I don't think I've looked forward to any movie as much as I looked forward to "Life Aquatic." All the descriptions of it read like a millenial film geek's giant wet dream - Wes Anderson gets a $90 Million Dollar Budget to go to Europe and do whatever he wants; Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston as a married couple; deep sea diving adventure; claymation imaginary sea creatures; Cate Blanchett as a pregnant love interest. I went to go see the movie on ski trip sophomore year. Have I ever told you about this ski trip? So much craziness - hook-ups and drinking games and skiing at the top of the world. And the whole time, me and my friend Roddy couldn't stop talking about how much we all had to go and see "The Life Aquatic." It was a different time. I think Hunter S. Thompson was still alive. Bush had just been re-elected. Anger was settling into malaise and casual annoyance.
I can remember the exact moment that I knew I didn't quite like the movie. It's the moment when Bill Murray breaks out of his bonds and shoots up a bunch of pirates, action movie style. It's a moment that Steve Zissou seems to become the great man that everyone is always saying he is, and after that scene, I was expecting that Bill Murray would finally come to life. It's strange to remember now, but he used to be a vital, crazy presence onscreen. He was never madcap - never a John Belushi - but there was a certain madness in his best performances, in "Caddyshack" as an idiot savant waging war on a gopher, in "Scrooged" battling his own inner asshole to find true love, and most especially in "Groundhog Day," where he covers an incredible range of moods - anger, madness, exasperation, existential regreat, and ultimately contentment. Anderson revived his career in "Rushmore" by making Murray play the same kind of man twenty years after the party - sad, quiet, mugged by the passage of time. That gunfight seemed to indicate a return of the old Murray.
But no. After the fight, he remains trapped in his little malaise - for the whole movie, really. In a sense, "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic" are the same sort of story, in that you hear, over and over again, how the characters' greatness has passed them by. The difference is that "Tenenbaums" has Gene Hackman, who absolutely holds the movie together. Every other character is trapped in that particular Andersonian stasis - they stand still in elaborate diorama-sets without really noticing anything. Hackman gives the whole film its life force - he's the burning, half-drunk, scheming supernova that casts light on everyone else. Bill Murray in "the life Aquatic" is just the opposite - every character onscreen loves him, can't stop talking about how great Steve Zissou is, and he's just at the center, hanging out in a steam room. He's the black hole. I think, frankly, this is because Hackman is a genuine actor and Bill Murray is just Bill Murray. Murray plays the same character in each film, and sometimes it's genius ("Lost in Translation") sometimes it's just monotone ("Broken Flowers.")
There are moments of "Life Aquatic" that make you laugh and moments that make you choke up with tears, and what they both have in common is that they come completely out of nowhere. Anderson doesn't write narratives that advance or grow - he comes up with a single idea and has characters circle around that idea for the whole movie. There is always an elephant in the room in Anderson films that characters never quite get around to talking about. In "Royal Tenenbaums" and "Life Aquatic," no one can ever quite bring themselves to admit what failures they have become.
The worst thing, though, was the cuteness. "Royal Tenenbaums" was cute, but there, within the film, it actually made sense - all of the characters suffered from arrested development, so it made complete sense that they all still acted like children. In "Life Aquatic," the cuteness is ruinous - you can't believe that any of the characters could steer a canoe, much less make a series of true-life deep-sea adventure films. You certainly don't buy Steve Zissou as a genius. Leaving the theater from watching "Life Aquatic," my strongest feeling was frustration - the whole movie, all I could think of was how much I wanted to crawl on the screen and shake everyone out of their stupor. You have a fucking boat with a fucking submarine! Life isn't so bad!
Hackman is that shaker in "Royal Tenenbaums." The teacher is that shaker in "Rushmore" - she never gets carried away by Max's dreams, never once buys into the fact that he actually loves her, is quite aware of the fact that HE'S A TEENAGER.
And that's exactly the role that Natalie Portman plays in "Hotel Chevalier," from the very first moment she steps into the hotel - "What the fuck is this music?" Jason Schwartzman's character has arranged his whole room just so, Wes Anderson style - he selects a particular soundtrack of late 60s music, he starts a bubble bath, changes his clothes, orders food. Natalie Portman is exactly the breath of fresh air that keeps Wes Anderson films from being empty whimsy. Gwyneth Paltrow was narcotized in "Royal Tenenbaums" - she never changed her expression. You could argue that it made it all the more potent when she did emote - the bit where she starts crying when she hugs Luke Wilson is beautiful - but you could also argue that it's strange, after her knockout performance in "Shakespeare in Love," to see the woman who was then the greatest actress in the world give a Jessica Biel performance.
I didn't read all of the race thing because I noticed it had spoilers for "Darjeeling," and even for movies I don't want to see I hate spoilers, but it seems that the main argument is that Anderson uses ethnic characters and cultures on the periphery and makes a joke out of his character's inability to understand them. Here we are getting into dangerous post-PC territory. There was just a big flap over a comment that a character made on "Desperate Housewives" - Teri Hatcher (who, everyone knows, is the ditzy housewife) said that she wanted to see her doctor's credentials and make sure he "didn't have a med school diploma from the Phillipines or something." Instantly, the Filipino government issued a massive public statement about how the comment was entirely misleading - that Filipino doctors are some of the most educated in the world, etc, etc. But was the line meant to make fun of the Phillippines, or was it meant to make fun of the characters' stupidity, or was it meant to portray a silly yet common prejudice in modern day America? Was the joke morally defensible? Is "Desperate Housewives" anti-Filipino?
This is an important question for the modern age, because the thrust of Slate's argument is essentially that Wes Anderson makes movies about upper class white people with no understanding of the rest of the world, and hence, Wes Anderson has no understanding of the rest of the world. Gene Hackman makes racist comments in "The Royal Tenenbaums" and people laugh at them, because Gene Hackman's delivery is very funny. Does that make us racist if we laugh at that? Archie Bunker said much worse for much longer on "All in the Family,"and that was one of the funniest sitcoms ever. If you were to watch an episode of "All in the family" and "Friends" back to back, which one has aged better? "Friends" is offensive to no one, and yet it is entirely deracinated as a result - FAR more hermetic, I would argue, then anything Anderson has done.
Is the Indian guy in "Royal Tenenbaums" funny? Hell yes. Does he have as big a role as other characters? No. Does he have a fascinating backstory? Yes - he stabbed Royal and took him to the hospital afterwards, and he stabs him again. For comparison, consider the movie "About Schmidt," one of the most heartbreaking films ever made about old age and loneliness which is also hysterically funny. The running joke of the film is that Jack Nicholson has taken part in one of those "save the african orphans" program and sends money to a child named Nduku - they encourage people to write their orphans letters, and so throughout the film, Jack Nicholson begins his letters, "Dear Nduku." Because people in America find the name so alien, and so when it's placed in such a quaint context of a letter, it becomes insanely funny. One critic (I don't remember who, so sorry if this is just a straw man argument) said that that bit was racist.
Take it one step further. There is a burgeoning question online about race in Peter Jackson films. There were no black people in "Lord of the Rings," but there were orcs (who had monstrous big noses and were generally ugly and scruffy looking and talked with Cockney accents) and there were also the Uruk-Hai, a warrior race of big dudes who painted their faces and could smell Man from miles away. They were black as soot, and looked like lions. They were unrepentantly evil, and unthinking. Are they meant to be African? Is "Lord of the Rings" secretly a story about gentrification - Aragorn, the long lost King, is after all a Numenorian, a member of a master race that lives a very long time and hangs out with the Elves, who stand still and statuesque like characters in a Wes Anderson film.
Even more problematic is "King Kong" - Peter Jackson envisions the natives of Skull Island as african-esque people. I say "african-esque" because the roles are played by actors of several different races who are colored more olive than brown. Jackson wanted Skull Island to incorporate aspects of several climate zones - plants from all over the world, different sorts of animals, and he wanted his people to have the same hybrid look. But does the fact that they were dark skinned and primitive mean that Jackson sees all African people like that? He makes fun of the earlier King Kong's treatment of the natives in his own film, but is his treatment any better? Does it matter that one member of the supporting cast is African American, quotes "heart of Darkness" from memory, and takes a young orphan under his wing?
So lets say, for the sake of argument, that Wes Anderson's whole point with race in his films is to show how his characters are silly in their prejudice. Where does that leave us? Royal gets his comeuppance - the man he insults ends up marrying his wife and becoming a surrogate father to his children. Conversely, nothing really happens in "Life Aquatic" to connect the characters to their environment. The treatment of the Pirates, in particular, is complete fantasy land - they're just a bunch of Filipinos who hang out on a broke down boat and keep a secret base on an island. My brother thinks that "Life Aquatic" has a particularly Mediterranean style - that Anderson absorbed the best of France and Italy and Spain. I don't see any evidence of the film styles of those three countries in the film. "Life Aquatic" is the ultimate tourist movie - Steve Zissou goes cool places without every really trying to understand them, doesn't seem to speak the language, doesn't try.
WHich brings me back to "hotel Chevalier," where the whole point, I think, is that Jason Schwartzman's character is hermetically sealed, and Natalie Portman is there as the eternal Breath of Fresh Air. I think there is something unbearably sad about the short, and I think that has everything to do with Portman's performance - the way she absorbs the whole diorama layout of Schwartzman's pristine room and asks, "What the fuck is the deal?" Most characters in Anderson films refuse to let even the simplest emotion out of their face, but Portman is all emotion - yearning, annoyance, hatred, sadness, confusion, amusement, everything. It's fitting, then, that she's essentially naked by the end of the film and Schwartzman hasn't taken off a single article of clothing. How perfect that the film ends out on the deck, because that's exactly the kind of view Wes Anderson's characters take of the world - they see it without being it, slightly removed in their lavishly designed, empty hotel room. The first and last shot of the film are the only two that aren't inside of the hotel room.
Wes Anderson's films are all about the tension between stasis and kineticism, between silent people who can't formulate a word and manic people who can't help but speak their mind. "Hotel chevalier" captures all of that in 12 minutes. The one wrong note in the film is the slow motion penultimate shot, but only because it feels so mannered - but notice how Anderson twists his own style, and our own expectations. Yes, there is the same old "British Invasion song playing over slow motion walking" bit, but it's the same song that was playing earlier - that Jason Schwartzman arranged for his perfect tableau scene - and it isn't actually the last shot - when Anderson cuts outside, they're moving back in normal motion.
One more thing about the song - in "Life Aquatic," you could tell that Anderson was just making his soundtrack quirky for the hell of it. "Search and Destroy" is a great song, but the montage it accompanies does nothing for the movie - it seems like a scene that exists purely to showcase "Search and Destroy." But "Where do you go to My Lovely" is exactly the right song for this film. It is rife with references to High culture and Europe and pop culture and names and places - it could have been written by Bret Easton Ellis ("you talk like Marlene Dietrich/ and you dance like Zizi Jeanmarie/ your clothes are all made by Balmaire) - but because Anderson is making a film that's specifically about an American abroad hermetically sealed in his hotel shell, the song becomes a bit sad - you get the vibe that Jason Schwartzman's character knows who Marlene Dietrich is but has never seen one of her movies, that he knows Picasso is great but doesn't understand why, that he knows Naples is cool but couldn't find it on the map.
The song is also important because it's easy to misunderstand the intention. The chorus runs, "WHere do you go to my lovely, when you're alone in your bed, tell me the thoughts that surround you, I want to look inside your head." Because it's a man singing, one might automaticaly assume that the song is about Natalie Portman's character. Just the opposite. Jason Schwartzman is the "lovely" of the title - alone in his bed, surrounded by thoughts. Natali Portman's whole role in the film is to try to get Jason Schwartzman to open up - to leave his little hotel room, to tell her what he really thinks, to get a RISE out of him. It almost kind of works.
I dunno. Maybe I just see alot of myself in the movie.
Cheers,
Darren
I can remember the exact moment that I knew I didn't quite like the movie. It's the moment when Bill Murray breaks out of his bonds and shoots up a bunch of pirates, action movie style. It's a moment that Steve Zissou seems to become the great man that everyone is always saying he is, and after that scene, I was expecting that Bill Murray would finally come to life. It's strange to remember now, but he used to be a vital, crazy presence onscreen. He was never madcap - never a John Belushi - but there was a certain madness in his best performances, in "Caddyshack" as an idiot savant waging war on a gopher, in "Scrooged" battling his own inner asshole to find true love, and most especially in "Groundhog Day," where he covers an incredible range of moods - anger, madness, exasperation, existential regreat, and ultimately contentment. Anderson revived his career in "Rushmore" by making Murray play the same kind of man twenty years after the party - sad, quiet, mugged by the passage of time. That gunfight seemed to indicate a return of the old Murray.
But no. After the fight, he remains trapped in his little malaise - for the whole movie, really. In a sense, "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "The Life Aquatic" are the same sort of story, in that you hear, over and over again, how the characters' greatness has passed them by. The difference is that "Tenenbaums" has Gene Hackman, who absolutely holds the movie together. Every other character is trapped in that particular Andersonian stasis - they stand still in elaborate diorama-sets without really noticing anything. Hackman gives the whole film its life force - he's the burning, half-drunk, scheming supernova that casts light on everyone else. Bill Murray in "the life Aquatic" is just the opposite - every character onscreen loves him, can't stop talking about how great Steve Zissou is, and he's just at the center, hanging out in a steam room. He's the black hole. I think, frankly, this is because Hackman is a genuine actor and Bill Murray is just Bill Murray. Murray plays the same character in each film, and sometimes it's genius ("Lost in Translation") sometimes it's just monotone ("Broken Flowers.")
There are moments of "Life Aquatic" that make you laugh and moments that make you choke up with tears, and what they both have in common is that they come completely out of nowhere. Anderson doesn't write narratives that advance or grow - he comes up with a single idea and has characters circle around that idea for the whole movie. There is always an elephant in the room in Anderson films that characters never quite get around to talking about. In "Royal Tenenbaums" and "Life Aquatic," no one can ever quite bring themselves to admit what failures they have become.
The worst thing, though, was the cuteness. "Royal Tenenbaums" was cute, but there, within the film, it actually made sense - all of the characters suffered from arrested development, so it made complete sense that they all still acted like children. In "Life Aquatic," the cuteness is ruinous - you can't believe that any of the characters could steer a canoe, much less make a series of true-life deep-sea adventure films. You certainly don't buy Steve Zissou as a genius. Leaving the theater from watching "Life Aquatic," my strongest feeling was frustration - the whole movie, all I could think of was how much I wanted to crawl on the screen and shake everyone out of their stupor. You have a fucking boat with a fucking submarine! Life isn't so bad!
Hackman is that shaker in "Royal Tenenbaums." The teacher is that shaker in "Rushmore" - she never gets carried away by Max's dreams, never once buys into the fact that he actually loves her, is quite aware of the fact that HE'S A TEENAGER.
And that's exactly the role that Natalie Portman plays in "Hotel Chevalier," from the very first moment she steps into the hotel - "What the fuck is this music?" Jason Schwartzman's character has arranged his whole room just so, Wes Anderson style - he selects a particular soundtrack of late 60s music, he starts a bubble bath, changes his clothes, orders food. Natalie Portman is exactly the breath of fresh air that keeps Wes Anderson films from being empty whimsy. Gwyneth Paltrow was narcotized in "Royal Tenenbaums" - she never changed her expression. You could argue that it made it all the more potent when she did emote - the bit where she starts crying when she hugs Luke Wilson is beautiful - but you could also argue that it's strange, after her knockout performance in "Shakespeare in Love," to see the woman who was then the greatest actress in the world give a Jessica Biel performance.
I didn't read all of the race thing because I noticed it had spoilers for "Darjeeling," and even for movies I don't want to see I hate spoilers, but it seems that the main argument is that Anderson uses ethnic characters and cultures on the periphery and makes a joke out of his character's inability to understand them. Here we are getting into dangerous post-PC territory. There was just a big flap over a comment that a character made on "Desperate Housewives" - Teri Hatcher (who, everyone knows, is the ditzy housewife) said that she wanted to see her doctor's credentials and make sure he "didn't have a med school diploma from the Phillipines or something." Instantly, the Filipino government issued a massive public statement about how the comment was entirely misleading - that Filipino doctors are some of the most educated in the world, etc, etc. But was the line meant to make fun of the Phillippines, or was it meant to make fun of the characters' stupidity, or was it meant to portray a silly yet common prejudice in modern day America? Was the joke morally defensible? Is "Desperate Housewives" anti-Filipino?
This is an important question for the modern age, because the thrust of Slate's argument is essentially that Wes Anderson makes movies about upper class white people with no understanding of the rest of the world, and hence, Wes Anderson has no understanding of the rest of the world. Gene Hackman makes racist comments in "The Royal Tenenbaums" and people laugh at them, because Gene Hackman's delivery is very funny. Does that make us racist if we laugh at that? Archie Bunker said much worse for much longer on "All in the Family,"and that was one of the funniest sitcoms ever. If you were to watch an episode of "All in the family" and "Friends" back to back, which one has aged better? "Friends" is offensive to no one, and yet it is entirely deracinated as a result - FAR more hermetic, I would argue, then anything Anderson has done.
Is the Indian guy in "Royal Tenenbaums" funny? Hell yes. Does he have as big a role as other characters? No. Does he have a fascinating backstory? Yes - he stabbed Royal and took him to the hospital afterwards, and he stabs him again. For comparison, consider the movie "About Schmidt," one of the most heartbreaking films ever made about old age and loneliness which is also hysterically funny. The running joke of the film is that Jack Nicholson has taken part in one of those "save the african orphans" program and sends money to a child named Nduku - they encourage people to write their orphans letters, and so throughout the film, Jack Nicholson begins his letters, "Dear Nduku." Because people in America find the name so alien, and so when it's placed in such a quaint context of a letter, it becomes insanely funny. One critic (I don't remember who, so sorry if this is just a straw man argument) said that that bit was racist.
Take it one step further. There is a burgeoning question online about race in Peter Jackson films. There were no black people in "Lord of the Rings," but there were orcs (who had monstrous big noses and were generally ugly and scruffy looking and talked with Cockney accents) and there were also the Uruk-Hai, a warrior race of big dudes who painted their faces and could smell Man from miles away. They were black as soot, and looked like lions. They were unrepentantly evil, and unthinking. Are they meant to be African? Is "Lord of the Rings" secretly a story about gentrification - Aragorn, the long lost King, is after all a Numenorian, a member of a master race that lives a very long time and hangs out with the Elves, who stand still and statuesque like characters in a Wes Anderson film.
Even more problematic is "King Kong" - Peter Jackson envisions the natives of Skull Island as african-esque people. I say "african-esque" because the roles are played by actors of several different races who are colored more olive than brown. Jackson wanted Skull Island to incorporate aspects of several climate zones - plants from all over the world, different sorts of animals, and he wanted his people to have the same hybrid look. But does the fact that they were dark skinned and primitive mean that Jackson sees all African people like that? He makes fun of the earlier King Kong's treatment of the natives in his own film, but is his treatment any better? Does it matter that one member of the supporting cast is African American, quotes "heart of Darkness" from memory, and takes a young orphan under his wing?
So lets say, for the sake of argument, that Wes Anderson's whole point with race in his films is to show how his characters are silly in their prejudice. Where does that leave us? Royal gets his comeuppance - the man he insults ends up marrying his wife and becoming a surrogate father to his children. Conversely, nothing really happens in "Life Aquatic" to connect the characters to their environment. The treatment of the Pirates, in particular, is complete fantasy land - they're just a bunch of Filipinos who hang out on a broke down boat and keep a secret base on an island. My brother thinks that "Life Aquatic" has a particularly Mediterranean style - that Anderson absorbed the best of France and Italy and Spain. I don't see any evidence of the film styles of those three countries in the film. "Life Aquatic" is the ultimate tourist movie - Steve Zissou goes cool places without every really trying to understand them, doesn't seem to speak the language, doesn't try.
WHich brings me back to "hotel Chevalier," where the whole point, I think, is that Jason Schwartzman's character is hermetically sealed, and Natalie Portman is there as the eternal Breath of Fresh Air. I think there is something unbearably sad about the short, and I think that has everything to do with Portman's performance - the way she absorbs the whole diorama layout of Schwartzman's pristine room and asks, "What the fuck is the deal?" Most characters in Anderson films refuse to let even the simplest emotion out of their face, but Portman is all emotion - yearning, annoyance, hatred, sadness, confusion, amusement, everything. It's fitting, then, that she's essentially naked by the end of the film and Schwartzman hasn't taken off a single article of clothing. How perfect that the film ends out on the deck, because that's exactly the kind of view Wes Anderson's characters take of the world - they see it without being it, slightly removed in their lavishly designed, empty hotel room. The first and last shot of the film are the only two that aren't inside of the hotel room.
Wes Anderson's films are all about the tension between stasis and kineticism, between silent people who can't formulate a word and manic people who can't help but speak their mind. "Hotel chevalier" captures all of that in 12 minutes. The one wrong note in the film is the slow motion penultimate shot, but only because it feels so mannered - but notice how Anderson twists his own style, and our own expectations. Yes, there is the same old "British Invasion song playing over slow motion walking" bit, but it's the same song that was playing earlier - that Jason Schwartzman arranged for his perfect tableau scene - and it isn't actually the last shot - when Anderson cuts outside, they're moving back in normal motion.
One more thing about the song - in "Life Aquatic," you could tell that Anderson was just making his soundtrack quirky for the hell of it. "Search and Destroy" is a great song, but the montage it accompanies does nothing for the movie - it seems like a scene that exists purely to showcase "Search and Destroy." But "Where do you go to My Lovely" is exactly the right song for this film. It is rife with references to High culture and Europe and pop culture and names and places - it could have been written by Bret Easton Ellis ("you talk like Marlene Dietrich/ and you dance like Zizi Jeanmarie/ your clothes are all made by Balmaire) - but because Anderson is making a film that's specifically about an American abroad hermetically sealed in his hotel shell, the song becomes a bit sad - you get the vibe that Jason Schwartzman's character knows who Marlene Dietrich is but has never seen one of her movies, that he knows Picasso is great but doesn't understand why, that he knows Naples is cool but couldn't find it on the map.
The song is also important because it's easy to misunderstand the intention. The chorus runs, "WHere do you go to my lovely, when you're alone in your bed, tell me the thoughts that surround you, I want to look inside your head." Because it's a man singing, one might automaticaly assume that the song is about Natalie Portman's character. Just the opposite. Jason Schwartzman is the "lovely" of the title - alone in his bed, surrounded by thoughts. Natali Portman's whole role in the film is to try to get Jason Schwartzman to open up - to leave his little hotel room, to tell her what he really thinks, to get a RISE out of him. It almost kind of works.
I dunno. Maybe I just see alot of myself in the movie.
Cheers,
Darren
No comments:
Post a Comment