The Hitch calls it the only thing he's terrified of. Waugh thought it was the mood the worst people on the planet inspired. And for Wes Anderson, boredom was the enemy against which his best film's characters ranged themselves. Stefan writes at my digital shtetl Jewcy on the auteur's debut feature Bottle Rocket, now released in a handsome Criterion Collection DVD:
Bottle Rocket seems to have taught Wes Anderson that there is a market for mannered whimsy, an audience that wants the blueprints for Dignan’s sweet cluelessness, so it can be told, “I could never stay mad at you.” Anderson’s imagination, once working full-bore against boredom, now struggles to fill an insatiable demand for emotional pornography. The most painful thing about Criterion’s new Bottle Rocket is that it includes the black-and-white short on which the movie is based—thirteen minutes that show, like fellow Austinite Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker, what kind of entertainment can be made out of the right kind of boredom.
For Linklater, however, lassitude is the natural state in which twenty- or thirtysomethings have their best conversations and, if they're lucky, fall in love. Anderson's real impetus since Bottle Rocket has been to excavate the supposed charms and idiosyncracies of arrested development; ironically, all of his later characters -- from Max Fisher in Rushmore to the entire Tannenbaum family -- are anything but bored because they haven't got the time. They operate in a frenzy of overachieving hyperactivity.
Texas is the tie that binds Linklater and Anderson. But whereas the former has a style that seems to embody all of that great state's cultural contradictions and ironies (the arty intellectualism of Austin filtered through a relaxed, Midwestern demeanor that suits a protagonist schlepping through Vienna or Paris), the latter has abandoned his roots entirely. Anderson's a New Yorker manque, and I mean that both in the geographic and journalistic sense of the term. He's the wised-up cosmopolitan prodigy that wants badly for Pauline Kael to love him (his introductory essay for the Rushmore script is in fact exactly about that urge), yet he's lost his authenticity in his move to the big city, even if we're more likely to tolerate his purple velvet suits here.
Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, coming soon to a theatre near you, is the classic boredom-evading novel about a young married couple that quits bohemia for the burbs and soon realizes what a mistake they'd made. Yates was thoroughly epater in his approach, but in Anderson's case, the joke's really on himself: some bildungsromans work better in reverse.
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