During his past decade or so of directing, Wes Anderson has done his darnedest to make audiences forget he’s an American. His most recent films have been set in elaborately imagined fictional versions of Budapest (2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel), Japan (2018’s Isle of Dogs), and France (2021’s The French Dispatch). Anderson has even adopted the lifestyle of an expatriate; born and raised in Texas, the 54-year-old filmmaker has long considered Paris his base of operations.
None of this would matter were it not for the fact that Anderson’s best films always reflected where he was from rather than where he was going. Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998) not only took place in the Lone Star State but savored the tiny emblems of the American way of life, like science fairs and firecrackers, and relished a wide variety of distinctively American types—from Owen Wilson’s hard-charging would-be con in Bottle Rocket to Jason Schwartzman’s resourceful high-schooler and Bill Murray’s midlife-crisis-addled businessman in Rushmore.
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