(Bottle Rocket and Fantastic Mr. Fox are playing at Central Cinema through Monday.)

BOTTLE ROCKET / FANTASTIC MR. FOX Wes Anderson at his earliest and best, respectively.
  • BOTTLE ROCKET / FANTASTIC MR. FOX Wes Anderson at his earliest and best, respectively.

All right, so what's your complaint about Wes Anderson? Everybody's got one—he drives more people absolutely insane than any other living director. Are his films too similar for you? Are they too mannered? Too cutesy? Too aloof? Is his aesthetic too predictable? I call bullshit on all those complaints. What auteur doesn't pick at the same themes and ideas over and over again? A great director has one statement or question they spend their entire career communicating to us. What auteur doesn't demand total control over their films? It's literally the definition of auteur.

The aesthetic complaints against Anderson—that his movies are too darling, that they feel artificial, like closed systems—might as well be arguments against film itself. Every film is an artificial, closed system. Naturalism is the lie. By designing the aesthetic of his movies to resemble overambitious shoe-box dioramas at a student art show, Anderson is acknowledging the artificiality of the medium. He's not interested in what happens outside the rectangle of the screen because, as far as the movie is concerned, there is no outside the screen. Once you move beyond the perfect rectangle, nothing exists. Every movie is a solipsist.

As of last week, I've seen every Wes Anderson film, and I've enjoyed almost all of them. The Darjeeling Limited lost me with its dour literalness and meandering camera. I nearly walked out on it when it was released in the theater in 2007, and I haven't revisited it since. The film that I saved for last was Anderson's first: Bottle Rocket....

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