The Phoenician Scheme

By the standards of his previous two films, “Asteroid City” and “The French Dispatch,” in which modes of storytelling were the story, narrative layers stacked on top of one another, Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” is straightforward. It’s one more workout of his pet theme, estranged fathers and sons, though this time the estranged son is an estranged daughter. That estranged daughter has spent most of her life in a convent, meaning that Anderson is truly wrestling with faith for the first time since his extraordinary “Moonrise Kingdom” in 2012. In that movie, Anderson reworked the Genesis flood narrative whereas in this one, he draws more from the four gospels and what’s-his-face driving the moneychangers out of the temple. Such themes are eternal, yet despite taking place in the 1950s and in an imaginary nation, reality pervades “The Phoenician Scheme.” Not just in the exultant Stanford ringer tee and Pepperdine sweatshirt that characters played respectively by Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks sport to play a Wes Anderson version of Bird and Jordan’s game of horse so many springtimes ago, but in how Anderson enacts this titular plan of action to weigh belief in something divine with the art of the deal.

Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is a cutthroat business tycoon. He’s so cutthroat, in fact, that he has suffered multiple assassination attempts, including another one as “The Phoenician Scheme” opens when his private plane is sabotaged, leading him to storm the cockpit, eject the pilot from his seat, and take the controls. It’s classic Wes Anderson: a comically deadpan visual revealing a deeper sense of character, a man of impressive self-regard who prefers to go it alone. He sees himself as a king, conveyed in the images from above in which he relaxes in a tub while being waited on hand and foot, and will extract anyone or anything for everything, by violence, if necessary, underlined in the hand grenades he carries everywhere and hands out like party favors. And all of it is wrapped up in a Del Toro’s surprisingly levelheaded demeanor; this is just the way world works.

Ah, but his latest assassination attempt triggers a near-death experience, seen in black and white images of the apparent pearly gates, kind of the Andersonian version of “Defending Your Life” (one guess who plays God) and prompting Zsa-Zsa to summon his only daughter, Liesel (Mia Threapleton), to install her as his business successor. On the verge of taking her vows, she agrees to a probationary period in by tagging along with dad on his location-hopping journey to rally investors for a gargantuan infrastructure project in fictional Phoenicia. The details might be so byzantine that Anderson charts them onscreen for our benefit, but they are also beside the point. As Zsa-zsa is gradually made to see the error of his ways, the convoluted Phoenician scheme proves merely an elaborately droll manifestation of the age-old observation of cowed dastardly men everywhere: as the father of a daughter.

Zsa-zsa and Liesel are joined in this journey by Bjorn (Michael Cera), a Norwegian entomologist first enlisted as their tutor but then morphing into something more like an administrative assistant before morphing again, improbably giving Cera the chance to play, in a manner of speaking, Timothée Chalamet. Indeed, while the character might seem just along for the ride to grant Cera entry into the Wes Anderson Players, he is so much more. He’s not who he says is, as he says, but also exactly who he says he is, as he also says, reflecting the emergent dimension of his travel companions and underlining how all the supporting characters, in one way or another, are there specifically to help spotlight the main ones.

Costumed severely to start, without a word Liesel begins applying lipstick and wearing colorful tights, embracing rather than rejecting the material world. At the same time, Liesel argues for her father’s rejection of that very world’s scruples, conveyed in Anderson’s preferred flattened dialogue, turning every conversation into a kind of negotiation of ethics and morals as the epic convolutions of the business deal are neatly contrasted against Liesel’s plain-spoken explanation of faith. When Zsa-zsa asks if the Bible condemns slavery, Liesel replies that she does, a remarkable line-drawing bit of dialogue that rejects using Scripture as a get out jail free card. I’m pretty sure that’s not twee. And near the end, when Zsa-zsa’s plane has gone from going virtually unpopulated to chock full, it’s another one of those visual jokes communicating a heartless man who has, in his own way, in his own time, opened his up, at least a little.

If “The Phoenician Scheme” is a spiritual movie, in the end, it proves a transcendental one too. It might not meet all the criteria of the transcendental style, not as Paul Schrader defined it anyway, not least because Anderson’s camera movement remains maximal, not minimal, even in the concluding scene. That concluding scene, though, which I won’t give away, feels like the end point of the transcendental blueprint, nonetheless, taking the film’s ornate world, building to a moment where it throws that world in flux, and then coming out the other side with something so intimate and quiet that it feels holy.

Asteroid City

Forgive me for beginning a review of the new Wes Anderson movie by referencing a Roland Emmerich movie instead, but the former’s “Asteroid City” includes Jeff Goldblum and extra-terrestrial life, not necessarily in that order, and I couldn’t help thinking of Goldblum’s line as cable repairman David Levinson in ID4 when he says the alien signal is “reducing.” Much as a cook might reduce a sauce or a soup to intensify the flavor, ever since his first movie in 1996, Anderson has been reducing his own aesthetic, causing, I suspect, such impassioned reactions to his last few films, whether from people who adore or abhor them. Indeed, his style has become so concentrated that for disinclined cinematic gastronomes, it might be easy to miss how his intensity of style is precisely what underpins his substance, his immaculate deadpan sensibilities now virtually inextricable from his deep wells of pathos. There was a moment in my screening of “Asteroid City” where it seemed as if half the theater was laughing and half the theater was, like myself, about to cry.

Much of “Asteroid City” takes place circa 1955 in the small eponymous American Southwest town semi-famous for a meteorite that crashed there round about 3000 BC and set to host a junior stargazers conference. This brings several bright students and their parents, including Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan) and his father Augie (Jason Schwartzman), trying to find wherewithal to tell his son and triplet daughters of their mother’s recent death, and Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards) and her mother Midge (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress emotionally reeling from divorce. All this suggests Wilder’s Our Town told by interlopers rather than inhabitants, underlining the movie’s defining sense of alienation and fear, where the notion of looking to the sky isn’t necessarily filled with wonder but mushroom clouds from recurring atomic tests and mysterious lights, the latter eventually yielding an otherworldly encounter prompting a militarized quarantine. And when Asteroid City is sealed off, notably it’s the kids who fight back while the adults mostly stand around sipping at gin and vermouth from a martini vending machine, a three-martini lunch as life.

That, however, is only half the movie as “Asteroid City” makes no attempt to pretend that Asteroid City is real. I don’t mean real to us, the viewer, but real in the movie’s own world. Because “Asteroid City” opens in black and white on a stage where a Rod Serling-like narrator (Bryan Cranston) looks right into the camera and explains that what we are about to see is a behind the scenes look at the production of a play called Asteroid City, introducing us to the writer (Edward Norton) and director (Adrien Brody) and cast, all of whom are the actors playing the characters in the desert town. In true Andersonian fashion, however, this is not merely a framing device but a means of exploration.

If “The French Dispatch” utilized its fictional eponymous periodical to evince something like Anderson’s mission statement of creative freedom and intent, then in “Asteroid City” he uses the stage bound establishing device to dissect and push back against his own perceived theatrical sensibilities. The narrow aspect ratio and monochrome of the stage scenes blossom into rich Kodak 35mm anamorphic widescreen that makes great use of both close-ups and detail-rich frames, like the lonely cactus dotting the periphery of conversations between Midge and Augie from the windows of their respective rental homes, while a static camera gives way to a three-dimensional one, constantly probing, seeming to forever pan right, again, looking for something else.

The acting, meanwhile, is no less concentrated than everything else. Unlike, say, Gene Hackman in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or Bill Murray in “The Life Aquatic,” the actors of “Asteroid City” deliberately eschew any idiosyncrasy, or actorly business, as Brody’s director puts it. Hey, I happen to like actorly business, but I like the absence of it too, and here the absence of it brings home the director is sculpting the performance as much as the performer. Johansson especially benefits, honoring the old Antonioni observation that an actor need only be on screen, reducing all sense of actorly intent until there’s virtually no barrier between her and the camera, not so much conveying her character’s tragicomic essence as beaming it directly to us.

Like Midge is an actor, Augie is a photographer, snapping photos throughout, evoking a desire for an artist to use his or her art to make sense of the world. Rather than mere refraction of this truth, however, the framing scenes become intertwined with it, as the division between the reality and fiction the movie presents is increasingly blurred in amusing and moving ways, bringing creators and creations in harmony with one another. Occasionally, “Asteroid City” goes even further than that, such as a balcony scene existing as both a dazzling metaphor for the old creative’s adage of killing your darlings and weirdly profound metaphor of loss, crystallizing the movie as one that does not simply understand but dramatically demonstrates how all art rests on the knife’s edge between artifice and emotion. 

The French Dispatch

Early in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” we see a close-up of a serving tray as it gradually acquires drinks, various aperitifs, an absinthe, even a cola, all rendered in sepia tones, like a vintage Bon Appétit cover from the 1960s. The tray will soon be carried up several flights of stairs to the offices of the eponymous fictional New Yorker-ish literary magazine in the make believe Ennui-sur-Blasé, France, but this image really exists as an emblem of Anderson gathering all the tools in his aesthetic toolbox. Throughout the ensuing hour and forty-eight minutes you see it all: different aspect ratios, color and monochrome, even animation, relentlessly playful costume and set design, not to mention hyper-specific story details, like inventing an entire mode of cuisine. It has already become de rigueur for critics to deem “The French Dispatch” as the most Wes Anderson-y Wes Anderson movie, and that is not untrue, filled to bursting with his preferred themes and motifs, narratively and visually, so chock full it might well require two viewings to truly imbibe it all. This is not, however, an illustration of the age-old, oft-unwarranted accusation that Anderson is all style, no substance. Far from it. You might not know it to view it, given the lack of a character as true Anderson stand-in, a la “Rushmore’s” Max Fischer or “The Grand Budapest Hotel’s” Gustave H., but “The French Dispatch” is Anderson’s most personal work yet, the style intrinsically merging with the substance to become a manifestation of art as individual expression. 

Though we see editor-in-chief Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) and his staff hash out The French Dispatch’s latest issue, Anderson is less interested in presenting the nuts and bolts of publication than he is in bringing a magazine issue to life. He does this not just by creating an anthology film but by structuring his anthology like a magazine, with a Talk of the Town-ish prologue and a culminating obituary sandwiched around three feature stories. And though these stories feature their writers in one form or another recounting their creations, the articles essentially emerge from the pages to become the movie, as if a New Yorker lying in your lap has been beamed up to the big screen. And even if the stories within are fictitious, this fiction feels as true to Harold Ross and William Shawn’s periodical as any inspired by adaptation, an animated sequence like a New Yorker cover as Loony Tune and nearly every Adrien Brody line finishing with a comic aside that might as well be a droll parenthetical. 

As is typical with Anderson, there is more than a whiff of nostalgia, though it is never so simple or saccharine. In his previous “Grand Budapest Hotel”, his main character lamented a world on its way out, if not already gone, though concluding developments raised the question of whether that world ever really existed to begin with. And though by setting “The French Dispatch” in the 1960s, Anderson is referencing a time gone by, when magazine writers could be reimbursed for holing up at an expensive, exotic resort to write their stories and editors had more clout than venture capitalists, he nevertheless imbues a love of journalism, the written word, and art in general that is tantamount to a rallying cry for its continued preservation. Indeed, the introductory travelogue, in which Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), shows us “a day in the life of Ennui over 250 years”, evokes the old Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr observation that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The first feature, “The Concrete Masterpiece”, is spiritually a three-hander about an artist, his muse, and his benefactor in which an art dealer, Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody), turns Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio del Toro), serving a prison sentence for murder, into a worldwide sensation after buying the inmate’s nude portrait of prison officer Simone (Léa Seydoux). In reproving himself as apparently the director most adept at harnessing Brody’s unique livewire energy, Anderson in tandem with his actor transforms Cadazio into a living, breathing paradox of art as commerce as Brody leaps back and forth, mid-scene, mid-sentence, from profit-making philistine to genuine artistic appreciator. Honestly, this is one of my favorite performances of the year, just sort of hiding in plain view. With his calm yet cantankerous air, del Toro embodies Anderson’s ultra-dry joke about a tortured artist while Seydoux’s stone face in combination with her character, willing to sit for the artist while also smack him one when he gets unruly, quietly embodies the age-old, more recently controversial notion, of respecting the art, not the artist.

“Revisions to a Manifesto”, the second feature, refers to a declaration being penned by Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet), student revolutionary being chronicled by The French Dispatch’s Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand). Thought the passage might reference France’s May of 1968 protests, Anderson is not re-imagining those real-life events so much as putting his own nostalgic sensibilities under the microscope, both satirizing the idea of youthful rebellion and holding it aloft as the ultimate ideal. (In one bravura sequence, Anderson recounts Zeffirelli’s play about youthful ambition and looming adult responsibilities by moving the camera so close that he virtually merges a stage production with his own cinematic format, so that when a character in the play ostensibly jumps out a window, the technique makes it seem as if he really does, but one example of Anderson’s astonishing visual poetry.) He does the latter most specifically through Krementz, whose emergent relationship with Zeffirelli not only probes the idea of journalistic neutrality but brings her close to something in which, figuratively if lyrically speaking, she discovers she can no longer participate but still appreciate.

In the climactic third feature, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner”, a food writer, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), profiles a chef, Lt. Nescaffier (Steve Park), specializing in the mythical haute cuisine of Police Cooking. Though seemingly superabundant with unharmonious narrative elements, these are delicately layered to draw other elements out, a prisoner who becomes the object of a ransom demand emphasizing how Roebuck got his start with The French Dispatch, Nescaffier’s experience as a immigrant evoking Roebuck’s, and so on, so that an ostensible piece about Nescaffier’s gastronomy becomes as much a Roebuck himself, a personal history intertwined with a profile, all building to the crucial moment when the author and editor disagree over whether a certain quote should be included in the final piece, nothing less than an illustration of contradictory aesthetic interpretations. 

In a way, Anderson is communicating the same idea to his audience, that this, his film, is open not only to interpretation but appraisal. Do you like it or don’t you? If you do, thanks; if you don’t, so be it, not that he would change a thing. The epilogue is an obituary for Howitzer himself and The French Dispatch honoring his specific, unsentimental request that the publication itself be terminated along with him, the presses dismantled and liquified. This, however, is not so much a eulogy for the character as Anderson’s own version of a manifesto. Because if someone else is going to tell him how to make “The French Dispatch”, then you might as well disassemble the whole cut and burn it.  

Some Drivel On...Moonrise Kingdom

Of Wes Anderson’s infinite visual motifs, perhaps his most prominent is the moving diorama, turning some locale, like the Belafonte boat at the heart of “The Life Aquatic”, into something akin to a dollhouse, moving his camera from left to right, or right to left, as he walks us through every facet of his finely honed vista. In the case of “Moonrise Kingdom”, he opens with two such moving dioramas. First, through the ramshackle home of Mr. and Mrs. Bishop (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand) located on fictional New Penzance Island, off the coast of New England, and then through the camp of the Khaki Scouts of North America, located on the same island, as Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) moves from his tent to the outdoor mess hall, pausing for spot checks along the way. Each of these shots express, as they always do, Anderson’s preferred auteur-imposed order where he can show us exactly how things work in his invented worlds. Of course, look closer and you will see the encroaching sadness, whether it is Mr. and Mrs. Bishop reading the paper in different rooms right next to each other, or the lax safety standards of the Khaki Scouts, which hints at total control being just beyond Scoutmaster Ward’s reach.

What is also notable about this procession through camp is how it ends – that is, with Scoutmaster Ward discovering that 12 year Khaki Scout Sam Shutusky (Jared Gilman) has flown the coop. Sam flees, we learn, to meet up with the Bishops’ young daughter, Suzy (Kara Hayward), who we see in her own moving diorama scene where he mostly stares out the window, fitfully, through binoculars, as if yearning for what is beyond her immediate reach. They are running away, fleeing their respective natural orders where, as we have seen, not all is copacetic. That order, of course, will try to reel them back in, with the island policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) leading the chase, institutions bearing down. 

Sam and Suzy’s journey takes them to an isolated cove, where they hide out, talk and dance to old records. Whimsical might be a word that jumps to mind, but it’s notable for how Anderson repeatedly undercuts that whimsy, with Sam cruelly laughing at Suzy when she admits her parents think her troubled, only to apologize, and Sam bluntly correcting Suzy’s fanciful notions of what being an orphan is like. It’s not simply the institutions, in other words, that have driven them to leave, but the people in charge of them. But when Sam and Suzy are found, Mr. Bishop rips the tent off the top of them, he leaves them exposed, half-naked, to the world from which he, and Mrs. Bishop, were supposed to protect his daughter. Later, when lying in their conspicuously separate beds, Mrs. Bishop remarks of the two kids “We’re all they’ve got.” Mr. Bishop replies, infused with Murray’s patented droll darkness: “That’s not enough.” If they are not enough, who is?

There is another adult in “Moonrise Kingdom” – namely, The Narrator (Bob Balaban). As the movie opens, he stands before the camera to proffer a brief history of New Penzance as well as foreshadow the so-called Black Beacon Storm, “the region’s most destructive meteorological event of the second half of the twentieth century.” That this event will conclude the film, the Narrator, who briefly inserts himself into the movie halfway through, becomes something like a prophet in high water pants. And I do not employ the term “prophet” lightly. There is a Biblical undertone to “Moonrise Kingdom”, one that is slathered quite plainly across the surface but occurred to me more forcefully on a third watch, perhaps because it was Easter week when I re-watched.

Even without the presence of his prophet, Anderson foreshadows what’s to come with Sam and Suzy’s Meet Cute, taking place at a children’s production of Noye’s Fludde, a one-act Benjamin Britten opera recounting the story of Noah’s Ark. In that light, you might assume that Sam and Suzy’s escape is informed by some higher power. That is not the case, however, and while most movies might make their running away and eventual retrieval the basis for the whole movie, here the runaways are found and brought back into the fold midway through so as to keep the spotlight firmly on the entire social system supporting, or not, these kids. There is a great wave that appears near movie’ end, destroying a dam, approximating a flood at a Khaki Scout camp on a neighboring island, and while it leaves significant damage, it does not wipe everyone out. If anything, it gives them a chance to shine, like Scoutmaster Ward re-proving his worth by Khaki Scout Commander Pierce, and by Captain Sharp, agreeing it at a dramatic moment, to become Sam’s guardian.

If Wes Anderson films are often thought of as superficial, beholden to their finicky dollhouse aesthetic and little else, characters as props to pose in a movie dollhouse, in “Moonrise Kingdom”, the people, in being pointedly spared by the great flood, become the point. The great flood does not wipe the earth to leave a few to rebuild; it leaves who is there still there. The Gal or Guy upstairs is simply reminding everyone below that the well-being of this whole damn place is very much up to us.

The Grand Wes Anderson Golden Globes Speech

It’s a film awards season and the most important thing to remember, you, avid-watcher of awards season television programs, is that no one who wins can thank people properly. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not saying they can’t thank people right, because they often do, but that our nation, as purveyors of social media, is under the impression that no one (I repeat, NO ONE) can thank anyone right. To whomever you say “thanks”, potential award winner, and whatever manner in which you say it and however long it takes you to say it, you’re wrong. And Twitter gonna let you know.

This is why I thought Jared Leto’s acceptance speech at last year’s Independent Spirit Awards in winning Best Supporting Actor for “Dallas Buyers Club” was so brilliant. He had been taken to task numerous times in the weeks leading up to that victory for not thanking people right in other acceptance speeches. So, he took that criticism to heart and then flipped it on its smelly, stupid face. He thanked “the seven billion human beings on the planet, and all of the planets and animals.” He thanked “the makers of vegan butter and baby Jesus.” He thanked “homemade burritos.” He thanked “Whitcomb L. Judson – the inventor of the zipper.” He thanked “Marisa Tomei”, but then everybody should thank Marisa Tomei. (Thanks, Marisa Tomei.) People, of course, got mad at him yet again for not thanking people right without realizing that what he had done was essentially troll everyone who had been criticizing him for not thanking people right. I thought it was certifiably brilliant.

At The Golden Globes this past Sunday, however, Wes Anderson, in accepting the award for Best Comedy/Musical for his outstanding “Grand Budapest Hotel”, went one better. He trolled the idea of not thanking people right in acceptance speeches and then he trolled the very people – the enigmatic Hollywood Foreign Press Association – who bestowed him the award, which also means he successfully trolled all the people who just reflexively thank the HFPA even if they have no idea who they are.

The Speech: “I’m not going to spend many of my few seconds up here thanking people like Steven Rales and Scott Rudin and Jim Gianopulos and Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula, Jane and Owen, Ralph and Hugo, Jeremy, Bill, Rowan and Jason, Randy and Edward, and Adrian and Jason, Jeff and Tilda, Jim and Rick, and especially James L. Brooks and Polly Platt. Instead, I’m going to focus on the membership of the Hollywood Foreign Press: Yorum and Dagmar and Yukiko and Munawar and Lorenzo, Armando, Husam, Jean-Paul, Hans, Helmut – these are the people I want to thank tonight, and many others with names nothing like theirs, but equally captivating – Kirpi, Erkki, Anke, and so on. I thank you for this Golden Globe.”

Here's to hoping Wes lands a Best Director nod with the Academy and the statue too, if only to hear what his Oscar speech might sound like.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

“He certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” This is how the protagonist of “Grand Budapest Hotel”, Monsieur Gustave H., dapper, detail-oriented concierge at the hotel of the title, played by Ralph Fiennes in a performance of remarkable layers, is summarily described in regards to his position. Yet, this phrase could just as aptly describe the film’s auteur, Wes Anderson. In one way, his seventh feature film is no different than his others, quirky, over-casted, inundated with heightened set design, and stuffed full frames. But in another way, this film is his most distinct, noticeably in the way some semblance of reality keeps trying to intrude in Wes’s Land of Make Believe. That reality never quite takes over can be attributed to Anderson’s dedication to sustaining his cinematic illusions with a marvelous grace.

Anderson’s films have often bore resemblance to novels, particularly “The Royal Tenenbaums”, but never quite so extravagantly as in “Grand Budapest Hotel.” The framing device features an aging author (Tom Wilkinson) in 1985 relaying the particulars of how a past work came to be at which point the film flashes back to a younger version of the author (Jude Law) in 1968 staying for a spell at the rusty relic the Grand Budapest Hotel has become where he meets Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the eccentric owner of the faded palace. Mr. Moustafa then relays to the author how he came into ownership of the hotel at which point the film flashes back to a younger version of Moustafa in 1932, then called Zero (Tony Revelori), a Lobby Boy at the Grand Budapest in its heyday. He is the protégé of Gustave H. and the film pivots on their friendship and the forthcoming adventure.

In “Moonrise Kingdom” Anderson invented an island – New Penzance – but in “Grand Budapest Hotel” he invents a whole central European country, Zubrowka. That is also the name of a Polish vodka but Anderson shot the film throughout Germany, primarily in the state of Saxony, and most every shot here could double as a travel postcard on a rack at a ski chalet. By both referencing the disrepair into which the Grand Budapest eventually falls and setting the majority of the film in 1932 Europe on the eve of WWII, Anderson is pointedly serving up a decadent slice of nostalgia, a wishful reminder of the way things were before all means of military might tore through and ravaged the landscape.

Not that he denies the looming threats of terror. The approaching atrocities continually creep up around the edges of the film, insinuating themselves into the proceedings, such as in the undefined but S.S.-suggesting state police, only to be repelled by counter attacks of whimsy. This is the most violent film Anderson has made, which likely prompted the weird R rating, and while the violence is not exactly sickeningly gruesome and still artfully choreographed, it is nonetheless striking merely for existing. Willem Dafoe, in fact, stalks through the film like a European Anton Chigurh.

Ostensibly the film is a kind of comic caper, centered around Monsieur Gustave H.’s relationship with an aging tycoon (Tilda Swinton). When she dies, Gustave and Zero strike out for her estate, where they learn, much to the dismay of her villainous son, the autterly Anderson-ian named Dimitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Adrien Brody), that she has left Gustave a priceless portrait. Alas, Gustave is accused of poisoning her, which lands him in prison which leads to a breakout and a chase and all sorts of moments and set pieces in between and after. The plot is not necessarily beside the point but atmosphere and character become the focus, even if many characters go no further than the essence of the actors playing them. Gustave, however, is something else entirely, played perfectly by Fiennes not only with droll verbal dexterity but with a noble professionalism.

A significant portion of the film stretches out to other finely rendered locales and yet, the spirit of the titular establishment, as introduced and asserted by Gustave, who is literally seen at a pulpit giving sermons to his fellow hoteliers, is never left behind. Why even when he and Zero make their cross-country trek to Madam D.’s funeral, they remain outfitted in their regimental workplace uniforms. His conciliatory role as concierge is what Gustave clings to in any given situation, constantly dousing himself in L’Air de Panache, as if to ensure his appearance is always at its most pleasing. Still, Gustave is prone to excessively brief if curse-ridden hissy fits, losing his cool and instantly regaining composure, suggesting cracks in that finely-calibrated Panache-infused exterior. And this is also suggestive of the cracks manifesting in the world which both he and his dearly beloved Grand Budapest inhabit.

Ultimately the hotel is an old world, pre-war symbol, memories pressed between the pages of Zero’s mind. In one sense, the film ends happily, but in another sense it very much does not. This is why Anderson opens the film by showing us what the Grand Budapest Hotel has become before showing us what it once was – he pines for the past, much like Mr. Moustafa, willingly staying in the servant’s quarters, a demonstration of painful longing. Gustave may have been adept at sustaining the illusion, but his mentor lost that skill somewhere along the way. And just past the marvelous shots and gracefully blocked set pieces of “Grand Budapest Hotel”, the first glimmer of Wes Anderson recognizing the folly of his own illusion comes into view.

Moonrise Kingdom

One of the phrases most utilized by adults when pre-teens complain about their lot in life is the following: You don’t know how good you have it. This phrase is both legitimate and idiotic. It is legitimate because too often adulthood devolves into the sort of weary drudgery and pre-occupation with occupation that seems to afflict the majority of adults on New Penzance, the mystical island off the coast of New England in a vibrant 1965 where Wes Anderson’s "Moonrise Kingdom" is set. These adults no longer seem to have it that good and probably haven’t for awhile. It is idiotic because, hey, adults seem to forget that when they were 12 year olds they too ceaselessly complained about their lot in life. It’s a right of passage.

This eternal conundrum is addressed in a wondrous scene in the camper home of Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), the man tasked with tracking down runaway boy scout Sam (Jared Gilman), where he serves that same runaway boy scout half a sandwich and a brat. Sharp seems confused why this disobedient boy is in such a hurry to grow up. But then Sharp wonders if Sam might like a sip of his beer and in a whimsically symbolic moment Sam dumps his milk into an ash tray to make room for a few drops of the adult beverage. Adults want to protect children from the rigors of adulthood as long as they can, but there comes a point where resistance is futile.

Every Wes Anderson movie in one way or another is about the rivalry between make-believe and the real world and the opening shot of Moonrise Kingdom illuminates this in the way it focuses on a painting of a modest red home before the camera – in typical Wes-ish style – gracefully pans to the right and then the pans pick up the pace as we realize we are IN the very house represented in the painting. It belongs to the family of our heroine Suzy (Kara Hayward), the rebel with the blue eye shadow and propensity for stealing library books. She concerns her litigating parents Walt and Laura (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) so much they have purchased a book titled Coping With A Very Troubled Child.

Suzy, as we see in flashback, has fallen head-over-heels (in her own stern way) with Sam, a no-nonsense romantic Khaki Scout who has tendered his “resignation” and fled the camp run with an innocent fist by golly willickers Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). Ward summons Sharp – forever adorned in uniform complete with the requisite high water pants – who is mired in an affair with Laura which seems less about passion than the lack of alternatives on the tiny island. A search party is configured and give chase as Sam and Suzy, armed with a hunting rifle, binoculars and a record player, stay one step ahead, though their destination may be known to the Narrator (Bob Balaban) who turns up now and again to allude to the historic storm set to descend in a few days time and allow for a nifty backdrop to the third act climax.

As the film progresses, it takes neat detours in the story that never dull the momentum and it is revealed – to us and Scout Master Ward – that Sam is an orphan whose foster parents have given up on him. Dreaded Social Services (represented by Tilda Swinton) awaits. (There is a dog here named Snoopy and that reference elicits thoughts of Social Services as a Daisy Hill Puppy Farm For People.) And Suzy, we learn, has a serious mean streak, deeply troubling to the very parents who seem unaware of how their own fingerprints may have more than aided in creating that mean streak.

There is no love as forceful as young love, a truth Shakespeare knew best and which is why "Romeo and Juliet" will still be performed by the kids of the kids of the kids of your kids and mine. And yet so rarely is young love taken seriously by the old, as evidenced by the scene-stealing Jason Schwartzman as a crooked camp master who assists our star cross’d lovers of "Moonrise Kingdom" and agrees to marry them so long as they take a real pause to consider just what the union of marriage truly means.

Anderson casts the brief shot of this consideration with Sam and Suzy in the left of the frame and a young camp-goer bouncing on a trampoline in the right. At first, you think “Oh, there goes that quirky Wes again.” But upon reflection it’s the most loaded shot of a film loaded with loaded shots. Carefree innocence ceding to the taking of vows. Sam and Suzy know what it means.

And Sam and Suzy know just how good they have it. They don’t need a reminder. Which is why they just yearn for everyone to leave them alone so they can be together.