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Then, the air came out of the tires. Released in 2004, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou cost $60 million and took in $24 million. The more modestly budgeted Darjeeling Limited grossed $12 million in 2007, $5 million less than Rushmore. These were commercial failures, sure, but the critics were also starting to pile on. Phrases like "too precious," "cloying" and "detached" popped up more and more in Anderson's reviews.
In one case of hipster cannibalization, The Hipster Handbook author Robert Lanham, writing for the ubercool Viceland Web site, said of The Life Aquatic: "Wes Anderson doesn't make movies anymore. He creates overly precious paintings inhabited by emasculated man-children who knit sweater vests to the accompaniment of Belle & Sebastian while fantasizing that they're macho enough to skin a caribou with a pocketknife. The set pieces to The Life Aquatic are stunning, but watching this film is like visiting the Natural History Museum. It's a beautiful building, but most of its pleasures are filled with lifeless things."
More ominously, and more irresponsibly, Slate pop critic Jonah Weiner came just short of calling Anderson a racist after the release of The Darjeeling Limited. "Wes Anderson situates his art squarely in a world of whiteness: privileged, bookish, prudish, woebegone, tennis-playing, Kinks-scored, fusty," he wrote. "He's wise enough to make fun of it here and there, but in the end, there's something enamored and uncritical about his attitude toward the gaffes, crises, prejudices and insularities of those he portrays. In The Darjeeling Limited, he burrows even further into this world, even (especially?) as the story line promises an exotic escape. Hands down, it's his most obnoxious movie yet."
It's hard to say why the criticism became so vitriolic or why audiences stopped going to his movies. One catches a whiff of schadenfreude for the wunderkind who could be seen on TV around the time of Life Aquatic paying homage to Truffaut while also lampooning himself and all directors in a hilarious American Express commercial. It's almost like someone in charge couldn't wait to serve Anderson his comeuppance for being given too much too soon. It probably didn't help that Martin Scorsese had singled Anderson out as the next Martin Scorsese in an Esquire article published after Rushmore came out.
Anderson admits he was a little taken aback by the failure of The Life Aquatic — his biggest and most beautiful film, brimming with mirth, mischief, and longing. It's also the most metaphysical of Anderson films, ending on a scene in which the mysteries of nature — symbolized by the heretofore mythological jaguar shark — swallow whole the existential angst and self-absorption of team Zissou, replacing them with a transcendent awe.
"When it came out, it seemed like it just sank and I didn't really know what to make of it because I kind of thought, Well, this is like a seagoing adventure, this ought to have an audience," he says. "But, stepping back, it's kind of a big, very odd ... not deliberately odd ... I don't know what movie to say it is like. It's just sort of its own thing. Maybe if it came out 20 years earlier in a different environment, it would have been fine ... in a time when MASH is a huge hit, where a movie can be released on one screen and play for three weeks and then it can move to another place and play for a year and people can process it in a different way."
Anderson also concedes that some of the recent criticism has gotten into his head. "I think certain criticisms that I've heard about myself repeatedly start to linger," he says, looking out the window, almost embarrassed for exposing himself in this way. "The things that I think about are whether or not I'm telling the same kind of family stories and whether these movies are so meticulously art-directed or organized that people can't get into the story. I feel like with Darjeeling Limited, I got a lot of people saying I was repeating certain things. But for me, I was doing a movie in India about these three brothers and those things are different. I mean, it's in India. It's a completely different movie.
"In the end, I just do whatever I do, probably," he says.
In some ways, Fantastic Mr. Fox can be seen as a referendum on what Anderson does. As with Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, goodwill toward the source material isn't in question. And it's unlikely that studios will continue to fork over Life Aquatic- or Fox-size budgets to Anderson without some evidence he can pay them off.
To his credit, Anderson hasn't let the pressure of dealing with either a sacred text or his recent track record cow him: Fox is a Wes Anderson movie through and through, despite the curious absence of the director's name from distributor 20th Century Fox's early marketing campaign. In fact, it might be the most Anderson movie to date, seeing as he designed every aspect of it from scratch, including the vulpine principals and their coalition of furry friends. To say the movie is meticulously art-directed is an understatement. In many ways, it is art direction.
"I liked the idea of just doing a movie where we could build the whole movie, and working in miniatures is kind of interesting because, in a live-action movie, you're not designing somebody's face and you're rarely designing a tree, you know?" Anderson says. "That was something that appealed to me. Building landscapes and things like that."
