Opening with the death of a long-serving magazine editor, the film is structured as an episodic obituary for a man, a publication, and an entire industry facing gradual extinction. Loss continues to hang over Anderson's latest film, The French Dispatch (2021), which is perhaps his most nakedly sentimental work. Anderson's protagonists bury their trauma beneath a facade of caricature, and their journeys are defined by how they deal with their grief. Likewise, Bill Murray's title character in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) is a transparently absurd personality from the moment he first dons his crimson beanie and holstered Glock, but the brutal death of his best friend, for which he vows revenge, is no less ghastly as a result. When Luke Wilson's awkwardly inept crook Anthony Adams candidly remarks, "I'm usually so exhausted now at the end of the days that I don't have time to think about blown opportunities or wasted time," he betrays an immense and existential sadness that cuts disarmingly to the heart of his lot in life. But this preoccupation with the offbeat surface of Anderson's work underestimates his deep understanding of the human condition and the gentle empathy which pervades his filmmaking.įrom his debut feature Bottle Rocket (1996), the director's reliance on understatement has lent his work a unique profundity. A 2013 Saturday Night Live sketch imagined an Andersonian horror film called The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders brimming with twee pretensions, dad-rock needle-drops and oddly detached performances. His distinctively affected visual style has been subject to both criticism and parody. Rushmore is a film about lonely, damaged people seeking human connection, and this spectre of unresolved grief haunts the Texan director's output.ĭespite this thematic absorption, death is unlikely to be the first thing that comes to mind when considering Anderson's oeuvre. But her presence, or lack thereof, defines all that Max does – particularly his strange, Oedipal obsession with the widowed Mrs Cross (Olivia Williams). Max's traumatic loss of his mother, for example, is mentioned just twice in Rushmore's script, and both times briefly. But Anderson's films don't exist within our dull reality – his worlds are fairy tales, and like all good fairy tales, they begin with death.Įverything Anderson dreams up is ultimately about life's first inevitability, and the craterous absence it leaves in the lives of the bereaved – even if they might not be prepared to admit it. An extract from Thomas Gray's 1751 poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, it might seem a more fitting epitaph for the tomb of a great military hero than this unremarkable grave. "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." So reads the headstone above the burial place of Eloise Fischer, mother of Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer, in Wes Anderson's 1998 film Rushmore.
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