Few fictional worlds are as ingeniously broken as those devised by writer-director Wes Anderson. Populated by hapless dreamers who hatch elaborate schemes in order to bring some sense of order to their tumultuous lives, Anderson’s droll comedies capture a universe of screwball fallibility that is only matched by our own.
Consider the settings in which Anderson’s stories take place. The corner brownstone in The Royal Tenenbaums, whose multiple floors house a family of former prodigies, each stewing in his or her own recipe of resentment and regret. The research vessel the Belafonte in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, sent full steam ahead on a senseless revenge mission by its grief-stricken captain (Bill Murray). The island of New Penzance in Moonrise Kingdom, where two teen runaways, stolen library books in tow, expose the fault lines of an insular community. I can only imagine what dour predicaments face the guests of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Anderson film scheduled for a March release.
What makes each of these locations special is the way Anderson – in his complete control of set design, camera movement, costumes, soundtrack and even speech patterns – imbues them with both a comic melancholy and a tinge of grace. For in their idiosyncrasies (the Dalmatian mice of the Tenenbaum mansion, the Portuguese versions of David Bowie songs sung on the Belafonte) these places reflect a creativity and joy and wonder, all waiting to be rediscovered by the characters. Anderson’s movies are awakening movies, in which sad clowns flail about until they suddenly, gratefully stumble upon a way to bring a slight sense of reparative concord to their disjointed existence.
My favorite broken Anderson world is that of Rushmore, his second film. Set at a private boys’ academy of khakis and leather-bound books, the movie centers on hyperactively precocious teenager Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman). Max is supremely accomplished in terms of extra-curricular activities – he’s the founder of the Bombardment Society and producer/playwright/director/actor for the Max Fischer Players, among numerous other endeavors – but this is all a flurry of endless activity meant to mask Max’s many insecurities: about receiving financial aid to attend Rushmore; about failing most of his classes; about his father being a working-class barber; about his mother having died when Max was 7.
Max finds a kindred spirit in Herman Blume (Bill Murray again), a Rushmore benefactor who nonetheless closes a chapel speech by telling the students to “take dead aim on the rich boys.” At an emotional dead end – Blume punctuates the birthday pool party for his detestable twin sons with a bleary, cocktail-induced cannonball – he sees a spark in Max’s indomitable energy and strikes up an odd sort of friendship. Do they save each other? Well, an ill-advised romantic rivalry over a young Rushmore teacher (Olivia Williams), an attempt to build an aquarium on the site of the school’s baseball diamond and Max’s expulsion all get in the way first.
Yet that saving – lurchingly, hilariously – does happen. In The Wes Anderson Collection, a book of essays and interviews about the director’s work, Matt Zoller Seitz writes that “Over time, Max excavates his own goodness without quite realizing he’s doing it. His maturation is the result of an artist listening to his heart instead of his ego. His generous impulses flower in the film’s second half. Battered and humiliated, he mellows without softening, correcting and apologizing for his lies and using his art to reach out and heal rather than continuing to glorify his own cleverness.”
Notice the way Seitz describes Max’s transformation: as if it comes from outside of the character as much as it does from within. This is another Anderson pattern. His films are sprinkled with little epiphanies – wonderful shots that would be throwaway moments if not for the emotional significance they mark. Often nature is involved, whether it’s Zissou’s encounter with a mythical shark in The Life Aquatic or the title character’s salute of a lone wolf in Fantastic Mr. Fox. In Rushmore, it’s the way the wind lifts a kite that Max is flying and he realizes, for the first time, how his prodigious efforts could actually be in service of someone other than himself.
Like all of Anderson’s epiphanies, this realization arrives as a gift. His characters are – to borrow the C.S. Lewis-inspired title of Tullian Tchividjian’s 2010 book – surprised by grace. What’s more, the way that Max’s response involves true confession and repentance reminds me of the sort of “costly grace” that German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about in 1937’s The Cost of Discipleship. While cheap grace “is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession,” Bonhoeffer wrote, costly graces requires not only penance, but also a dedication to no longer prioritizing the dreams, desires and preferences of the self.
Self-sacrifice, of sorts, is what we see in Max’s final play, a bombastic, overproduced, naively pretentious Vietnam War epic that nevertheless brings Herman Blume, a veteran of that conflict, to tears. Which is as it should be – Max made the play for him. The post-performance cast party is also indicative of Max’s new priorities, as he’s invited each of the people he’s deceived or offended for an evening of confession and reconciliation. There are awkward apologies and equally awkward dancing, yet also a hint of something new in the air. A peculiar sort of harmony has settled into Rushmore’s broken world. Consider it a lovely foreshadowing of shalom.
Josh Larsen is editor of Think Christian, a collaborative digital magazine exploring the intersection of faith and culture. He also writes about movies at LarsenOnFilm.com and is the co-host of Filmspotting. His latest book, Fear Not: A Christian Appreciation of Horror, is also the latest book in our Reel Spirituality Monograph Series.
