was phoning in being the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What a weird year he had!

“Poison”, meanwhile, after almost being word-for-word with the source material, does change the end, to refuse to let the racism off the hook. Partly this is through some sharp editing, but mostly through the looks on Ben Kingsley’s face.

It’s worth noting, for the record, that while this set of stories has a remarkable variety of narrators, none of them are women, which while accurate to the source material, rankles somewhat here in the twenties.

I Guess I Should Put A Conclusion

Like I mentioned way back at the start, I watched these out of order, Henry Sugar first, then Asteroid City, so on first swing the movie felt like a step back from the shorts. On a rewatch in the right order, it was more obvious how they built on each other. But I enjoyed them both either way.

Where do you go from here, though? Henry Sugar really does feel like an endpoint for the approach Anderson has been developing since at least The French Dispatch, there’s a straight line from that movie, though Asteroid City to Henry Sugar. Or maybe not an endpoint but more that the technique has arrived at it’s final form.

I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.⁵

---

1. This is because these people don’t want “different”, they want everything to look like a Scorcese movie.

2. Which pretty much sums up the whole of the current economy and the human condition in one sentence. I will not be taking questions at this time.

3. It’s incredible.

4. It’s a kind of extended riff on soliloquies, but that both makes it sound overly pretentious and undersells it at the same time, so I won’t make that comparison.

5. I was expecting another stop-motion palette cleanser, but instead it sounds like it’s going to be a spy movie?