Blood Jump #4: The Most Wes Anderson Issue Yet
The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Royal Tenenbaums. Asteroid City.
Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA and everyone striking.
In high school, I spent a year pairing scarves with corduroy blazers and smoking clove cigarettes and yes, this issue of Blood Jump is about Wes Anderson. I was a vapid teen who wanted to seem bookish, and movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums were catnip, a new set of Harold and Maudes for the Millennial suburbanite who loves David Bowie and lies about having read Franny and Zoey.
Anderson makes comedies that are big and bawdy and heartfelt and wrapped in a trademark visual parlance that longs for the sophistication of a time and place that Isn’t Right Here and Right Now. His films are opulent dioramas—often literally—that capture, perhaps better than any other working American director, the idea that there’s a world both more contained and more fruitful on the other side of the screen. He is an erudite Parisian dowager in a pencil-necked Texan body, an avatar for kids whose lives might crest romantic if only if they were in Europe, if only it were the 60s.
With Asteroid City, Wes Anderson is now in his fourth decade of filmmaking, and a new generation of vapid teens who want to seem bookish are racking up millions of views on TikTok by making videos styled after his movies. Anderson’s legacy is secured and cemented to a degree that makes it difficult to have the right take on his oeuvre—Wes stans and detractors are exhausting in equal measure, and his films have outlived their vulnerability to hot takes. Instead, Anderson’s recent output is typically described by using the director himself as the film’s own rubric. Each movie since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom has been heralded “The Most Wes Anderson Wes Anderson Movie yet,” a grade tallied by Anderson’s adherence to his own style—to high artifice and grief you can’t shake; to clipped dialogue and inexpressible love; to daddy issues and needle drops from Desplat to Donovan.
In this week’s Blood Jump, we pay tribute to the King of Quirked Up White Boys by taking a look at two of the most Wes Anderson Wes Anderson flicks before diving into his new feature. The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Royal Tenenbaums. Asteroid City. Let’s begin.
Life During Wartime
Wes Anderson is a stylist in the fashion that Lydia Davis is a stylist. Each employs an intricate and hermetic form that dominates the artists’ reputations, and a calloused read of either’s work might dismiss the depth of the content those forms shape. The Grand Budapest Hotel finds Anderson at his most ornate, a nesting-doll story that trades matryoshkas for Fabergé eggs. Apart from Anderson’s trademark 70s-pop needle drops, replaced here by an original score from longtime collaborator Alexandre Desplat, Budapest is perhaps the best showcase for Wes’s routine: a 17-piece A-list ensemble, meticulous close-ups, a world built from miniatures, fratty jokes that betray a cloying sense of twee. But for all its overwhelming style, Budapest is also case in point for Anderson’s capacity to deliver an achingly beautiful story stronger than petty detractions toward his unmistakable form.
Via a book written in 1985 that recounts a conversation in 1968 regarding events from 1932, The Grand Budapest Hotel concerns Zero Mustafa (Tony Revolori), a young refugee who’s been hired as a lobby boy by hotelier Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). Gustave has been holding affairs with the wealthy and elderly Madame D. (Tilda Swinton), who, after passing, bequeaths him a priceless painting titled Boy with Apple. Madame D.’s family—primarily, son Dmitri (Adrien Brody), a trio of mumbling sisters, and family hitman J.G. Jopling (Willem Dafoe)—are incensed that the painting went to Gustave, and chase him and Zero, with painting in hand, from their estate, launching Budapest into a madcap adventure-chase-historical fiction-romance movie, one that remains Anderson’s most critically and commercially successful.
There’s a double nature to most Wes Anderson movies. They’re dressy, hyper-stylized, and exhaustingly literary; they’re also frequently cowritten by the guy from You, Me and Dupree. Anderson’s movies are exercises in highs and lows that wed their pretension and broad comedy with a precision that feels like he’s shooting the moon no matter how many times you watch him sink the shot. The results are often disarmingly kind. Gustave is a perfect synecdoche for the Duality of Wes: he treats cologne and perfume as a vice and indulges in literary soliloquies when addressing his staff; he curses like a sailor and fucks women at the hotel like a gigolo. His adventures with Zero find him hilarious and exhausting in equal measure, and true to Anderson form, he exudes an empathy that can stop the movie in its tracks.
Anderson is not an especially political filmmaker, but setting a movie in 20th century Eastern Europe makes politics hard to avoid. Which is nerve-wracking for a hand as prone to whimsy as Wes’s—the song-and-dance-man approach to genocidal regimes has yielded some of the most insipid art of the last decade. With Budapest, though, Anderson finds something of a loophole. The movie builds its home in the fictional nation of Zubrowka, a confectionary negative of the real countries ravaged by authoritarianism on either side of World War II (Grand Budapest is based loosely on the writings of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig). Zero and Gustave, a refugee and an openly queer man, respectively, are on the run from Madame D.’s nationalist family, decked in all black and double-Z insignia that play deliberately on Nazi regalia. The remove might read like a cop out in less capable hands, but Wes employs it with intention, allowing the distance between Zubrowka and reality to let just enough air out to keep Anderson’s style potent without feeling insulting. It also loosens fascism from the frame of an isolated incident, and while Grand Budapest is far from dour, it refuses to absolve its audience from the reality of its politics in the way that something like, I don’t know, a rendering of Hitler as a goofy imaginary friend might.
Like many of Wes’s movies, The Grand Budapest Hotel is lovingly aware of its own nostalgia. It’s told mostly via flashback by Zero, played in his later years by F. Murray Abraham, bound dutifully to running the hotel after Gustave’s passing. He is reverent toward his old friend, a man who repeatedly circumvents the queasy relationship of steward and servant by staring down fascism’s gun whenever it points in their direction. Remembering the late hotelier, Zero describes him as “a glimmer of civilization in the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity.” The Grand Budapest Hotel keeps that glimmer shining.
I Always Wanted to Be a Tenenbaum
If you didn’t mold your own personality after The Royal Tenenbaums, you likely know someone who did. It is a vase that gives shape to adolescent depression, a Baby’s First Criterion DVD that threw Elliott Smith toward a generation of moody kids like a lit match toward a can of gasoline. Anderson’s third film is one of the more common starting points for Wes fans. It is a Big Movie, one that skirts the weight of defining a generation by confidently proving its substance, a path through loss and longing and soft incest set to Nico tunes. If The Grand Budapest Hotel is the most decorative Wes Anderson movie, The Royal Tenenbaums is his most emotionally solvent.
If you’re reading some nobody’s a boutique Substack about Wes Anderson and still don’t know the plot of The Royal Tenenbaums, here you go: The Tenenbaums are a family past their prime. In the late 70s, Royal (Gene Hackman) and Etheline (Angelica Huston) raised three prodigal children before divorcing. Chas (Ben Stiller) is a whiz kid with a mind for big business, adopted daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a gifted playwright, Richie (Luke Wilson) is a star tennis player. Twenty years later, the kids have burned out their genius and return home after Royal coaxes his way back into the Tenenbaum house by revealing his stomach cancer diagnosis to Etheline. It’s worth mentioning that Royal is a liar.
What do you do with a deadbeat dad? Tenenbaums is a story about nursing old wounds, of what to do now that the father who let you down your whole life is on his death bed. The Tenenbaum kids wriggle under the weight of familial depression and the shadow of their childhood successes. Wes has a fastidious devotion to character and detail, and he keeps each of the adult children bound to their childhood costuming; the results bear the scars of a lifetime of watching a bountiful upbringing revealing itself as a series of broken promises. Chas’s precocious deal-making has grown moldy with anger and paranoia after the tragic death of his wife, and his Adidas tracksuit clings to him like a bottle bursting with so much rage. Richie has become suicidally depressed after years of pining for his adopted sister, and he wears his tattered tennis clothes like the tokens of a life that might have been. Margot is perpetually 14 behind her heavy eyeliner and billowing fur coat; she learned early that she needed to protect her sense of self from a family that never quite accepted her. It amounts to a collection of killer Halloween costumes and a look into a director who embeds generations of feeling into obsessively manicured aesthetics.
The best Wes Anderson movies make you feel like you’re the first to discover a world that’s been sitting in broad daylight your whole life. The Royal Tenenbaums is bold and obvious with its inspirations and influences: it borrows liberally from J.D. Salinger and The Magnificent Ambersons, it pairs Margot’s sulky chain-smoking with the Charlie Brown Christmas song, it scores a falcon soaring over New York City with fucking “Hey Jude.” Somehow, it all feels vital, as if the movie were a mixtape made only for you. That Tenenbaums houses pop culture references as disparate as Oliver Sacks and “Needle in the Hay” and still feels seamlessly of its own world speaks to another of Anderson’s remarkable strengths: one of curator, of being able to construct a story built from the bones of our everyday lives into a shape that looks alien to anything we know.
It is as difficult for me to keep from turning this segment into a 5,000-word essay as it is to pretend to write objectively of a movie that’s so dear to me. Richie’s depression looked just like mine did when I first watched the movie at 14, and Wes’s vision of New York City was more exciting and romantic than the Giuliani-sanitized Manhattan I’d see on train rides from upstate. That the movie remains fresh to me as an adult feels like a miracle. As a teenager, I obsessed over the Velvet Underground’s contributions to the soundtrack and dreamt about a girl like Margot who was (a) real, and (b) interested in me. These days, it’s Chas’s story that burrows deepest under my skin. He’s had a tough year, and grief is a bad chaser for a complicated childhood. I should call my dad.
Just Keep Telling the Story
The Royal Tenenbaums is framed within the pages of a novel; The Grand Budapest Hotel is a memory within a conversation within a book. Neither architecture is particularly obtrusive. There is little metafiction throughout Wes Anderson’s filmography—his movies are indulgent, but not self-indulgent—and each story could exist relatively untouched without its framework. Asteroid City marks a departure from these tendencies: its story, nestled within a play within a TV program, is entirely dependent on its scaffolding, and the movie operates as the most explicit and direct mission statement of Anderson’s career.
Asteroid City is introduced via black-and-white broadcast by a nameless face played by Bryan Cranston, who narrates a fictional documentary about a fictional play that will eventually share a title with the movie itself. It’s within this play that the film blooms into technicolor and spends most of its runtime—and, yes, becomes the most Wes Anderson shit ever.
The play goes like this: Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a recent widower, has brought his son, Woodrow, along with his three young daughters, to a convention for gifted kids at the site of an asteroid crater. There he meets Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), who’s brought her daughter, Dinah, to be honored at the same convention alongside Woodrow and a few other brainiacs. They’re staying at a motel operated by an opportunistic grifter (Steve Carell), which houses a gaggle of other convention attendees, among them: a schoolteacher (Maya Hawke) leading a class on a field trip, convention host General Grif Gibson (Jeffery Wright), astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), and handful of locals, including Hank the Mechanic (Matt Dillon) and country crooner Montana (Rupert Friend). Excitement mounts up to and through the convention, until it’s interrupted by an alien UFO, who has come back to retrieve the asteroid.
Asteroid City’s meta-play is as deliberately and delightfully maximalist as anything in Anderson’s career (I ran out of space above to even mention Tom Hanks’s significant involvement). There are 21 starring names on the movie’s poster alone; its surplus of characters is equipped with distinguished Andersonian quirks and stilted dialogue; there are needle drops, bon mots, and fumbled swings at grieving galore. Wes punches hard on the pedals that make him an easy subject for AI-generated parody, reveling in a style distinct enough to be recognized by broad audiences who likely don’t care much about style. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood felt almost like a victory lap, a director playing to his strengths with the awareness of a greatest hits tour. Anderson, alongside Tarantino, is one of the few remaining stylists in prominent American cinema, and Asteroid City finds Wes with a similarly established legacy—and little road to run from it.
Asteroid City is perforated regularly by its own docufiction, the 1950s broadcast that details the creation of the titular play, with many of its actors assuming double roles. At first, the TV program functions like any other framework in Anderson’s deck. But maybe the alien’s arrival punctures a hole big enough to pull the movie inside out through itself; maybe the world has changed drastically enough to encourage Anderson to challenge his approach toward his own work. Wes movies hardly feel contemporary—Bottle Rocket’s walkie-talkies might be the closest thing to a cell phone in his filmography—but it’s easy to imagine the events of the last few years have influenced Anderson’s perspective. There is a sense of doom that plagues the people of Asteroid City. The alien has thrown the makeshift town into havoc; it’s placed under a mandatory quarantine (I promise this does not read as cloyingly as you might think), the schoolteacher no longer knows how to lead her class (“Some of our information about the solar system may no longer be completely accurate,” she says memorably). The UFO is as detrimental to the cast’s sense of reality as a plague or a climate crisis, and while Anderson is never as careless with metaphor as to let his latest feature function as an allegory, there’s a prescient sense of urgency that pervades the work.
Eventually, the movie’s crises bleed through the pores of its play to affect the actors in the metafictional broadcast. At the play’s climax, Schwartzman (now as the actor who portrays Augie Steenbeck) becomes disillusioned with the script and steps from behind the curtain to consult the play’s director (Adrien Brody, at his inexplicably hunkiest). The 50s saw the rise of postmodernism in the U.S., and Asteroid City lets its second setting—an ostensibly LES theater scene—take full advantage. The movie careens and spirals in its black-and-white third act until it crashes into one of the most sublime and emotionally potent moments in Anderson’s career. It is not as much a break in style or character for Wes as it is an adjustment of perspective, a reappraisal that results in assured confirmation rather than reinvention. Sometimes, you don’t have to understand the story—you just have to keep telling it.
Sample Draws
My good friend Austin Mooney has been writing lightning fast and freaky horror fiction. Check out this one about a haunted noise machine, or this one about ear wax.
We saw The Doughboys do a live podcast from The Riviera Theatre over the weekend. It’s astounding how joyous watching men in their forties argue over fast food can be. (Do-Rite Donuts is 5 Forks.)
My film club covered Lau and Mak’s Infernal Affairs last week, and I’m still reeling from how much fun it was. It’s a smooth-as-glass, thrilling crime drama that feels like watching The Departed at 2.5x speed (which rocks). You can stream it on The Criterion Channel, but the Blu-ray is drop-dead gorgeous.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again on Monday, July 10, for the next issue.