Free The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded by David Thomson Page A

vulnerabilities. But is there any other way?
    No other American director working today has such sad, tender, and smart ways of looking into the depths of society, or for feeling out their poignant juxtapositions. He writes great, ragged speeches, and he is like a fond parent with his family of actors. All his three films so far have used John Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Philip Baker Hall. In addition, he has done remarkable things with such diverse figures as Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, and Burt Reynolds. His way of blessing actors is so very close to his wish to rescue people from their drabness. Sooner or later, it will be perceived how desperately concerned he is about the society called America.
    Of course, Magnolia is like Short Cuts in that both films are symphonies attempting to take in everything. They have the ambition of an Ives, say, who could hardly get his work played, let alone make it popular. Altman has learned cunning ways of making that ambition into a career. But he is older, and far less kind. Anderson’s energy and aspirations are destined to collide with Hollywood thinking, and he may be too young and too good to learn subterfuge. If he is as good as he thinks he is (and I think he is), there are bloody battles to come. But no one has a better chance of offering us new narrative forms for our movies.
    In advance, there were very few coherent ideas as to what There Will Be Blood was or was trying to be. And on first viewing, it was not easy to grasp just how audacious the film was. It was alleged to be a version of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! , and there was a sense of the desert geology being carved up by antlike men that was both epic and comic, and which reminded one of Greed more than Giant . It was a parable about capitalism, piracy, and initiative, and it was in that breadth that some people saw and felt a genuine extension of Citizen Kane , in the sense that it was a film about how America was made. The film had its crazy aspect, and an unwavering interest in nobility. It was very hard to think of another picture that had so caught the recklessness of the later nineteenth century and the ghastly awareness of the loss of God or gods. It was a great film and the plain impact of a major director, even in the brief history of a very threatened medium.
    Wes (Wesley) Anderson , b. Houston, Texas, 1969
1994: Bottle Rocket (s). 1996: Bottle Rocket . 1998: Rushmore . 2001: The Royal Tenenbaums . 2004: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou . 2007: The Darjeeling Limited; Hotel Chevalier (s). 2009: Fantastic Mr. Fox .
    In the last edition of this book (in advance of The Life Aquatic ), under Wes Anderson, I wrote, “Watch this space. What does that mean? That he might be something one day.” What I meant to say was that Wes Anderson seemed to me enormously promising, if not yet clarified. Why should he be at thirty-five, you ask? Very well, but how long does he need? If pushed further, I would have said then that Rushmore was one of the best films about high-school-age kids (though its school is a private place in Texas such as Anderson himself attended). I liked it very much but felt already that The Royal Tenenbaums had a kind of whimsical pretension that can mark and beguile a student who has given up on being educated. Thus, the agonies of family dysfunction have been chilled by a kind of visionary novocaine, itself pleasing and very much of the moment, but with one drawback: that the sense of dysfunction (and thus failure) could be reassessed or tamed as mere oddity. I wasn’t quite sure where it was all going—or whether the soulful melancholia was getting too close to self-pity.
    In the years since, the Wes Anderson cult has built, along with the sense that he is central to the most valuable young generation America has brought to film in thirty years (one that includes Noah Baumbach—they have collaborated several times), the Coppola children, young actors like Owen Wilson and Jason