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UNLIKE MANY WRITER-DIRECTORS of his generation, Wes Anderson does not view his characters from some distant Olympus of irony. He stands beside them - or rather, just behind them - cheering them on as they chase their miniaturist renditions of the American Dream. The characters who inhabit Anderson's cinematic universe, a Middle West of the Imagination, embody both sides of William Carlos Williams's famous edict that the pure products of America go crazy-, being, for the most part, both purely American and slightly crazy. Though some might label his people losers, or even invoke that generational curse, slackers, they are in fact ambitious and motivated overreachers, misguided though their energies occasionally are.
Todd Solondz may be the new leader of the arch-irony cult, and therefore the filmmaker seemingly most at odds with Anderson's lighter, nonsatiric touch, but he at least uses his distance to create a shifting matrix of uncertain sympathy and identification. It's filmmakers like Gregg Araki or that ironist old-timer Hal Hartley to whom Anderson is most in opposition. They use an ironic stance to establish their superiority over characters and audience alike. Within their overly referential worlds, the viewer is always left to play catch-up, attempting not only to spot the reference but also digest its "meaning," while characters are reduced to ciphers or signs. In a climate where coolness reigns and nothing matters, the toughest stance to take is one of engagement and empathy. Anderson seems to have accepted the challenge.
Anderson himself seems not so removed from those he portrays, as if his deep affection and sympathy for his characters stems from a glimmer of selfrecognition. Both of his films to date, 1996's Bottle Rocket and the new Rushmore, were shot in areas of his native Texas with which he is intimately familiar, and apparently autobiographical elements are strewn throughout. Rushmore, named after the small, fictitious private school in which it is mostly set, was filmed at the alma mater where Anderson languished through his high school years. Still, this is not to imply that his films are psychodramatic extensions of a therapist's couch. Each is an entertainment of the highest order, with a wit, verve, and sincerity largely absent from the contemporary youth picture.
Young Wes, like Rushmore's Max...