The Profoundly Unnecessary Wes Anderson Rankings

Unknowingly, I was exposed to Wes Anderson before I bothered paying attention to who made the movie I was watching, how it related to any of their other movies, what their long-term “project” might be, or what their interests or idiosyncrasies were. I saw Fantastic Mr. Fox on a youth group service trip with my friends, and we all thought it might just be the funniest and cleverest thing we had ever seen. As high school turned into college and I started exploring my passion for movies more, finding yet another piece of Wes’s work was a constant in my experience. With Asteroid City now in theaters, I figured it was the perfect time to dive into “WesWorld”.

His aesthetic choices – an idiosyncratic repetition of camera movements, shot composition, and control over every aspect of the mise-en-scéne that no silly AI could ever truly replicate – are usually the first things that people bring up when discussing his work. Focusing solely on this or considering it his only significant achievement is incredibly reductive (as is the assumption that his only color palette is pastels). His characters have a lot in common – many suffer from forms of arrested development or middle-aged crises and are unsatisfied with what their lives have become and have oddly specific skillsets and interests which they look to give their lives the meaning they lack; this rarely works. Despite experiencing these characters’ lows in real time, his movies often have uplifting endings suggesting that healing is always possible. As time has gone on, his narrative structures have become increasingly more complex and his casts have swelled into grand ensembles, something that speaks to both his position in the industry as one of the few true artists worth working with, and his ability to tell stories about a menagerie of characters that are still fully realized.

He’s come a long way since Bottle Rocket in 1996, but since Martin Scorsese called him the next Martin Scorsese, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that none of his movies are bad.

11. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

This movie, Anderson’s most spare but perhaps the one that he would consider his most personal, feels his most thin. His typical style of deadpan, in the wake of the extremely dry Life Aquatic, doesn’t seem to service the material well here, and the incompleteness, though certainly not emptiness, of the movie’s ideas about cultural appropriation, grief, or self-identity just doesn’t all come together as well as his best work. That said, this film contains some hilarious sequences, pathos, and very strong acting; the worst Wes is still Wes.

10. Bottle Rocket (1996)

Wes’ debut feature is quite a treat to revisit, as you can see his early calling cards in both character and style but is a successful film. Frustrated ambition, as well as delusion responsible for that ambition, colors nearly every character in this story. This movie was also a huge debut for the Wilson brothers, and they each give excellent performances. Luke Wilson gives a performance that’s comedic, yes, but also full of such repression and quiet torment while Owen Wilson is far louder in his borderline-manic desire to escape their small town via “the big heist”. The small scale of this production meets the story material perfectly, and the movie’s exploration of yearning for something greater but not having the skills or mental acuity to achieve more than petty thefts in the most mundane locations is one hell of a subject for a first-time filmmaker to dive headfirst into.

9. Isle of Dogs (2018)

One consistent throughline of Wes’ work is that you just don’t want to be a pet in his movies, it never turns out well. In this film, he’s answering for any criticism relating to that as well as exploring his interest in Japanese culture and returning to stop-motion animation to create a dystopic vision that’s quite unique. The ensemble of voices he’s able to conjure up here is really something to behold, and he succeeds in following up the ability he showed in The Grand Budapest to deliver compact yet powerful emotional punches to the audiences’ gut, sometimes in the form of a single edit. This film is also an interesting depiction of groups of beings’ inability to communicate with one another yet still ultimately connect and understand each other; all that said, it’s a bit more of a shallow exercise than his most successful stuff.

8. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

If your only memory of this film is its silly idiosyncrasies, such as the crew’s funky uniforms and adorable red hats, the whimsical flourishes of the ship’s production design, the spoofs of documentary (and by extension all) filmmaking, or the stop-motion fictional sea creatures, you might be forgetting that at times this movie is the bitterest that Wes has made. Bill Murray’s self-loathsome, and at times completely loathsome, Steve Zissou is quite the biting portrayal of a post-prime and middle-aged creator who has destroyed most of his personal relationships and is constantly longing for and pushing away human connection. Though I think this all meshes better than in Darjeeling Limited and is a similar reflection of Wes trying to figure out what’s next after Royal Tenenbaums, the film doesn’t always feel complete.

7. Asteroid City (2023)

This is a movie of two efforts, with two different aims. On the one hand, the lampooning of 50’s American jingoistic iconography is as clever as advertised. As the sleepy town falls under government quarantine, Wes flexes his Bottle Rocket muscles once again through conjuring up dry ennui that breeds offbeat but sweet human connection, made all the fresher by our own recent history. He and the terrific ensemble cast sort through grief, parenthood, and alienation (pardon the pun). On the other hand, this is also a beautifully wrought story of the collaborative creative process by nature of the fact that everything that occurs in Asteroid City is a part of a play. The two halves of this story don’t always evenly meet, but they successfully make each other richer and deeper and point to a higher truth that can be hindered, though never stopped, by repressive authorities caught in a panic.

6. The French Dispatch (2021)

This film suffered a lot by being released during COVID, as I think it’s one that got lost in the shuffle that’s worth everyone’s time. Its audacious narrative structure (three anthological tales that are recreations of articles from the eponymous fictional magazine, featuring occasional cutaways to further research on small elements of each story as well as a chronicle of the magazine itself) can be quite daunting. Each story employs a flashback structure as well as both black & white and color filmmaking, unique editing, occasional animation, and more cameo appearances from the entire scope of Wes’ troupe than one could think possible, but every single choice – nay, every single frame – is filled with intent and feeling. That alone should be worth the price of admission, but one more thing worth recommending it is Jeffrey Wright’s incredible performance in the film’s third section.

5. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

This movie is especially notable in Wes’ filmography in retrospect for being when he fully embraced his aesthetic style even though he’s brilliantly capturing a real-ish autumnal New York. Between the costume design of the principal characters and the set design of their house, Wes became the Wes we know today in 2001. Despite his casts growing in both number and star power over the years, he hasn’t told a true ensemble story like this one since; the identity of the main character isn’t clear, though the story is anchored by the last great performance from the all-timer Gene Hackman. That said, the entire ensemble is excellent in this panoramic view of broken former “Gifted Kids” living in the Upper West Side. This remains Wes’ most thematically mature movie, as the characters here fall to the lowest lows of any character in his stories, but that means that the real moments of connection are even more profound.

4. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Children who want to be adults upend the lives of adults who are awful childish in Wes’s beautifully photographed slice of mid-60’s Americana that evokes the work of Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper, and those postcards lying around Grandma’s beach house. This movie is punctuated by the whimsy everyone associated with Wes, but there is real weight creeping at the margins of the frame surrounding our two preteen lovers and how they behave, though ultimately this fable’s happy end is among Anderson’s most touching. I don’t much care for the climax of the film, but the first hour, closing images, and exploration of longing between misfit kids and grown-ups are just wonderful. The best performance of the film, for me at least, is the one Bruce Willis gives; Looper isn’t the only 2012 film where he gives a still and pathos-laden effort to save his younger self.

3. Rushmore (1998)

This might just be Wes’ boldest film, with Jason Schwartzmann’s Max Fischer occasionally drifting towards sociopathy in pursuit of his goals; if this character is a representation of Wes himself in his sophomore feature, it’s quite the self-effacing one. There are noticeable airs of The Graduate at work here, but it’s not Olivia Williams’ Ms. Cross (the object of Max’s desires) who essentially plays the jaded, depressed, and tragicomic Mrs. Robinson as a counterpart to the precocious and lost youngster, but it’s Bill Murray’s Herman Blume a full 5 years before he would tread similar ground in Lost In Translation. For only his second film, Anderson shows a remarkable amount of maturity in chronicling the mess and ultimate sweet redemption that happens when these broken characters collide, conflict over the same woman, and begin to understand each other through art and patience.

2. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

The fun thing about Wes’ filmography is that I can sandwich a PG, stop-motion kids’ movie in between 2 R-Rated comedies as his three best films and the list still works. I won’t attempt to own the take that this isn’t actually a kids movie or anything like that, but it might be a one that adults appreciate a whole lot more. This movie is at once celebrating, poking fun at, and ultimately embodying the tropes of several genres, including heist films with an over-the-hill protagonist falling back into crime after getting clean and coming-of-age stories filled with romance and jealousy. This is quite an achievement for Wes, despite the cute appearance of the production – the stop-motion animation is seamless, and this film hits all its emotional beats with aplomb. Don’t worry, there’s also plenty of fanciful clever humor; my favorite is the replacing of curse words with a literal “cuss”.

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

I think this is the most complete vision that Wes has ever rendered onscreen, and this movie is also his most funny, charming, and – in the few times it sets out to be – devastating. This movie was hailed by critics upon release and found commercial success for Wes; it also seems to be the most responsible for all those AI or TikTok attempts to recreate his style, probably because his style is operating at its finest and most purely distilled here. Of course, what anybody trying to rip him off will never be able to achieve is the range of feelings he’s able to create, the meticulous level of detail in every frame, and a cast that is universally onboard to enact his vision. They’re spearheaded by an unbelievably excellent Ralph Fiennes, whose snub for an Oscar nomination for playing the inimitable M. Gustave only gets worse and worse with each passing year. Digging past the pleasurable surface also yields thematic depth, as this movie is ultimately an ode to an extinct world, fascism’s role in hastening its extinction, and how literature is capable of resurrecting what is lost. It’s really something to behold.