How to ruin a film

Rating: 1/10 (11 March 2013)

This movie is a classic example of how a film which should have been successful was turned into an abject failure. This can all be blamed on Wes Anderson, the director and co-writer. The film has magnificent art direction and production design, and many excellent actors. But the approach is entirely wrong. I have given considerable thought to what exactly must have gone wrong in the execution of this interesting project. The feel I get is that when most of the scenes were shot, the director, and doubtless the crew as well, must have been so convinced that everything was hysterically funny that all they had to do was turn the camera on and the audience would realize that too. But it doesn't happen. The set-ups are too artificial and contrived, the 'hysterically funny material' is taken for granted, and little is done to convince the viewer that he should agree with the director and join in his cosy coterie of admirers and all chuckle and laugh on cue like a group of trained seals. Viewers are not seals, they are people, and they require convincing. Anderson appears to have forgotten that what to him is hysterically funny can be to 'someone out there' merely stilted, contrived, and unfunny, especially when he adopts cutsey mannerisms and coy approaches which only serve to alienate the material even further from even the slightest semblance of reality, making it laughable for all the wrong reasons, by which I mean that the film itself becomes a joke, not that there are jokes in the film. One cannot make a film simply based upon the premise that it is funny, one has to work hard to make it funny by achieving spontaneity, which is the secret of all comedy. Artificiality such as we see in this film is the death, not the birth, of comedy. Comedy is more difficult than tragedy. If nobody cries at a tragedy, that is not the end of the world, but it is fatal if no one laughs at a comedy. Even though the two oddball kids who star in this film were very amusing, and the idea was also amusing, the end result was not. With a decent director, this film might have worked. There are directors around who could have turned it into something magical and delightful. But instead, it is a 'lead balloon' and an ignominious directorial catastrophe. And I really had to force myself to sit through it, which was a terrible ordeal. I felt sorry for the kids, whose efforts were wasted. They obeyed all those instructions to keep poker faces, to stand in unconvincing postures, to look at one another and at others in unnatural and contrived ways and to behave in an overly ridiculous fashion in the pursuit of laughs which are never achieved because they are too false. All this artificiality was to no avail. If even one scene had been allowed to be natural, rather than contrived, there would at least have been a few moments of this film which were enjoyable. If only Woody Allen had been given that budget and that material, it would have worked. But no one has ever given Woody Allen that much money to make a film, and they never will, because he is a genuine artist, and people like Wes Anderson are just empty paper bags full of stale air. That is why Woody Allen never works in Hollywood, in case no one ever noticed.