A young man named Anthony, inmate of an Arizona mental hospital, says a friendly good-bye to his psychiatrist and then prepares to shin down the wall on a rope of knotted sheets. Anthony's stay at the hospital has been voluntary; but, as he explains to his psychiatrist, he must pretend that he is escaping for the benefit of his friend Dignan, who is waiting--small, blond, and highly charged--in some shrubbery on the edge of the grounds.
"He's got this whole escape thing worked out, and he's just so excited aboutit," says Anthony. "I mean, look how excited he is!"
The two men stare out at Dignan, an oxygenated imp bouncing around in hisbush; Dignan, wearing black leather gloves, obligingly flashes signals off alittle mirror and makes complicated bird-noises.
"I gotta do it this way, Doctor Nichols," says Anthony. "I gotta go out thewindow."
The psychiatrist sighs. "Okay," he says. "But could you make it fast?This--this doesn't look good."
So begins the 1996 film Bottle Rocket, director and screenwriter Wes Anderson's first, and Anderson's world is laid out for us: a limbo between pathology and wellness, childhood and adulthood, playtime and reality, enthusiasm and weary maturity. The hero flares in the bush, a life of undimmable zest: Whether you're really escaping or not, what's important is to act as if you are. The play's the thing, always. Besides, in every way that matters, Dignan is indeed springing his friend from the booby hatch. He has trekked into the desert to scoop up the feckless and recently deranged Anthony and stick him in a Greyhound headed home. It's a rescue, and a brave one. He is bringing his friend back to life.
Once he has Anthony settled in a bus seat, Dignan whips out his seminal text:the 75-Year Plan. The Plan is scribbled into a school notebook, with sections andsubsections numbered and alphabetized. In a brief over-the-shoulder shot weglimpse the headings: "Ways of Success," "Opportunities,"and--tantalizingly--"Outside Interests." A friend of mine, inspired, crouchedscribelike over his VCR, working the pause button until he produced a handwrittenredaction of this extraordinary document: part reverie, part self-improvementprogram, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People crossed with the first three chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Dignan has imagined a life of genial crime for himself and his friend--nothingmore or less than Huck and Tom's "high-toned" gang. Riches and culture are instore. Beach houses are mentioned, as is the importance of meeting people fromforeign countries. "Predictability" is chastised as a "Negative Value." Outlinesfor the "2nd Five Years" include a brief breakdown of the Robin Hood Principle("Establish goodwill within community"; also, make "Anonymous donations"). Andthe final section, "Living into 21st Century," is prefaced with the very sensibledisclaimer that "Anthony as you know there can be no way of looking this farahead." The goals laid out for this hazy futurity are appropriately modest andgeneral. ("1. Remain flexible. 2. Don't be too derogatory.") Yet there is anirresistible reference to "honorary degrees" further down the page. Anthonyraises his eyebrows, bemused and grateful. Within hours, the two master criminalswill be burgling his parents' house.
Dignan is played by Owen Wilson, who is also Anderson's writing partner. As anactor, Wilson can do no wrong: A comedic golden child, haloed with uncannylaughter, he has wandered redemptively through many an awful movie. He talks withslow, disbelieving relish, rising to a melodic whine when he gets excited.Whatever the role--a dubious cowboy in the Jackie Chan vehicle Shanghai Noonor a downed USAF pilot in the recent movie Behind Enemy Lines--and whatever the situation, his characters always seem to be pursuing some space-age agenda of personal development. Of all of them, Dignan is the greatest. In Dignan, Anderson and Wilson have created an American classic. His conversation is a chaotic series of briefings, freely mingling the jargons of personal trainer, positivity guru, and corporate strategist. It's the language of American possibility, the oral tradition, handed on like a burbling flame from Tom Sawyer to Norman Vincent Peale to Henry Rollins. It never goes out, this entrepreneurial, autohypnotic, vigorously secular voice, something between a hustle and a prayer. It can do, literally, anything. (Of course, the capacity for self-delusion is crucial.)
Anderson's second film, Rushmore (1998), matches innocence with experience in the friendship between Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a precocious 15-year-old schoolboy, and Herman Blume, a middle-aged pipe mogul played by Bill Murray. Max, a blazered and bespectacled Iggy Pop, has a lust for life. At his beloved Rushmore Academy, he has made a religion of the extracurricular: He is president of the French Club and the Rushmore Beekeepers, and founder of the Bombardment Society. He writes a thrilling stage adaptation of Serpico for his own company, the Max Fischer Players. Like Dignan, Max is an enthusiast.
Herman, however, is adrift, almost washed up. "What's the secret, Max?" heasks, observing in wonder Max's whirl of schemes and self-promotions. Sadnesscomes off him. It's the unique effect of Bill Murray--his glum, soiled face, theimpression he gives of a man swaying slightly in the aftermath of some hugerebuke, some cosmic corrective to hubris or exuberance that has left him with hisears ringing and his pride numbed. Murray's timing is not the jab-jab,quick-release, anxiety-and-discharge shtick of the stand-up comedian but aneternal yawn that spans the microseconds between thought and expression--theimmeasurable can-I-be-bothered caesura between Herman's son telling him, "Pullyour head out of your ass!" and Herman's twisting around in his car seat to givethe boy a thick ear.
Max, like Dignan, has his own way of putting things. Listen to the explosiveclash of registers as he gets to know Herman.
Max: So--you were in Vietnam, if I'm not mistaken?
Herman: Yeah. [A pause.]
Max: Were you in the shit?
Apart from being absurdly funny, this tells us a good deal about Max: hisweird formality, his bluntness, his thirst for adventure, and his weakness formacho slang. In just two lines, the poles of his character are glowing. Thescrollwork of Max's talk-- "As per our conversation, ... Moving on, ... Onefootnote, ..."--recalls in a curious way the stratagems that a stammerer will useto tip himself into speech, the little byways past blockage and into utterance.At any rate, Max's talk, in all its homely pretension, has an air of beingdefined by its obstacles--his low birth, for example ("I'm a barber's son"), orhis notable lack of academic success. It's a sort of emergency flying machine, anaspirational contraption that might just take him where he wants to go.
Such hair-trigger sensitivity to language makes most Hollywooddialogue sound like the modulations of a fire alarm. Anderson and Wilson areexperts, safecrackers, flies on walls. They have a knack for going undercover inplain, everyday talk, almost surreptitiously injecting the serum of novelty andunexpectedness. Take Max's father in Rushmore: "Well, well, well," he says,welcoming an end-of-the-rope Herman Blume into his barbershop. "Look what the catdragged in." Or Dignan after his getaway driver makes a rather too privategetaway: "Bob's gone! He stole his car! He flew the coop while we were sleeping!"The cat and his draggings, the coop that gets flown--these are well-worndoorknobs of American speech. It takes a batlike ear to give this kind oflanguage life and character: in the first case, the character of a benign andskeptical 60-year-old barber, totally comfortable in his idiom; in the second,that of a half-crazed young man with culturally nostalgic outlaw fantasies.
Rushmore was a hit--not a blockbuster, but a much-heralded success. And there is a sense of prophetic completion about this: Rushmore is largely a comic meditation on excellence, on prizes, on being top of the class; so the wreaths and garlands heaped upon the film and its actors (Golden Globe nominations, Critics Circle Awards, Best Film accolades) are hilariously apt--the stuff of Max's most lucent and high-flying daydreams. Anderson and Wilson were hot, and their latest film, The Royal Tenenbaums, has been hotly anticipated.
And guess what--they've blown it. If Anderson and Wilson were a great rockband, The Royal Tenenbaums would be their third album--the cocaine album, greedy with visions, where they aim too high while simultaneously failing to challenge themselves properly, the album where their girlfriends are models and they have just fired their manager. Blazing with star power and racing with ideas, Tenenbaums never comes together. The story of a grand New York family--three eccentric children, a mother, and a scandalous father--fallen on hard times, the film shows signs everywhere of an excess of design. The attention to detail so lovingly expressed in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore has become orgiastic--sets swarming with exotica and corroded by bric-a-brac, every whim indulged.
The characters are similarly baroque. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), the talentedbut blocked playwright, has a wooden finger and pack-a-day habit that she hasconcealed from her family for 22 years. Richie (Luke Wilson), once a famoustennis player, still sports his headband and spends a lot of time at sea. Chas(Ben Stiller) lost his wife in a plane crash and wears nothing but red joggingsuits. And so on. Bottle Rocket has two main characters, and Rushmore three; Tenenbaums has many. There are the Tenenbaum parents, Royal and Etheline (Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston), their children Margot, Richie, and Chas, Mrs. Tenenbaum's suitor Henry (Danny Glover), and the kids' drug-addled childhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson). It's quite a crowd, and everyone's cracking up.
Anderson's other films are set in a world of griefs discreetly alluded to and breakdowns just recovered from. The action of Bottle Rocket takes place against flat southwestern spaces, smooth prospects, and limitless green lawns that gently ironize the antics of the characters; yet there is anxiety in this distance--the horizon-tug of collapse, of the depression from which Anthony is escaping. Similarly, Max's mother, we discover early in Rushmore, died when he was seven, and this loss hangs over the "sharp little guy." But in Tenenbaums, where every major character is in a state of crisis--Chas's bereavement, Margot's block, Richie's love for Margot, and so forth--such gentle retroactive shading is impossible; the amount of baggage brought to the screen is simply overwhelming. Montage follows montage, trailing back into the abyss. So much exposition is needed that there's nothing for it but that most transparent of narrative cop-outs, that abdication of screenwriterly responsibility, the voice-over (supplied here by Alec Baldwin).
If the idea was to give Tenenbaums a fabular, bedtime-wondrous glow, it doesn't work. Baldwin's voice, a ream of rugged blah, is an immediate irritant. Royal Tenenbaum announces to his family, "These past six days have been some of the best days of my life," and Baldwin is quickly in our ear with this blundering confidence: "As soon as he said it, Royal realized that this was true." It's like a stranger in the row behind you--a stranger with bad breath--leaning forward and explaining the film to you in a rasping whisper.
There are problems, too, with the soundtrack. Anderson has already proved thathe has the sharpest director's ear for classic rock since Martin Scorsese, aswell as his own style of mood music. In Rushmore the pounding tambourines and gonglike cymbals of the British Invasion are perfectly offset by the glaucous, mannerly interludes of Mark Mothersbaugh's score, with its sleigh bells atinkle. But in Tenenbaums, not one track cleaves to its moment like the Stones' "2000 Man" did in Bottle Rocket or the Who's elephantine blastings did in Rushmore--not even the vision of Margot Tenenbaum descending in slo-mo from a bus, Gwyneth in furs, her disastrous beauty tracked by Nico's "These Days." Somehow, it doesn't quite gel. And to end the film with the queasy candy of the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B"--that, as Max would say, is just rude.
Of course, there are flashes of the old magic. Hackman's portrayal of Royal, aman who fakes a mortal illness so that the family he abandoned will love himagain, is a masterpiece of gravelly insincerity. Queried about the nature of hisdisease, he answers: "I've got a pretty bad case of stomach cancer." Attempting arapprochement with his estranged and bitter children, he announces, "Of courseI've missed you all like hell, my darlings." The Anderson-Wilson ear is intact,and the heart still beats beneath.
Imaginative bloat is not terminal. We can hold out the hope that havingoverextended themselves, having supped with horrid luxury, Anderson and Wilsonwill return, hung over and perhaps slightly shriveled, to what they do best:recreating our world.