Finding Wes Anderson's Missing Key

Next Friday, we will receive Wes Anderson's 13th feature, The Phoenician Scheme. Watching the trailer, I noticed Anderson's increasingly absurd style and a plot that is anything but based in reality. I've never felt less excited about one of his movies.

Am I the only one who feels like the director is in a rut? Yes, his movies are stylistically unique — a type of style that can only come from Anderson — yet, I feel like something is missing.

Despite whatever gripes I mention in this article, make no mistake: I'm a big Wes Anderson fan. He's the most unique director working today. However, I admit that my love for him has dulled over the past couple years. His last movie that really grabbed me was The French Dispatch, which was enjoyable but ultimately forgettable.

Even in that movie, I felt like there was something missing, a key that Anderson just wasn't hitting.

In preparation for The Phoenician Scheme, which looks very much like a continuation of the hyperstylized-yet-emotionally-shallow series of movies Anderson has made since The Grand Budapest Hotel, I decided that I needed to go back, way back, to when Anderson was still making his name.

I decided to rewatch The Royal Tenenbaums.

I had to know if Anderson really had changed as much as I thought. I found the movie on Disney+ and I pressed play.

Maybe it's because I'm older now, but rewatching Tenenbaums was a very rewarding experience. It resonated with me on multiple levels, from its decades-spanning music to its American sensibilities to its emotional depth. That is to say, I think I discovered what's missing from Anderson's latest movies.

This first part is kind of a tangent, so bare with me. Along with being a cinephile, I'm also an audiophile. A few years ago, I did a deep dive into rock music from the 1960s and 70s. I knew who The Beatles were, but I wanted to learn why they were considered so influential.

This investigation led me down all sorts of rock-and-roll corridors. I learned a lot about The Velvet Underground and Nico, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bob Dylan. Going further down the rabbit hole, I found that The Beatles were credited as inspiration for Frank Ocean's Blonde, a modern favourite of mine, along with someone named Elliott Smith. I listened to him too.

When I wasn't studying rock history, I was writing my own screenplay and listening to Erik Satie incessantly.

You can imagine my surprise when all of these threads connected in a movie from 2001. It was like Anderson had been in my mind during this period, 20 years before it ever occurred. Talk about trippy.

His song choices in Tenenbaums are nothing short of impeccable. He meticulously blends big hits with deep cuts.

"Hey Jude" works perfectly for what it accompanies in the movie. Anyone familiar with Beatles lore knows that Paul wrote that song for John's son, Julian, to comfort him after John and his wife divorced. There's a clear parallelism between the real-life story behind the song and the scene where Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) breaks the news of his divorce from Etheline (Anjelica Huston) to his children.

When his children are dealing with their fading celebrity, Anderson hits us with "Look at Me" by John Lennon. A gorgeous song, but also a relatively deep cut in the Lennon catalogue. It works so well with the imagery of the movie, as the lyrics, "look at me, who am I supposed to be?" reflect the exact sentiments of these child prodigies turned wayward adults.

It was not by accident that the music fit so perfectly. Anderson worked on the soundtrack extensively, even stating that Tenenbaums was "the most complex, ambitious musical piece I've ever worked on."

There's an old moviemaking adage that you shouldn't use music with lyrics in your movie unless those lyrics reflect exactly what's going on in the story. Anderson understood the assignment. Whether it be "Me and Julio Down by The School Yard," "Gymnopédie no. 1," or "Needle in the Hay," each song used in Tenenbaums perfectly reflects the action and the messaging in the scene. It's brilliant, akin to how Scorsese uses pop music, if not better.

There is also the movie's Americana themes. Since Tenenbaums, very few Anderson movies are actually set in the United States. The director chose to take his features international, with settings like Budapest, France, and underwater. I'm all for this worldly flair, but there is something classic about Tenenbaums' New York setting. It gives Scorsese, again. It gives Woody Allen without the baggage (considering the movie's quasi-incest subplot, maybe some of the baggage). Dwelling on America's identity is usually a turn-off for me, but Anderson isn't obtuse in his commentary — this isn't a Clint Eastwood movie.

This is kind of a weird thing to single out, but one Americana aspect that I really appreciated was Royal Tenenbaum's racism toward Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), the man who is in love with Royal's ex-wife. America is an inherently racist country; there's simply no denying its history. For Royal to use racism to try and get under Henry's skin is a quintessentiallly old-American way of handling a competitor. It's this showing of the warts, this acceptance of the unpretty truths, that gives this movie a certain degree of authenticity.

I mentioned Woody Allen and it's clear that Anderson's style is a continuation of an American cinema form that Allen crafted in the 60s and 70s. Tenenbaums plays like an extended trauma dump — with personal revelations throughout that are only suitable for a therapist. From Etheline admitting that she hasn't been with a man in over a decade, to Richie's (Luke Wilson) infatuation with his adopted sister, to Chas (Ben Stiller) trying to overcome the grief of widowhood, every one of the Tenenbaums is trying to fix themselves, one way or another. These are the same types of personal discovery stories that were in Allen's best works, like Annie Hall and Manhattan.

Personally, I love a movie like this. I want to watch people work through their problems in real time. I don't want to agree with everything, understand everything, identify with everything. I want to observe strangers acting strangely.

This deeper, psychoanalytical level is the missing key that I think we've lost in the more recent Anderson movies. Yes, his new features have eccentric characters, stunning sets, and sensational symmetry, but they lack an anchor to reality. They lack a certain personal touch.

Tenenbaums was the last movie that Anderson co-wrote with his buddy, Owen Wilson. I don't want to give Wilson too much credit, because there still is a good deal of heart and emotion in Anderson's other movies, but maybe Wilson brought the best out of his friend. Since Tenenbaums, Anderson has written a majority of his movies on his own, and he's co-written some movies with Noah Baumbach and Roman Coppola, but have we received a scene as emotionally poignant as Richie Tenenbaum's bathroom scene? I don't think we have.

It's unlikely that The Phoenician Scheme will be the movie that sees Anderson go back to his deep emotional well. However, maybe it will be the last of this hyper-stylized and absurdist aesthetic, which he's perfected over the past two decades. If we are currently in Anderson's Sgt. Pepper's era, I want to see what he's got for us in his Abbey Road era. I hope that, in the future, Anderson chooses to look more inward. I'm willing to give up the wacky wigs and goofy plot lines if it means that we gain some emotional weight. Like Lennon said, just gimmie some truth.