Give Wes a Break
I’ve been reading a lot of criticism of Wes Anderson — ranging from calling him a fascist to saying that his minority and female characters are hallow caricatures. While I’ll leave dealing with the details of the latter criticism to Reihan, I’ll add that all this highfalutin criticism of Anderson is just a sign of how talented and important he is.
That he makes movies where he’s a bigger draw than the high profile actors in them and that he tries to make art: this is what makes him a target for this type of criticism. Because his movies are so expertly and lovingly shot, because they’re written so cleverly and are just so damn endearing, people have very high and very specific expectations of them. Since there are so few directors who actually have artistic ambition like Anderson, every film buff who has some sort of cultural agenda (not that there’s anything wrong with having a cultural agenda) focuses an inordinate amount of criticism on him. Let’s be happy we have Wes at all, and not worry so much that he can’t be perfect in writing and depicting all of his characters.
Did you even read her piece?
No one is so much as attacking Wes Anderson personally, as much as they are critically analyzing his work, and if the work an artist producers reflects the artist themselves then one can easily make the connection between Wes Anderson’s cinematic portrayal of people of color and his personal feelings or personal interactions with people of color (long sentence).
As a woman of color filmmaker, I really don’t want to settle for “Wes”.
And it’s not so much the issue of being perfect, there seems to be a deliberate (conscious or subconscious) exclusion of people of color (women of color) when it comes to his screen writing.
Al
October 17, 2007 at 6:37 pm