Woody Allen once sardonically described the fans of his films as being divided between those who liked the “early, funny ones” and the later, darker pictures. Much the same might be said of another famous WA: Wes Anderson, who has established himself as one of American cinema’s most significant auteurs despite no longer living in the country – he hops between England and France. Like most auteurs, his films are more succèss d’estime than they are succèss de box office, but he has the cream of Hollywood lining up to work with him and commands respect among actors young and old.
Anderson is rightly celebrated – or castigated – as a visual stylist, but he has enormous flair as a screenwriter
Anderson’s visual sensibility is infamous. It is somehow both inimitable and yet widely imitated. Now, a major exhibition – jointly hosted by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London – devoted to this aesthetic has arrived in Britain. For a relatively youthful filmmaker, still only in his mid-50s, it might seem as if this recognition has come too early. But for those devoted aficionados and casual fans alike making their way round the Kensington halls, this will be catnip: an Instagram-friendly fiesta of costumes, sketchbooks, photographs and memorabilia, all complemented by a gift shop that, when I visited, had fans determinedly lining up by the dozen for trinkets being offered at jaw-dropping prices.
Anderson is rightly celebrated – or castigated – as a visual stylist, but he is also capable of enormous flair as a screenwriter. The Grand Budapest Hotel is probably the wittiest original screenplay of the past couple of decades, aided greatly by Ralph Fiennes as its central figure, the pernickety but charismatic maître d’ Monsieur Gustave.
The scripts that Anderson co-wrote with his regular collaborator Owen Wilson for Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums do not come far behind. All three films are given a fair hearing at the exhibition, with a fine collection of costumes, objets d’art and production-design pieces. If you wanted to see a scale model of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the props of Jeff Goldblum’s severed fingers or the 1920s photographs that inspired the aesthetic of Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer in Rushmore, this show will be nirvana.
The problem, however, is that a mid-career retrospective of any director means that it is impossible to make value judgments without making the exhibition feel lopsided. In fact, it is strange that Anderson’s last, disappointing pictures Asteroid City and The Phoenician Scheme are given considerably more attention and space than The Grand Budapest Hotel or Tenenbaums, just as it is a frustration that there is never any empirical sense of why Anderson’s films have, or haven’t, worked. Nobody would seriously argue that The Darjeeling Limited, his inadvertently patronizing picture about Americans going native in India, is a cinematic classic, and yet it is treated as a masterpiece. Anyone unacquainted with the Anderson oeuvre would be forgiven for viewing it as little less than a modern-day version of A Passage to India. First class, naturally.
Unusually, the exhibition’s accompanying catalog is well worth the $50 because it contains invaluable interviews with the actors, crew members and co-conspirators who have worked with Anderson. You don’t need to read between the lines to understand that he’s a control freak. The director is someone who gives line readings to actors not just in intonation and stress, but in tone of delivery, and who views their precise position in frame as just as important as the way they move their faces.
This is a richly revealing show about one of Hollywood’s least comprehensible figures
Many have rebelled against this form of micromanagement, not least Gene Hackman, who gave one of his greatest performances as the sketchy patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums while fighting against his director every step of the way. Anderson made it sound subsequently as if his star was unfair and bullying. But reading in the catalogue about this demonstration of Leni Riefenstahl-level dictatorship, you can hardly blame Hackman, an actor who will be remembered as long as cinema exists, for fighting back. And even Fiennes, who was happy to work with his director, dug his heels in for a key scene in The Grand Budapest Hotel and refused to go through Anderson’s prescribed list of tics and movements. The results were unforgettable.
Wes Anderson: The Archives is a richly entertaining and revealing show about one of Hollywood’s least comprehensible figures. We are not talking about Terrence Malick here, a visual stylist par excellence who has always lacked a decent screenwriter, or a Spielberg or Nolan, visionary filmmakers whose work has occasionally been unfairly scorned by the cognoscenti because it makes too much money. Instead we are discussing a fascinating, somehow unreachable talent whose fiercely loyal clan of A-list collaborators has ensured that his acclaimed but sometimes unprofitable films end up being a stepping stone to the next endeavor.
You leave the show thinking that you’d like to go for a crème de menthe and a chat about Thomas Mann or Stefan Zweig with Anderson. But whether you would like to be his friend, or his collaborator, is another question altogether.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2, 2026 World edition.
Comments