Chaos and Control
You always know when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. Perhaps more than any other contemporary auteur, he brings an unmistakable visual style and aesthetic blueprint. Anderson curates meticulously precise, flamboyantly detailed hermetic worlds. Indeed, his characters and settings are so distinctive that it is as though they produce a spatial and temporal reality that is all their own.
His signature ‘look’ is so culturally pervasive that it has inspired an Instagram account (‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’) that has over 450,000 followers. On it, photographs are posted that replicate Anderson’s use of symmetrical framing and ‘frontality’, a formal composition of visual elements whereby characters and objects stare back at us ‘dead-on’. This self-reflexive style eschews naturalism, instead privileging the visual pleasure of looking at an obsessively ‘staged’ set of images that are often bursting with elaborate detail. Far from sidelining him as a cult figure, the singularity of Anderson’s mode of address has attracted popular approval. He is that rare American director who has successfully transitioned eccentric whimsy into the ordinary moviegoer’s consciousness; his films deliver solid box-office results without ever compromising on artistic sensibility.
However, this stability of vision isn’t without its detractors. As Nick Pinkerton has pointed out, ‘Criticisms of Anderson’s movies, in fact, tend to revolve around the fact that they are too much like Wes Anderson movies.’ Then there are the charges of prioritising ‘surface depth’ over genuine human characters and narratives. Critic Sam Davies writes that Anderson is ‘chronically aware that his own imaginative world isn’t real, and uses it like a model train set: scaled-down, delimited, inhabited by figurines’.
Anderson has stated that his films are ‘five degrees removed from reality’. In (Anderson, 2012), this artificiality is turned in on itself, as a pair of love-struck twelve-year-olds plot escape from an absurd adult universe. The film’s visual language magnifies the perspectives of our protagonists while pointing up the limitations of the parent figures. In a departure from some of the director’s other work, here the ‘surface’ details and handmade storybook aesthetic are calibrated to is a highly amusing film, more often than not a wistful register dominates.
