Every Wes Anderson film is about grief and loss — about the unrecoverable loss of a parent, a child, a sibling, a lover and so on, and even more than that about the loss of childhood itself and the inevitable heartbreak that occurs within families, either the ones we are born into or the ones we gather or accumulate around us. I don't know what specific losses may have occurred in Anderson's life, but nothing could possibly be a more universal human experience. For a director who is sometimes lazily understood as being uninterested in human emotion, or only able to approach it through ironic artifice, the consistency of his tragic vision is remarkable. Superficially, Anderson could hardly be more different from Yasujiro Ozu, the rigorous Japanese master filmmaker who famously observed that the relationship between parents and children is the first act of the human tragedy — but I think they are much closer in sensibility than the outermost signals would suggest.
Wes Anderson emerged from the pandemic and decided he was going to make an arthouse movie, goddammit, and undoubtedly it's not for everyone, blah blah blah.
