It took me years to become a fan of Wes Anderson, but now I'm as big a fan as anyone.
The first Anderson film I watched was 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, released during the height of my cinema-going mania. I loved it. By 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, my trips had slowed to a crawl, so my next Anderson was a copy of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was curious about, finally, because it was a Bill Murray film. And I loved it. Then I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I loved it.
But I didn't love Wes Anderson until 2018's Isle of Dogs. I didn't just love Isle of Dogs, I fell in love with it. It wasn't just an experience I really enjoyed, but internalized. I couldn't get over it. I obsessed over it. Like Fantastic Mr. Fox, it was stop-motion animated, but it had a heart that swallowed all its eccentricities and maximized them. It was a perfect movie.
When I saw 2021's The French Dispatch, I knew I was a fan. So I had to finally catch up with everything else.
I had first heard of Anderson with 1998's Rushmore, along with pretty much everyone else. I had been subscribed to Entertainment Weekly since 1996. When Entertainment Weekly obsessed over something, I was never sure I was actually the target audience. They also obsessed over Election, starring Reese Witherspoon, and I still have never been completely sold on Witherspoon, have never seen either of the Legally Blonde movies (but love her in Walk the Line and This Means War). Sometimes Entertainment Weekly obsessed over things I knew I would never like (never became a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), minutiae designed to appeal to geeky insiders. I knew Bill Murray was in Rushmore, but this was before Lost in Translation (which even that, I didn't see for years, although in this instance not for lack of interest), when Murray's career was in flux. He appeared, prominently, in Space Jam, and it's never thought of as a Bill Murray movie. Hollywood seems determined to kill the careers of its stars, and Murray's career had all but been killed at that point. Rushmore, although I didn't know it at the time, was the start of his comeback.
Entertainment Weekly also gushed over 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, and this one I sort of actively avoided for years! I always just assumed it was Keeping up with the Kardashians before anyone cared a thing about anyone named Kardashian (except that one lawyer), just a case of Hollywood preening itself.
I caught up with 2007's The Darjeeling Unlimited and Moonrise Kingdom first. As it happened, these were also films Entertainment Weekly had warned against, having themselves cooled to Wes Anderson. And of course I loved them. Then I happened upon a Criterion Collection edition of Tenenbaums. Then I just sought out Rushmore and Anderson's first movie, 1996's Bottle Rocket. And, darn it, I loved them all!
So I have a definite new addition to my collection of favorite filmmakers. Bottle Rocket, cowritten and costarring Owen Wilson (he's really pretty much avoided writing anything since, which is a shame), and of course he pops up in pretty much all of Anderson's movies, and he's among the most likeable actors I know. He was even in the 2022 Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy Marry Me, and of course I loved that, too, so he's certainly still showing up in good material, an unlikely but very solid career.
A different version of this blog (aside from being more active) would do a whole series on Anderson's films, explaining everything that's great about them, but here it's enough to say I haven't encountered any director who has so thoroughly mastered his art direction, who has so completely perfected his style, and who has so consistently delivered. Even among my other favorites, there's a range of results. There's really not a weak link in Anderson's filmography. Critics considered French Dispatch to be just a series of scenes with no real point. They missed the point. No real surprise, there. Where Entertainment Weekly will momentarily cherish Anderson, they're hopping on a trend. And they hop right back off. Isle of Dogs didn't even win Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, but it was certainly my favorite movie from 2018. And, really, it wasn't even close. (Though that year was ripe with unlikely greats.)
All of which is to say, I will be appreciating Wes Anderson for years to come, thank you very much. (Of his two upcoming films, one releases on Netflix. To this point, I have never subscribed to the service, not even to view Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, which remains frustratingly locked onto it. I bitterly resent the streaming era. I may have to reconsider, finally.)
