The candle that burns twice as bright, we are told, burns half as long. By this logic, regular 50 cent candles must burn bright initially, before slowly petering out into darkness. A bit, in other words like the career to date of American director Wes Anderson, the washed out (if possibly revitalised) former darling of new American independent cinema. Okay, maybe the darkness bit is a little overboard - it’s not like he’s producing snuff films now - but it’s still a good indication of the extent to which Anderson’s career and output stalled after his earlier critical and commercial successes.
His work has always possessed the potential for disaster, with even his best work often walking a fine line between the wildly imaginative, mercurial and witty, and empty hipster quirkiness. Half way through his third feature ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, however, the latter gained a firm foothold, one that was to dominate the depressingly slight and lifeless ‘Life Aquatic with Steve Zizou’. By the time he produced ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, his films were playing like undergraduate imitations of his earlier work. The extent to which ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ has rejuvenated both his public profile and his skills as a filmmaker are open to question. I found it witty if more than a little too cosy.
It’s certainly nothing compared to his second feature ‘Rushmore’ - still his best film by a considerable margin. Anchored by the sublime performance of a then unknown Jason Schwartzman (as unknown as the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola can be anyway) ‘Rushmore’ is the best depiction of late adolescence since ‘Catcher in the Rye’, and a lot funnier. This was Bill Murray’s first foray into the sort of middle-aged existential whimsy we’re now so familiar with, and the shifting sands of his character’s relationship with Schwartzsman’s precocious 17-year-old Max Fischer (as they chase the same woman) anchors the film. Anderson’s reputation as a showy, technical director, more adept at the montages of period music that dominate his later films overlooks his obvious, too rarely seen, abilities as writer. Not that ‘Rushmore’ isn’t full of Anderson’s tricksy approach to photography, editing, and informed use of popular music. It’s just that here they’re more servile to the film’s narrative goals.
Yes, it ponders the same obvious terrain of most of Anderson’s films (upper middle-class Americans are dysfunctional), but pathos versus revulsion is a difficult balancing act, especially in a comedy. In ‘Rushmore’, Anderson and Wilson’s eye for perfectly pitched comic mis-en-scene, and an ear for the bottomless horrors of early (and late) adulthood give us characters that are by turns selfish, indulgent, cruel, sadistic and indolent - yet still demand total unrequited love from the audience.