14. Wes Anderson Explores His Daddy Issues
On the surface, all of Wes Anderson's father figures are rather charming, none more so than in his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, starring a never-slicker Ralph Fiennes as the silver-tongued concierge Gustave H. Unfortunately, that surface is inevitably paper-thin and the charm never survives a perfunctory squint that reveals each man is as self-obsessed, self-serving and self-indulgent an individual as conceivably possible. It would be no surprise to learn that The Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson had a dysfunctional family growing up - that's what all of his films are really about; the families we're stuck with and the families we make, as messy as both are - but it's more often and not the older men in the cast who take top billing and the biggest chunk of screentime, which suggests that Anderson has some unfinished business with his own dad, hugely affected by his parents' divorce as a young child. Let's run the figures down: there's James Caan's initially fatherly but ultimately conniving criminal in Bottle Rocket; Bill Murray's romantic rival-turned best friend to Jason Schwartzman's precocious high schooler in Rushmore; there are three father figures in The Royal Tenenbaums - Gene Hackman & Danny Glover's biological fathers and Bill Murray's surrogate daddy to Hackman's screen daughter Gwyneth Paltrow; the titular arrogant oceanographer (again Bill Murray) in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou; a father conspicuous by his absence from The Darjeeling Limited, the road (well, tracks really) film about three brothers on a journey of self-discovery a year after his death; George Clooney's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a Royal Tenenbaum stand-in by way of whimsical anthropomorphism; the many surrogates of Moonrise Kingdom, from Ed Norton's well-meaning scout troop leader to Bruce Willis' desperate, sensitive sheriff and (yet again) Bill Murray as kind of an a-hole dad; and, of course, Fiennes' Gustave, who fails to be a father to his charge Zero on a number of occasions until he gets his act together and teaches him how to be a man. In reality, it's probably the other way around in almost every film.