Oh, Wes!

Wes Anderson’s sublime new AmEx ad is better than his last movie. As usual, Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson gets it right, while movie-crit fireball Armond White gets it brilliantly crazy. As Stevenson notes, the two minute mini-movie is perfectly suited to Anderson’s talents—his precocious, dry style, his exuberance for whimsy, his fetish for detail. As Stevenson writes:

The brief, bounded format of a commercial plays to Anderson's strengths and hides his weaknesses. No need to develop believable characters or to build organically motivated relationships between them (things Anderson has never managed to pull off in a film—though it may be he simply has no interest in them). Here he can just indulge his greatest talents: set pieces, art direction, whimsy, ironic bombast. There is no one more brilliantly entertaining than Wes Anderson when he's doing what he does best, and with a two-minute leash he hasn't time to do anything else.

Anderson’s last movie, The Life Aquatic, was an intermittently amusing effort with some great performances, but it was all deadpan wit and visual quirk, substituting melancholy tone for the cute, sad stories that made his first three films so loved. The AmEx ad solves all of The Life Aquatic’s problems by simply avoiding them. Fussed over images, wry dialog, and ironic distance can’t sustain a feature film, but they’re more than enough for a great commercial.

And then there is Armond White, a sometimes brilliant, always cantankerous, verbal showman with an almost wholly unpredictable aesthetic (though, as near as I can peg it, it’s got a tendency toward African-American Christian Socialist Traditionalist readings; make of that what you will). White’s article isn’t so much about Anderson as it is about a group of filmmakers he calls the "American Eccentrics" and that group's sluggishness in putting out new films. Strangely, he doesn’t put Quentin Tarantino in this category, and unironically claims that Tarantino “turn[s] out updated genre vehicles as if on schedule.” If by “on schedule,” White means 4 full length films (5 if you count Kill Bill as two movies) in 14 years, then ok; but somehow, I find any classification that lumps Tarantino’s clever, character-driven, pop-culture saturated odes to genre in with studio friendly explosion whores like Brett Ratner and Michael Bay somewhat dubious.

White tries to say that the studio system ought not be prohibitive to regular film production. But he doesn’t seem to notice that the filmmakers he lists as being predictably on schedule make films only every two years at best, and the examples he gives of directors working fast in the studio system are all from before 1960. It’s possible that he’s just pining for an earlier age (he does a lot of that) when films could be made on the cheap with less preparation, but surely White knows that the logistics and hula hoops of Hollywood prevent all but the most powerful directors from making a film more often than every year and a half, and even that time frame means speedy work.

As usual, White props himself up with namedropping whenever reason and insight won’t serve his ends, managing, in one paragraph, to reference Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, Jacques Coustaeu, Robert Altman, and Ayn Rand. Later, White advises the too-slow filmmakers to work faster, arguing that they should imitate “Robert Altman’s casual approach to creativity and profundity [in order to hit] the cultural bull’s eye here and there”—which certainly seems to be White’s approach.

Because, of course, there are gems to be found in the piece. The next to last paragraph, which is mainly a straight reading and interpretation of Anderson’s commercial, is full of smart stuff. Obviously, White is capable of incisive cultural and intertextual interpretation, and he’s clearly got a mind stuffed full of film to reference. Too bad he’s usually too busy trying to earn his contrarian cred—loudly and obnoxiously—for any of that brilliance to really show.