The Royal Tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums is the third Wes Anderson film I've seen, and probably the best. What I think puts it over the top above Rushmore is what Peter Travers described in his review. He said that the film is better "not because its cast is starrier but because the film has an accessible maturity." This is an important point. Rushmore is memorably funny, but with this film the seriousness aspect of Wes Anderson's movies has come to match the humor and make something more complicated. Things start out spiffy, but time and discord split the family up into a sprawling wreck. It becomes something kind of comparable to Nashville, where we see the inhabitants of the film interact and live out their crises and relationships. It doesn't suffer from the sprawling messiness of Altman's film, though, since everything is closely interconnected and not as detached from the viewer. With its hands-on auteur feel, there is a soul central to the film. The story is then set in an ironically storybook-like setting, as the narrative awkwardly jumps from humorous to bleak. Many of the shots feel like they belong in a children's book, with dense, colorful sets and framing that hones in on the principal characters.







The whole film is a mood piece, with music buoying it up and dragging it down at each turn. This roller-coaster existence for the characters is an important contrast to Rushmore; though the protagonist there does have some 'troubles', the bigger bumps in this film help to humanize and explain how the stylized, caricatured characters that Wes Anderson loves have come to be. It provides a reason for the wackiness that we see, and makes it funny and sad. The Royal Tenenbaums is a strange film, and I'm not sure what sort of a conclusion I would make about it, but it was certainly my favorite of those by Wes Anderson that I saw.

Coens

Watching the three films that we did, it is understandable that the Coen Brothers have come to hold the reputation that they have among critics and audiences. They have a strong, technical control of cinematography and editing that serves them well in creating memorable films. The stories in their films still take center stage; comparing Raising Arizona and No Country for Old Men, some important similarities and differences come out.

The big thing that the two films share is the general plot concept of individuals taking what isn't theirs and getting caught up in the chaos that results. Raising Arizona is a screwball comedy about parents with fertility issues stealing a quintuplet, and No Country is a desolate thriller about drug money and a number of people getting killed. So, there's clearly some difference between the two. One of these differences is in the tone that each film's conflict takes on. In Raising Arizona, there is a class conflict aspect; the troubled, childless new family in a trailer vs. the wealthy furniature salesman with 5 new babies. No Country turns out as more of a bleak portrait, in which once things go wrong, everybody is taken down. As multiple people remark at the scene of the failed drug deal, "they even shot the dog."

The two films can also be compared by their bad-guy characters. Raising Arizona is more comedic, of course, with Leonard Smalls, the 'biker of the apocalypse' who blows up rabbits with grenades. He's an absurd character, but as such he's the perfect fit for the film; he's not an antagonistic bad guy as much as a mythical embodiment of disaster. This ties him in somewhat with Anton Chigurh, who in No Country is an almost indescribable killer with a disturbingly off-kilter manner. He embodies the whole 'fate' idea of the film when he tosses a coin to chose if someone lives or dies. Both characters are well suited to their films and make up an important part of the whole for each.