Wilson's Cinema

Field Maloney breaks through the cask of the mysterious relationship between Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson; once the golden pair of American Art Cinema. Currently, the speculation is that, with The Life Aquatic, Anderson has stepped further into a form of cinematic solipsism, and that Wilson was the actual language that broke or structured that solipsistic trance.

I disagree somewhat: Life Aquatic, the first Anderson/Baumbach fell below the Wilson/Anderson films in terms of immediate aquaintence, but it does grow on a viewer in much the same way as a piece of dada performance art does. To me, it becomes more emotionally true after having watched it; as though the dream world of Zissou's descent from greatness, and his ultimate search for validation, becomes meaningful as an artefact, a memory in me.

However, Maloney analyses places in the Wilson/Anderson ouvre where the structured language and concepts eluded Anderson as abstractions, were Wilson could play with them as character-driven plot devices pulled from film history:

Unlike Anderson, whose film vocabulary is impressive but top-heavy with auteurs—Jean Renoir, Truffaut, Michael Powell—Owen Wilson draws on the rich mine of the American middlebrow. When Max, facing expulsion from Rushmore Academy, asks his headmaster: "Can you get me off the hook? You know, for old times sake?" Wilson points out that it's a Godfather reference. When Max, alone in a classroom with his love object, the beautiful young teacher Ms. Cross, gets up, mid-conversation, to stick a pencil into an electric sharpener, Wilson recalls a moment in Terms of Endearment when Jack Nicholson, driving in a convertible across the beach, runs his fingers through Shirley MacLaine's hair and shouts, (according to Wilson): "Wind is in the hair, lead is in the pencil!"

But the most telling moment in the Rushmore commentary comes later, during a long, panning group montage shot—a Wes Anderson trademark—that segues into a scene of an angry and frustrated Max finally confronting a just as angry and frustrated Ms. Cross, who finally tells Max off:

Ms. Cross: "Do you think we're going to have sex?"

Max: "That's kinda a cheap way to put it."

Ms. Cross: "Not if you ever fucked before, it isn't."

The first voice, commenting on the group montage, belongs to Anderson:

"There's a storybook feeling, something about trying to create these insular worlds in these movies. I don't know exactly why we're doing this, but …"

Then, cut to the classroom scene, where we hear Owen Wilson in the background. "In Bottle Rocket and Rushmore there's an innocence to the characters," Wilson says. "This scene feels very real in a movie that in a lot of places seems sort of dreamy. This scene has a cringe factor to it because the movie has an innocent feel and this sort of breaks through that. It makes you uncomfortable, which is appropriate because it has to puncture Max's make-believe world."

Telling lines, and, one can't help suspect, somehow indicative of the larger system of checks and balances in the Anderson/Wilson partnership.

Presumably, Wilson left the partnership for the immediate future to indulge in his growing success as a comedic performer, with generally pleasureable results. But what is uncertain is whether, even if he could return to the partnership, Wilson's reigns of "Reason" would affect Anderson's ambitions toward Abstraction. In Life Aquatic, easily the weakest character and performance was Wilson's- his performace seemed stilted, dulled, stripped of its luster and language.

And yet, in Wedding Crashers, he doesn't shine, either. Vaughn, the first string quarterback in Junior High, the man who can brilliantly "make it rain out here," held his ground. And Wilson delivered wonderful lines again.

But ultimately, had Wilson infused Wedding Crashers with the compatriotic, energetic spirit of Dignan in Bottle Rocket or himself in the New Yorker, he would have worked his character out of the self-obsessed, melodramatic faction of the same solipsism accused upon Wes Anderson. This is a strange argument, to be sure, to say that Wilson's character in the film Crashers fell into Anderson's trap of making the film Aquatic. But rather it is about the awareness of the structure of Story and Character. And how, seemingly, both men, having lost the enigmatic spark in their writing relationship, seem to have faltered in detecting those elements wholly once again.

And yet, this is all loathesome speculation. Wilson's performances continue to offer at least a chuckling thrill [and more often a chortle!]; and Anderson's films delight with mysterious spectral fear and analysis. Neither is out of the game. Perhaps their broken symbiosis will allow them enough room to really approach new capabilities and arts.