Welcome to Episode #245 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of Roald Dahl adaptations, starting with the Wes Anderson anthology film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024).
0:00 Welcome 02:45 Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996) 07:12 Napoleon Dynamite (2004) 13:52 Peter Pan (1960) 16:55 The Legend of Ochi (2025)
24:04 The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024) 49:09 The Witches (1990) 1:10:12 James and the Giant Peach (1996) 1:23:35 Matilda (1996)
After getting out of my afternoon screening of The Phoenician Scheme, I texted Brandon that it might have hit my top three Wes Anderson films right out of the gate (although on later reflection it’s more safely in the top five), and he replied that it had been largely dismissed out of Cannes as a minor work from him. Within days, I stumbled upon this tweet and sent it to Brandon; in case it disappears, it reads “Oh, did another Wes Anderson film premiere to a muted response at Cannes only to turn out to be another masterpiece? I guess it’s summer again.” I mentioned last year in discussions around Asteroid City that I think Anderson is a filmmaker that we have started to take for granted, even if I personally didn’t care much for The French Dispatch (which Brandon reviewed very positively here). There was much consternation about Asteroid City among some of the people that I ran into at a Friendsgiving in November, and I mostly kept my opinion to myself. It’s a movie that requires you to get on its level and is the only one of his films that I would describe as genuinely surreal. If you didn’t like or get it, then I don’t know that I really have the language to articulate what about it spoke so clearly and effectively to me, or that “getting it” would automatically translate to “liking it.” What I will say is that Asteroid City is far from being an entry level Anderson film, or one with broad general appeal, and that The French Dispatch is also not one that I think should be anyone’s first. The Phoenician Scheme, however, with its mostly straightforward narrative structure, is one that I think will be of interest to a larger audience and range of viewers.
Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is an international arms dealer and industrialist who finds himself surviving the most recent of numerous attempts on his life when his plane goes down in 1950. Unlike in his previous miraculous survivals, any of which may have taken the lives of his three dead wives, this time he undergoes a near death experience in which he faces divine judgment regarding his heavenly worthiness. Somewhat shaken by this, Korda reaches out to the eldest of his ten children and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter), who is a novice preparing to take her final vows to become a nun. Although it’s been years, he offers to provisionally make her the heir to his empire, which would be flattering if all of her brothers weren’t children aged three to fifteen (Korda has adopted several in addition to his biological sons, in case all of his genetic progeny turn out to be duds). Further complicating matters is the widespread belief that Liesl’s mother, Korda’s first wife, was killed at his hands, and although he vehemently denies that he has ever directly or indirectly committed murder, his ongoing recognition of a large number of assassins whom he previously employed calls his veracity into question. Not to mention that he is completely unencumbered by any apparent ethical limitations, as his most recent and greatest work, an infrastructural overhaul of the fictional nation of Phoenicia, will require the use of slave labor, and that he claims responsibility for a famine in the area that’s destabilized local power structures in order for him to have his way. Although Liesl’s devotion to her faith calls her to return and take her vows, her own morals demand that she take the opportunity to agree to Korda’s offer on the condition that there are no more famines or slaves (and that her brothers are moved from a dormitory across the street into Korda’s gigantic mansion, and that some level of paternal attentiveness is provided for them).
For all his many, many flaws as a father and a human being, Korda has an endless thirst for knowledge, which includes the hiring of numerous tutors on various subjects to provide extemporaneous lectures to the boys and himself. The most recent of these is Norwegian entomology professor Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), who ends up along for the ride serving as Korda’s new administrative secretary (the last one died in the plane crash that opened the film). Korda lays out the movie’s overarching plot quickly and in detail. Due to actions on the part of Korda’s industrial enemies, market manipulation of the cost of “bashable rivets” has suddenly created a funding gap for the whole titular scheme, so he must convince all of the other investors in his project to cover some percentage of “The Gap.” These include Phoenicia’s crown prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the brother duo of venture capitalists Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), Korda’s second cousin Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), Casablanca-inspired nightclub owner and gangster Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), and “Uncle” Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Korda’s estranged half-brother. As Korda meets with each of them in turn, he finds himself returning to Heaven’s courtroom, where he is defended by an attorney named Knave (Willem Dafoe) before God (Bill Murray) and interacts with Liesl’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in her afterlife. Under the guidance of Liesl’s moral certitude and with things not going well for him “upstairs,” Korda grows as a person despite never losing his sardonic edge.
The set pieces that comprise this one are all a lot of fun. When I was telling a friend about it, the one with whom I had watched so many Final Destination films, I noted that this movie opened almost like one of those would, with an airplane blowing out part of its fuselage and a man being ripped in half as a result, except that it’s done in a typically Andersonian visual style, with string and stop motion bits in place of fire and guts, and it sets a great tone for what is to follow. Even while using his standard palette, Anderson is doing a few new things, including using a very shallow depth of field in several wide shots of the massive room in which Korda reunites with his daughter, which causes the image to appear diorama-like until people enter and the illusory spell is broken. It’s fun stuff, and calls to mind the experimental playfulness on display in, for instance, the tour of the submarine in The Life Aquatic. The aforementioned surreality of Asteroid City is not completely absent here, although it’s limited to the scenes in which Korda finds himself at his out of body inquest and its various asides, and they’re very funny; there’s something a bit Mel Brooks about the whole celestial spectacle, which I mean as a great compliment. They’re also much more palatable, as I can imagine the average moviegoer—a “normie” for lack of a better term—showing up to Asteroid City and being completely put off by some of the more esoteric choices, especially with regards to the “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” refrain that occurs near the film’s ending. Here, confining the more dreamlike elements of the piece to these near-death visions posits them in a rhetorical space that demands less suspension of disbelief (and which contains, perhaps, less whimsy) and is likely going to be more acceptable to the standard viewer. As such, The Phoenician Scheme could easily function as a very good introduction to Anderson’s body of work, since it’s much more straightforward approach would have a broader appeal.
Del Toro is excellent in this, giving a truly outstanding performance. Korda is a bit of an Andersonian archetype in that his treatment of his children is absurd in the way it finds comedy in its outlandish neglectfulness. This, along with his desire for familial reconciliation, makes him a figure very much like Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, but with a bit of a twist. Whereas Royal had a desire to reconnect with his family that was almost entirely selfish and self-interested and he was willing to fake having a terminal illness to get in close, Korda is the ultimate capitalist robber baron who seems to have never cared about anyone other than himself (and perhaps Liesl’s late mother) but who has a large, unloved family that he has no real desire to connect to (like certain other billionaires we could name). He seems more interested in having a family because he’s expected to have some kind of legacy, even if he hadn’t given much thought to what that could mean until he survives his seventh plane crash. There’s a great scene in the “Marseille Bob” segment of the film in which said gangster’s night club is invaded by socialist revolutionaries led by Richard Ayoade, and Korda gets into the middle of things and ends up shot by a trigger-happy rebel. Bob mistakes this accident as a sign of Korda’s nobility and immediately agrees to cover a part of The Gap, and although Korda clearly takes advantage of this error, Del Toro plays the moment as if the motor-mouthed cad is slightly taken aback at how good it feels for someone to believe you’re capable of change. There’s a talent to adding that kind of nuance in both performance and direction without skipping a beat in the dizzyingly-fast dialogue.
As a counterpoint to all of this, we see Liesl slowly let go of the trappings of faith while retaining her sense of self (there’s a great bit where she admits she’s never heard God’s voice but that she imagines that she does, and He just tells her to do what she was going to do anyway). First, as a rider to her accepting provisional heirship, Korda has her give up her humble rosary for a “secular” one, which is gaudy and covered in jewels. Later, she is given a more ornate replacement for her corncob pipe, which is even tackier. When she tries to return to her order, the Mother Superior tells her that these worldly possessions (which she did not seek but merely received) indicate that she is among those who are simply not cut out for a life of cloistered humility spent in prayer. Part of the film’s genuine heart is finding out where Liesl and her father are going to meet in the middle, and the film is filled with objective correlative metaphors for this in the number of images of things which don’t quite connect, most notably a railway gap of about twenty feet that ends up becoming a makeshift basketball court (it makes sense in context).
Where the film fumbled somewhat was with the Uncle Nubar character. Cumberbatch is done up in intentionally ridiculous facial hair, and he looks a bit like Ming the Merciless if he stopped grooming or conditioning his mustache and beard and let the whole situation get a little scraggly. It’s a little much, and Cumberbatch’s performance is at first a hard pill to swallow, but by the time he and Korda get into a knock-down drag-out fight, I had come around on it. Some people in my screening were enjoying it from the start, and what I noticed at this movie (which was actually the same theater in which I saw Asteroid City last year) was that it shared that film’s propensity to elicit laughs from different parts of the audience at different times. The jokes come at such a rapid pace that sometimes you just have to give yourself over to the music of the dialogue, and the guy six seats over is laughing at something that you’ve missed and the couple behind you are getting a lot more out of Cumberbatch than you are while you’re laughing at something that it seems like only one other person enjoyed. In my screening, there was one man one row in front of me and two seats over who fell asleep almost immediately and then snored for the remaining 90 minutes. A comedy that’s able to be funny to different people in different ways (and a great movie to take a nap to for that guy in Row C) is laudable, and isn’t to be taken for granted.
I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate. The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls. Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind. Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry. It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me. Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it. If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead. There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.
At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives. I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing. I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty. I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution). In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation. In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach. It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.
The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo. One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women. The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes. You can likely guess which one I preferred. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar. It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc. It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage. Rodeo is a much thornier picture. It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation. There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives. The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.
I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart. Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions. Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times. The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion. In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it. We have to dream. As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world. Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax. Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads. It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.
There’s something about the way that people have been reacting to the sudden appearance of A.I.-generated “art” that makes me sad. Not because I think that it’s “coming for my job” or because I think it can replace art made by human beings (it definitely can’t, no matter how many attempts your preferred media monopoly makes in order to try to make that happen), but because it once again reveals just how unbelievably stupid a lot of people are, or perhaps how lacking they are in that ineffable quality we might call “a soul.” Specifically, I’m talking any person who looked at any of the A.I.-generated trailers for movies within the past couple of months and then reposted it on social media. Some did it with a dire warning that this braying abomination heralded the death of artistic careers, others relished in the lizard brain delight of watching an algorithm shuffle a deck of Star Wars images into a deck of almost-but-not-quite-accurate Wes Anderson references and create a nightmare. To take a quick diversion, think about all of the fairy tales that you read as a kid in which some clever boy or girl defeated something wicked posing as a human because they recognize the villain’s otherworldly bizarreness and think out a method to outwit them. What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of eyeballs on these monstrosities and an awful lot of people failed to recognize the fundamental inhumanity of the image with which they were presented. Nothing is real, nothing is convincing, and it’s like people have no real interest in being convinced.
Into all of this comes a real Wes Anderson film, and one which plays with the concept of narrative and nesting stories. It also deals with the nature of separation, distance, and isolation. Software can’t do that because software doesn’t get lonely; software is never tempted to give their ex-boyfriend another chance; software never had to figure out how to deliver bad news. Software doesn’t have to go into quarantine for a time that ends up stretching to the horizon, and software doesn’t understand how that kind of thing might make one lose their grip on reality, and software really, really can’t grasp why people might come out of the other side of that with a song in their heart and a spring in their step.
Asteroid City is a play, being performed for a broadcast over the air in the days of pre-color TV. It’s also the name of the tiny desert settlement in which the play takes place. The TV program host (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to this setting through the use of stage directions, which include a hand-painted mountain backdrop, an eternally incomplete elevated highway on-ramp as a permanent testament to the apparent insignificance of the place, a diner, a mechanic, a motor court with individual cabins, and, most importantly, a meteorite (and its attendant scientific complex). Each of these elements is first presented as stage dressing before we enter the full color world of the narrative itself, complete with proportion shift in addition to the Wizard of Oz-esque transition between the world of the artificial mundane and the imaginative sublime … which is somewhere that shouldn’t be that interesting, and yet it is. That is, perhaps, the point. Asteroid City the place shouldn’t be anything special; it’s the tiny little nowhere that, in a film with broader, more mainstream appeal, we would only see as a crane or drone shot as our protagonist dashes through it so that we can see that they are leaving everything behind through the visual language of them speeding away from the last outcropping of civilization into a desert of the unknown. For Anderson, this isn’t fly-over (or drive-through) country; this inhospitable specimen is made hospitable, and fascinating.
Within the play, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is, like Chas Tenenbaum before him, a widower who has not yet figured out how to tell his children that their mother has died. He and his four kids—teen genius Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and girl triplets Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia—find themselves stranded in Asteroid City when their car breaks down, and Augie calls his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to collect the girls. The town was already the final destination for Augie and Woodrow, however, as the boy is a finalist for a scholarship prize in the Junior Stargazer convention, as a result of his invention of a device that allows one to project an image onto the moon. There, he falls in puppy love with another finalist, Dinah (Grace Edwards), whose mother happens to be famous actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), with whom the emotionally raw Augie finds some connection and solace. The play itself has a huge cast, including an entire class of children on a field trip with their teacher (Maya Hawke), a singing cowboy who seeks to woo her, three other finalists with their own strange inventions (including death rays, jet packs, and brand new elemental particles), the meteor science team leader Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) – honestly, too many names to name without essentially reciting the IMDb page. And that doesn’t include the “outer” layer of “reality,” which features not only the aforementioned host, but also stage director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), his wife Polly (Hong Chau in a brief but memorable scene), and the actress who would have played Augie’s wife in a flashback if that scene hadn’t been cut in the final draft (Margot Robbie). And that’s not even the half of them.
Asteroid City is a matryoshka doll of stories, like a few of Anderson’s recent works. He’s always had an obvious talent for creating a sort of tableau within itself and an intentionality in his evocation of stage elements for the purpose of drawing attention to the artificiality of the form. There’s an escalation of it here that I really love, because the inherent staginess of Asteroid City and the way that it gives way to the vibrant “real” Asteroid City is a beautiful externalization of what we mean when we talk about the suspension of disbelief. I recently ranted in my There’s Something Wrong with the Children review about how far (that is, not very) most modern audiences are willing to extend their patience for narratives that require more than 25% attentiveness, and along comes this movie with imagery that illustrates this exact idea. Art can sometimes merely be evocative and then transport you to some distant place; it’s your choice to stay trapped in the Platonic cave staring at the set decoration, or you can choose to transcend the limited ability of painted flats to stand in for an open sky and just see the sky. Any text with which we interact must put in some of the work to meet us halfway, of course, but it’s on us to let go a little and embrace the opportunity to slip these surly bonds and let our spirits soar.
And soar you will, or at least I did. There is a distinct loneliness that flows out of the screen, and even if Anderson hadn’t confirmed in an interview that the story was informed by COVID, the fact that the play’s third act (and therefore the film’s final act as well) takes place in quarantine makes this all but explicit. There are many scenes in which Augie and Midge talk to each other between cabins, sitting at their respective windows, at once so close that they don’t have to raise their voices to be heard while nonetheless separated by a distinct barrier – a tableau that calls to mind the imagery of early quarantine when these sorts of six-feet-apart casual visitations were the temporary norm. Every character, like every human being on earth, is lonely in his or her own way; Stanley has lost his beloved only daughter, Augie his wife, his children their mother, the schoolteacher her certainty about the order of the cosmos, Schubert his own wife, and the world a brilliant playwright with the death of Asteroid City‘s author, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Even quarantined on top of one another in a tiny town, we are all alone, but that’s okay, because we’re all alone together.
Welcome to Episode #174 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the merits & miseries of twee, comparing the 2015 twee-revival comedy Girl Asleep against a grab bag of aughts-era twee classics.
When I was a teenager, I thought of Wes Anderson as a singular genius who made esoteric art films for in-the-know sophisticates. In my thirties, I now see him for what he actually is: a populist entertainer. The fussed-over dollhouse dioramas that typify Anderson’s visual style often distract from the qualities that make his films so popular & rewatchable: they’re funny. Laughing my way through his new high-style anthology comedy The French Dispatch felt like a rediscovery of the heart & humor that always shine in Anderson’s work but are often forgotten in retrospect as we discuss the consistency of his visual quirks. People often complain about how visually lazy mainstream comedies are, and here’s a film packed with Hollywood Celebrities where every scene is overloaded with gorgeous visuals and hilarious jokes. You can access it at practically any strip mall multiplex, right alongside the superhero & animated-animal sequels that otherwise crowd the marquee. No one else is making films exactly like Anderson’s, but everyone stands a chance of being entertained by them.
Judging by the wraparound segments of The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson appears to be self-aware of his usefulness in presenting Art Film aesthetics to wide audiences. The titular literary magazine is written by high-brow artsy types in the fictional town of Ennui, France, but is published as a newspaper insert in the farmlands of Kansas. The film is structured like a magazine layout, with light humorous moodsetters, standalone articles of in-depth culture writing, and a heartfelt obituary to cap it all off. The deceased is the magazine’s editor, whose death makes the entire film feel like a love letter to the lost art of editing at large, in the age of ad-driven clickbait production. Mostly, though, it’s all just a platform for rapidfire joke deliveries from talented celebrities dressed up in gorgeous costumes & sets. The anthology structure makes it play like a warmer, more frantic version of Roy Andersson’s sketch comedies, except the presence of household names like Frances McDormand & Benicio Del Toro means that more than a couple dozen people will actually watch it. And they’ll laugh. The French Dispatch may be more-of-the-same from Wes Anderson, but it really helped clarify how much I value him as a comedic filmmaker – even if he’d likely rather be referred to as a “humorist”.
Scrolling through this ensemble comedy’s massive cast list, it’s easy to distinguish which new additions to the Wes Anderson family feel at home among the returning players (i.e., Jeffrey Wright as a James Baldwin stand-in) vs. which ones were invited to the party merely because they’re celebrities (i.e., Liev Schreiber as the talk show host who interviews Wright). It’s much more difficult to single out which performer is the film’s MVP. Tilda Swinton is the funniest; Henry Winkler is the most surprising; Benicio del Toro is the most emotionally affecting. It’s likely, though, that the film’s true MVP is newcomer Timothée Chalamet as a scrawny political idealist who incites a vague yet violent student’s revolution on the streets of Ennuii with no clear political goal beyond the fun of youthful rebellion. It’s not that Chalamet is any stronger of a presence than this fellow castmates, but his Teen Beat heartthrob status outside the film is highly likely to draw some fresh blood into Anderson’s aging, increasingly jaded audience. The general reaction to The French Dispatch indicates that adult audiences who’ve been watching Wes Anderson since the 1990s are tiring of his schtick. Meanwhile, teenage girls hoping to get a peek at their favorite shirtless twink are perfect candidates for newfound, lifelong Anderson devotion. He worked best on me when I was that age, anyway.
The French Dispatch is dense & delightful enough that I’m already excited to watch it again, which is exactly how I felt when I first watched titles like Rushmore & The Life Aquatic in my teens. It might be my favorite of his film since The Royal Tenenbaums, or at least it feels like a perfect encapsulation of everything he’s been playing with since then. There’s a high likelihood that I walked out of Moonrise Kingdom & The Grand Budapest Hotel with this same renewed enthusiasm for his work, and I’ve merely forgotten that immediate elation in the few years since. Regardless, I don’t know that I’ve ever so clearly seen him as one of America’s great comedic filmmakers the way I do now. His visual & verbal joke deliveries in this latest dispatch are incredibly sharp & consistently funny. Many scenes start as fussed-over dollhouse dioramas shot from a cold, clinical distance. Those neatly segmented spaces tend to fill with oddly endearing goofballs, though, and you can tell he’s having the most fun when he’s feeding them punchlines.
Director Wes Anderson has such a meticulously curated aesthetic that his work is almost polarizing by design. As his career has developed over the decades, long outlasting the wave of “twee” media it partly inspired, he’s only more fully committed himself to the fussed-over dollhouse preciousness of his manicured visual style. That can be a huge turnoff for audiences who prefer a messier, grimier view of the world that accepts chaos & spontaneity as an essential part of filmmaking. Personally, I can’t help but be enraptured with Anderson’s films, as if my adoration of his work were a biological impulse. Like the way house cats host parasites that fool pet owners into caring for them, it’s as if Wes Anderson has nefariously wired my brain to be wholly onboard with his artistic output. It’s a gradual poisoning of my critical thinking skills that stretches back to my high school years, when his films Rushmore & The Royal Tenenbaums first established him as a (divisive) indie cinema icon. Anderson’s latest work, Isle of Dogs, only makes his supervillain-level command over my critical mind even more powerful by directly pandering directly to things I personally love. A stop-motion animated sci-fi feature about doggos who run wild on a dystopian pile of literal garbage, the basic elevator pitch for Isle of Dogs already sounds like a Mad Libs-style grab bag of the exact bullshit I love to see projected on the big screen, even without Wes Anderson’s name attached. As he already demonstrated with Fantastic Mr. Fox, the director’s twee-flavored meticulousness also has a wider appeal when seen in the context of stop-motion, which generally requires a level of whimsy, melancholy, and visual fussiness to be pulled off well. That’s why it’s so frustrating that Isle of Dogs is so flawed on such a fundamental, conceptual level and that I can’t help but thoroughly enjoy it anyway, despite my better judgment.
Set decades into the future in a dystopian Japan, Isle of Dogs details the samurai epic-style adventure of a young boy attempting to rescue his dog from an evil, corrupt government (helmed by his own uncle). All dogs in his region have been exiled to the pollution-saturated hell of Trash Island (which is exactly what it sounds like) amidst mass hysteria over a canine-specific virus, “snout fever.” The story is split between two efforts: a search & rescue mission involving the boy & a gang of talking Trash Island dogs (voiced by Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, etc.) and a much less compelling political intrigue narrative in which an American foreign exchange student (voiced by Greta Gerwig) attempts to expose the government’s villainous deeds. As an American outsider himself, Wes Anderson is at times contextually positioned in the POV of both the Trash Island Dogs and the foreign exchange student, the only consequential English-speaking characters in the film (a large portion of the dialogue is unsubtitled Japanese). In his worst impulses, Anderson is like Gerwig’s foreign exchange student– an enthusiastic appreciator of Japanese culture who awkwardly inserts themselves into conversations where they don’t belong, wrongfully feeling entitled to authority on a subject that is not theirs to claim. From a more generous perspective, Anderson is like one of the American-coded trash dogs– compelled to honor & bolster Japanese art from a place of humbled servitude, even though he doesn’t quite speak the language (either culturally or literally). By choosing to set an English language story in a fictional Japanese future, Wes Anderson has invited intense scrutiny that often overpowers Isle of Dogs’s ambitious sci-fi themes, talking-dog adorability, and visually stunning artwork. This is especially true in Gerwig’s (admittedly minor) portion of the plot, which sticks out like a sore thumb as one of the film’s more conceptually flawed impulses. For a work so visually masterful & emotionally deft, it’s frustrating that it seemingly wasn’t at all self-aware of its own cultural politics.
There are much better-equipped critics who’ve more thoughtfully & extensively tackled the nuanced ways Isle of Dogs has failed to fully justify its Japanese culture-gazing: Inkoo Kang, Justin Chang, Emily Yoshida, Alison Willmore, to name a few. As a white American, it’s not my place to declare whether this gray area issue makes the film worthy of vitriol or just cautions consideration. I could maybe push back slightly on the cultural appropriation claims that say there’s no reason the story had to be framed in Japan and that Anderson only chose that setting for its visual aesthetic. Like Kubo & The Two Strings’s philosophical relationship with the finality of death (or lack thereof), Isle of Dogs engages with themes of honor and ancestry that feel very specific to its Japanese setting (even if not at a fully satisfying depth). Truth be told, though, I likely would have enjoyed the film even without that thematic justification. Unless Isle of Dogs is your very first exposure to the director’s work, you’ve likely already formed a relationship with Wes Anderson as an artist, whether positive or negative. It’s a relationship that can only be reinforced as the director doubles down with each project, sinking even deeper into his own particular quirks. I assumed with Moonrise Kingdom that no film could have possibly gotten more Wes Andersony. Its follow-up, Grand Budapest Hotel, immediately proved that assumption wrong. While Isle of Dogs stacks up nicely to either of those films in terms of visual achievements, its own doubling-down on the Wes Anderson aesthetic is tied to the director’s long history of blissful ignorance in approaching POC cultures (most notably before in The Darjeeling Limited). It does so by submerging itself in a foreign culture entirely without fully engaging with the implications of that choice. As a longtime Anderson devotee in the face of this doubling-down, I’m going to have to reconcile my love of his films with the fact that this exact limitation has always been a part of them, that I’ve willfully overlooked it in my appreciation of what he achieves visually, emotionally, and comedically elsewhere. Isle of Dogs is a gorgeous work of visual art and a very distinct approach to dystopian sci-fi. It’s a great film, but also a culturally oblivious one. The conversation around that internal conflict is just as vital as any praise for its technical achievements.
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