The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (9 page)

But, even in 1958, Anderson seemed torn between irritation with
Cahiers
and the recognition that it had taken a rewarding path, above all in the way it led to actual, and marvelous, films: “Here you have a magazine like
Cahiers du Cinéma
, terribly erratic and over-personal in its criticism, which has been enraging us all for the last five years. But the great compensation is that its writers make films, that three or four of its critics are now making films independently. And this means that they have a kind of vitality which is perhaps finally more important than critical balance.” That comes from a
Sight and Sound
discussion with Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, and Penelope Houston in which Anderson alone seems disturbed by English inertia. Those films he saw coming made Free Cinema—the hopeful blanket description of British documentary in the mid-1950s—look dreadfully insipid.

In fact, Anderson worked in TV and began to direct for the theatre. His first feature,
This Sporting Life
, was from a novel by David Storey and still smacked of Free Cinema in its flashy use of tenements, pubs, and rugby league. But the dogged boorishness of its subject, epitomized in the inescapable presence of Richard Harris, gave it a sad, plodding feeling in place of the sheer working-class tragedy to which it aspired.

In the 1960s, Anderson was more heavily involved in the theatre than in films.
The White Bus
was broken by production problems, and
The Singing Lesson
showed Anderson’s rather forlorn resort to East Europe as an artistic influence. Indeed, Milos Forman owns up to a large debt to Anderson’s encouragement.
If …
, in 1968, and for Paramount, was a real film, rooted in a world and feelings that Anderson knew, but alight with ideas and passions that would not have shamed Vigo. Its ending is bleakly and helplessly destructive (as if Anderson now was disenchanted with politics), but
If …
makes other English school films look halfhearted. It is pungent, sexy, socially accurate, funny, and exciting—what a film for a young man to have made.
O Lucky Man!
, though, is something an older man hopes to forget.

Anderson remained his own man: despite the geriatric delicacies of
The Whales of August
(nothing else had ever shown him as such a softy),
Britannia Hospital
was a rowdy satire on bureaucracy, while
Glory! Glory!
tore TV evangelism limb from limb with Swiftian vengeance.

His death prompted revelations—of gay urgings, his own difficulty and frustration—all wonderfully covered in Gavin Lambert’s biography,
Mainly About Lindsay Anderson
.

Paul Thomas Anderson
, b. Los Angeles, 1970
1997:
Hard Eight
. 1998:
Boogie Nights
. 1999:
Magnolia
. 2002:
Punch-Drunk Love
. 2007:
There Will Be Blood
.

There were stories when
Magnolia
opened that Paul Thomas Anderson was upset at the way New Line were advertising his picture. The press ads for the picture were scarcely legible, let alone enticing—so Anderson had a point. Equally, New Line seemed to be so much in awe of their young director that they were ready to accept his suggestions. Yet, truly, how would you do a poster for
Magnolia?
How would you begin to convey the feeling and form of the picture? Would you bother to ask the question why it is called
Magnolia?
Would you let yourself ask, are posters the proper way to offer great movies?

Such awkward questions could accumulate in Hollywood marketing offices, which have so little time or practice with the crosscutting ironies and countervailing doubts that obsess Anderson and are the energy in his films. He was, before reaching thirty, a cult figure, profiled in the
New York Times Magazine
, and hardly bothered to muffle his youthful arrogance. He knows it all, you can hear some saying, except how to get a hit. And among the things he knows is the serpentine idea of a road that binds a city, and the necessary affront of a surreal accident like the frogs in
Magnolia
. (At least Robert Altman—one of Anderson’s models—used a plausible earthquake as his device in
Short Cuts.
) I like nearly everything about Anderson except the stances he seems bound to take up as self-defense, and the wilful arbitrariness of his work. For wilfulness in Hollywood is sooner or later interpreted as a challenge—no matter that no one his age can create such complex scenes, or build them into such ravishing patterns. I stress the latter because Anderson seems one of the relatively few new directors inspired by ideas in editing.

It is also the case that anyone as good and smart as Anderson should be more perceptibly self-critical. In fact,
Magnolia
is his most youthful and indulgent film—and
Hard Eight
, his best and most austere. But there are poetic mysteries in the first film that come closer to pretension in
Magnolia
. In other words, Anderson is not handling himself well. He is drawing fire upon his own vulnerabilities. But is there any other way?

No other American director working today has such sad, tender, and smart ways of looking into the depths of society, or for feeling out their poignant juxtapositions. He writes great, ragged speeches, and he is like a fond parent with his family of actors. All his three films so far have used John Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Philip Baker Hall. In addition, he has done remarkable things with such diverse figures as Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, and Burt Reynolds. His way of blessing actors is so very close to his wish to rescue people from their drabness. Sooner or later, it will be perceived how desperately concerned he is about the society called America.

Of course,
Magnolia
is like
Short Cuts
in that both films are symphonies attempting to take in everything. They have the ambition of an Ives, say, who could hardly get his work played, let alone make it popular. Altman has learned cunning ways of making that ambition into a career. But he is older, and far less kind. Anderson’s energy and aspirations are destined to collide with Hollywood thinking, and he may be too young and too good to learn subterfuge. If he is as good as he thinks he is (and I think he is), there are bloody battles to come. But no one has a better chance of offering us new narrative forms for our movies.

In advance, there were very few coherent ideas as to what
There Will Be Blood
was or was trying to be. And on first viewing, it was not easy to grasp just how audacious the film was. It was alleged to be a version of Upton Sinclair’s novel
Oil!
, and there was a sense of the desert geology being carved up by antlike men that was both epic and comic, and which reminded one of
Greed
more than
Giant
. It was a parable about capitalism, piracy, and initiative, and it was in that breadth that some people saw and felt a genuine extension of
Citizen Kane
, in the sense that it was a film about how America was made. The film had its crazy aspect, and an unwavering interest in nobility. It was very hard to think of another picture that had so caught the recklessness of the later nineteenth century and the ghastly awareness of the loss of God or gods. It was a great film and the plain impact of a major director, even in the brief history of a very threatened medium.

Wes
(Wesley)
Anderson
, b. Houston, Texas, 1969
1994:
Bottle Rocket
(s). 1996:
Bottle Rocket
. 1998:
Rushmore
. 2001:
The Royal Tenenbaums
. 2004:
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
. 2007:
The Darjeeling Limited; Hotel Chevalier
(s). 2009:
Fantastic Mr. Fox
.

In the last edition of this book (in advance of
The Life Aquatic
), under Wes Anderson, I wrote, “Watch this space. What does that mean? That he might be something one day.” What I meant to say was that Wes Anderson seemed to me enormously promising, if not yet clarified. Why should he be at thirty-five, you ask? Very well, but how long does he need? If pushed further, I would have said then that
Rushmore
was one of the best films about high-school-age kids (though its school is a private place in Texas such as Anderson himself attended). I liked it very much but felt already that
The Royal Tenenbaums
had a kind of whimsical pretension that can mark and beguile a student who has given up on being educated. Thus, the agonies of family dysfunction have been chilled by a kind of visionary novocaine, itself pleasing and very much of the moment, but with one drawback: that the sense of dysfunction (and thus failure) could be reassessed or tamed as mere oddity. I wasn’t quite sure where it was all going—or whether the soulful melancholia was getting too close to self-pity.

In the years since, the Wes Anderson cult has built, along with the sense that he is central to the most valuable young generation America has brought to film in thirty years (one that includes Noah Baumbach—they have collaborated several times), the Coppola children, young actors like Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman—not forgetting older players (like Anjelica Huston and Bill Murray). So far, so good. Watch this space.

Alas,
The Life Aquatic
and
The Darjeeling Limited
did not fill or occupy this space—they lost it. These are two pretty awful films, and I see no reason not to say that. The mealymouthed praise they have had from Anderson loyalists will serve no purpose.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
is a far more effective and old-fashioned film, but one that leaves great doubt about what Anderson wants to do.

So what should we conclude? I think the comparison with Paul Thomas Anderson is a signal. PTA’s films have been odd and disconcerting at times, but overall they leave no doubt about the maker’s sense of trying to make films in a time of immense physical and cultural crisis. By contrast, WA seems to exist at the far end of a very private, isolating corridor.

So watch this space.

Bibi Andersson
(Birgitta Andersson), b. Stockholm, Sweden, 1935
Although Bibi Andersson was married to one director, Kjell Grede—for whom she has never filmed—our impressions of Bibi Andersson have been radically affected by another, to whom she seems to be spiritually committed: Ingmar Bergman. They first worked together when she was only seventeen and appeared in a television commercial for soap directed by Bergman. That effect of scrubbed, cheerful cleanliness took some time to wear off. She trained at the Royal Theatre, Stockholm, from 1954–56, and was already making small appearances in films:
Dum-Bom
(53, Nils Poppe);
En Natt pa Glimmingehus
(54, Torgny Wickman);
Herr Arnes Penngar
(54, Gustaf Molander); a bit part in
Smiles of a Summer Night
(55, Bergman);
Sista Paret Ut
(56, Alf Sjoberg);
Egen Ingang
(56, Hasse Ekman); and
Sommarnoje Sokes
(57, Ekman). She then played the wife in the pair of fairground innocents (the husband being Nils Poppe) who survive the apocalypse in
The Seventh Seal
(57, Bergman).

She offered at this time little more than the vague, childish prettiness that symbolized hope in Bergman’s most pretentious and hollow period. Similarly, in
Wild Strawberries
(57, Bergman), she was one of the young hikers who brings comfort to the dying Isak Borg. In that film, Andersson seemed a lightweight beside the anguished Ingrid Thulin. She was more seriously tested as the prospective mother of an illegitimate child in
So Close to Life
(58, Bergman), but had only a small, repertory part in
The Face
(58, Bergman).

At about this time, she went back to the theatre and made only one film in 1959:
Den Kara Leken
(Kenne Fant). She was the virgin who irritates Satan in
The Devil’s Eye
(60, and one of Bergman’s more playful films). Over the next five years she waited to mature—or so it seems in hindsight: to Yugoslavia for
Nasilje Na Trgu
(61, Alf Kjellin); into a new sexual frankness with
The Mistress
(62, Vilgot Sjoman);
Kort ar Sommaren
(62, Bjarne Henning-Jensen);
On
(64, Sjoberg, not released until 66); one of Bergman’s women in
Now About These Women
(64);
Juninatt
(65, Lars-Erik Liedholm); uselessly to America for
Duel at Diablo
(65, Ralph Nelson).

She needed such a holiday to prepare for one of the most harrowing female roles the screen has presented: Nurse Alma in
Persona
(66, Bergman). That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgment of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and Ullmann arranges Andersson’s hair, it is as if Bergman were saying, “Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.” Alma talks throughout
Persona
but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema.

She was in support, spiky and ill at ease in
A Passion
(69, Bergman), the center of regeneration in
The Touch
(71, Bergman), and in one episode from
Scenes from a Marriage
(73, Bergman).
The Touch
shows that she is the warmest, most free-spirited of Bergman’s women, more broadly compassionate than Thulin or Ullmann. Being more robust, her distress is more moving, and her doggedness more encouraging.