Wes Anderson

One of my writing teachers had an interesting theory about Hemingway. We had been reading "The Sun Also Rises," which is still the only Hemingway I've read besides "The Snows of Kilamanjaro." It was a senior-year lit class, affectionately called the Novel Salon. Each week, we take a different book, read it, dissect it, ponder why it works and why it doesn't. It wasn't literary analysis. We were all writers, or wanted to be. The prideful spite-fink in me felt no end of aroused dignity, considering that I was the only writer in class recognizable to the local public at large. Celebrity pride, senior year pre-graduation pride, starting-a-relationship pride - it was an interesting time.

Anyways, the teacher's theory went thusly - "The Sun Also Rises" was the breakthrough for the Hemingway form, stripped of excess emotion, descriptive of only the barest actions, deadpan dialogue that ran on until you forgot who was talking to who and wondered if it even mattered. It's the Hemingway that everyone has read - true connoisseurs sample the better chapters of "A Moveable Feast" (the best ones involve Fitzgerald), when you reach a certain age you have to read "The Old Man and the Sea." And it is told entirely from the perspective of Jake Barnes, with his old war wound that left him impotent, maybe even castrated. When you understand that about Jake, and you see how it affects his worldview - to Hemingway, and to Barnes, to be asexual is to be neutral, disinterested, vague - then Hemingway's style makes sense. A first-person narrator who is distant from his own life is unbearably sad, like the book itself.

But after "The Sun Also Rises" (according to the teacher), Hemingway wrote predominantly in the third person, and although his writing was still good, there was something essentially wrong with it. The notion of a single individual cut off from the world is sad; the notion that everyone is like that, every character, the godlike omniscient narrator, is just a little bit lazy, and depressive, and nihilistic.

I thought of the teacher's theory last night, as I fell asleep to "The Royal Tenenbaums," I movie which I passionately loved when I first saw it in theaters. For three years after, Wes Anderson struck me as a genuine film artist. When I heard that his next movie was going to be a high-seas adventure involving claymation and Bill Murray, my head exploded. But then "The Life Aquatic" came out. There is much brilliance in the movie, but there is something missing, too. It is a film lovers' candy land, the kind of adventure we all dreamed of having. But so much of the movie is adrift. The final scenes are moving, and yet, so few of the characters in the film have any real emotional arc. The middle hour is little more than a bunch of people hanging out in beautiful sets. And the sets are beautiful. But it's an empty beauty.

It steadily began to dawn on everyone else that "Life Aquatic" was not the genius film we were expecting, and so, by the time "The Darjeeling Limited" arrived in theaters, Anderson-bashing was a genuine pastime.

I haven't seen "Darjeeling," though I want to. But having reviewed "Royal Tenenbaums," I think I've finally figured out the problem with "Life Aquatic." There are a bunch of great actors in "Tenenbaums," but the most underrated has to be Alec Baldwin, in what might be his best performance, his gravel voice combining the gravitas of his earlier glamour-boy roles with the light whimsy of his current comedic second act. It's Baldwin who directs us, like a good storyteller or a wise old medicine man or a filmmaker, in the film's opening scenes, which cut across decades of Tenenbaum life, introducing us to all the characters at a whip-quick pace that could have come out of Pynchon or Roald Dahl.

There is no Baldwin voice in "Life Aquatic" - and that is a problem. Like the Tenenbaum children, Steve Zissou is a genius past his prime, a great talent descended into mediocrity. The narrator in "Tenenbaums" shows us that great talent; in "Life Aquatic," we have to take it on faith, and just to make sure, Anderson keeps making other characters say, "Steve is great, we love Steve, we'd do anything for him." Brilliant as Bill Murray can be, he lets his characters find him, and not the other way around - and he can never (to me) summon up the authority of someone who is supposed to be such a great leader of men. (He works better in "Lost in Translation" and "Broken Flowers" with his lifelong loners.)

"Royal Tenenbaums" feels much closer because of the narration - first-person cinema. We can understand the heavily stylized atmosphere - this is a fairy tale, a book gotten from a library, a retelling of an old story. "Life Aquatic" feels much more removed - third-person cinema. It feels like it should be more realistic, not more kitschy.

That's my theory anyways.

"Hotel Chevalier" rocks.