fulfilment, something each character struggles with at some point in their own narrative.
Of course, within each of his films, Anderson’s characters have their own strategies for coping without a mentor or parental figure – invariably, they make plans. Intricate, illustrated plans. They might schedule on a day-to-day basis, as Francis does in The Darjeeling Limited; or try and plan for the next 75 years, as Dignan does in Bottle Rocket. For all the maps, lists and itineraries we see on screen across his films, we can at least get the sense that Anderson’s characters are really, truly trying to figure things out. But simply having a plan and instructions in place doesn’t mean they will be observed. As Francis discovers in The Darjeeling Limited, when attempting to spontaneously destroy the itinerary for trip to India that has been painstakingly prepared, and then laminated, by his assistant Brendan, it’s best not to set anything in stone – or plastic – in a Wes Anderson film.
It’s just as well for Anderson’s characters that their surroundings reveal as much about them as their (thwarted or misdirected) actions. His physical locations are often presented in a highly-stylised way, though rarely just for appearances’ sake. When
first presenting Steve Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte, in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and the Bishop house in the opening scene of Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson divides each space into many small components or compartments, before his camera slowly pans through each location, allowing us to process the space and all its relevant details (sometimes highlighted by an on-screen caption, or by a narrator).
While this presentation of the space ties in with the living dollhouse aesthetic that complements Anderson’s presentation of his characters as characters, as figures acting in a staged, constructed narrative, it can also be extremely effective in communicating the film’s theme to the audience. The framing of the two Bishop spouses in separate doorframes in separate rooms neatly highlights their estrangement, both physical and emotional, from each other; an idea compounded later on when they are seen lying next to each other in separate beds, in mismatched bedclothes. Similarly, the author-narrator of The Grand Budapest Hotel astutely notes in tandem with a grand overhead shot of the sparsely-populated dining hall that the guests of the titular hotel, during his time there in the 1960s, were ‘without exception, solitary.’
Given his fondness for this kind of itemised, knolling presentation, Anderson’s use of trains, cable cars, and funiculars as modes of transportation, as featured in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited, is a natural and inspired choice. Train carriages are, of course, compartmentalised and allow for the filmmaker to include a lot of detail in a compact, Polly Pocket-style space, in keeping with his visual style. To take it further, a carriage on rails or cables represents a level of formal control, or at least, a desire for it – what better way for characters to stay on track than by placing them on tracks? But even narratively, that control is lost on the two occasions the train is stopped in The Grand Budapest Hotel, with violent, even fatal results; as well as in The Darjeeling Limited when the Whitman brothers wake to discover that overnight, the titular train ‘got lost’. Francis excitedly responds to the conductor’s comment that ‘we haven’t located ourselves yet’ as a metaphor for the brothers’ spiritual journey across India; a declaration that actually works to diagnose a pretty high proportion of Anderson’s characters.
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