I HAVE a sneaking suspicion that if you rearranged the order in which Wes Anderson’s films have been released-if The Life Aquatic had appeared first, followed by The Royal Tenenbaums and then Rushmore, with his modest debut, Bottle Rocket, tossed off as an aside along the way-the critical consensus on the films might be reversed as well. The conventional wisdom holds that Rushmore was Anderson’s high point, and that he’s been repeating himself ever since to diminishing returns—building the same intricate, hermetic worlds over and over again, populating them with the same actors playing the same sort of talented, eccentric, wildly dysfunctional families, and setting the whole thing to the same sort of quirkierthan-thou, rock-geek soundtrack. But precisely because he’s been repetitious, it’s possible to imagine The Life Aquatic, had it appeared out of nowhere, being hailed as a work of originality and genius-or Rushmore, had it arrived on the heels of several similar exercises, being dismissed as part of a creative rut.
As it happens, I basically concur with the critical consensus, but I tried to keep this thought experiment in the back of my mind while watching The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson’s latest variation on his usual themes-on the theory that the fact that a filmmaker seems to do only one sort of thing doesn’t mean he can’t do it exceptionally well the fourth or seventh time around.
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