I have been a longtime Wes Anderson fan since the days of Rushmore. Probably my favorite of his is Bottle Rocket, which is also his first, and it's been a bit downhill from there. Bottle Rocket has laugh-out-loud moments and real heart. It's quirky and charming. Rushmore had a bit more heft (and a bit less charm) because its central character was so flawed (nowadays he'd be labeled an incel, I suspect). But since then he's steadily dialed up the quirk and this most recent effort is positively charmless. In fact, we couldn't finish it. It's not just that it's picaresque - a series of vignettes in search of a movie - because the Coens did that with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and it was successful, with at least two of the segments being devastating. It's more that it seems, I don't know, almost mean-spirited. There's an underlying contempt for some of the characters (and outright misogyny in a couple of places - Anderson's never been good with women, but this one takes the stale cake) and the whimsy has just curdled. There's not one character who isn't a single-note idea, and this despite the usual incredible cast. (The atmosphere on Anderson sets must be amazing because not only does he keep attracting new A-listers (most notably the omnipresent Timothée Chalamet), the same crew of dependables (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Ed Norton, Bob Balaban...) keeps coming back for more. And I have to say that, like the previous (far superior) effort, The Grand Budapest Hotel, it looks amazing. But it rings completely hollow. The dialogue is no longer merely precious, it's irritating. The stories have no real point (other than, perhaps, aren't people silly?) and the characters don't reveal any universal types, they're just idiosyncratic without being amusing. At this point I think the only way I'd watch another Wes Anderson movie would be if he was directing somebody else's script. (And not just his adaptation of somebody else's book, because I don't like his version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox really much at all. There's hope: I hated the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There (which had some of the same failings), and they have certainly produced some amazing films since. But I'll take some wooing back. At this point he's a lot less Coen Brothers and a lot more Woody Allen, who similarly seemed able to woo just about anybody to appear in increasingly similar films, where all the actors seemed driven to do imitations of him, just because that seems the only appropriate way to deliver his irritatingly mannered dialogue.
(The story we gave up on was the one that seemed to be referencing Les Evenement de Mai, but in a way that seemed positively sneering. Also? If you have a scene in your movie that is a direct ripoff of Mon Oncle, your movie damn well better be deserving, and this one certainly wasn't.) Maybe if you have to watch this, watch it on a very big screen but in a foreign dub so you can't understand what they're saying. It could only improve it, and you can enjoy the visuals (although you'll probably still cringe a bit at the kind of leering female nudity).
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