Twee Magazine

Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow in "The Royal Tenenbaums"

We may never see a film version of the Glass Family, the collection of washed-up former child geniuses essayed by J. D. Salinger in a series of stories starting with 1948's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." But we don't really need to, as Wes Anderson provided his own version of the Glass family with his collection of washed-up former child geniuses in "The Royal Tenenbaums."

Salinger isn't the only source for the film, even if he's the most obvious. Anderson has an omnivore's tastes for influences, all increasingly unexpected. There is a cuckolded husband, played by Bill Murray, and he is based on neurologist Oliver Sacks (which is clear in the original script, which gave him Sacks' lisp and English accent). There is an accountant played Danny Glover as a soft-spoken klutz, but with a wardrobe and goatee lifted from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. There is a neighbor who has made a career for himself as an author of speculative Westerns, played by coauthor Owen Wilson, and he is, in Anderson's words, a "Cormac McCarthy knockoff."

There's an element of collage to the film, as though the whole of the film were pieced together from back issues of "The New Yorker"; unsurprising, as Anderson apparently owns every issue of the publication. And there's an element of the film that displays Anderson and Wilson's obsessive interest in film: The story itself, about a once-great family in decline, owes as much to Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" as it does Salinger. The role of the film's callow and accidentally cruel patriarch, the tough-talking bon vivant Royal Tenenbaum, was written for 70s film superstar Gene Hackman over the actor's own objections. The film borrows from Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Pierre Melville's film "Les Enfants Terrible." With "Tenenbaums," Anderson revealed himself to be as much a cinematic magpie as Quentin Tarantino, drawing from sources just as broad-ranging; there's even a line of dialogue in the film that borrows from "Witness."

Tarantino's and Anderson's films end up packaging these influences very differently: Tarantino is self-consciously cool, and he has wound up being a great legitimizer of genre films, while Anderson is self-consciously twee, even if he wouldn't use that word, and his sources come squarely from the American middlebrow. This is not meant as a criticism, by the way -- Anderson uses these shared touchstones of American good taste to tell stories of people behaving badly and falling apart in the process. Anderson's characters tend to be damaged, and the exquisiteness of their environment serves to highlight their pain. And while his films often seem set in a world of privilege, this was the first movie of his featuring lead characters who were undeniably privileged. Max Fischer, the main character in "Rushmore," was the striving child of a working-class single father, and Owen Wilson's character in this film has a similar story. He seems to have been raised by his grandmother, attended a Catholic boys school, and has taken aim at the rich kids, as Fischer was instructed to do.

But the Tenenbaums are the film's main characters. There is disgraced former lawyer Royal, alienated from his family, whose mixture of masculine dandiness and old-timey tough guy phrases make him a precursor to "Grand Budapest Hotel's" M. Gustave. There is his never-divorced wife Etheline who, like Anderson's own mother, became an architect after her marriage fell apart, and has raised her children to be geniuses; she is played with understated elegance by Anjelica Huston. There is eldest son Chas, played by Ben Stiller, who displayed an early knack for finance and a later inability to deal with family tragedy.  There is middle child Margot Tenenbaum, who was adopted and never allowed to forget the fact, and had a brief career as a playwright and an adult career as a secret adulterer; she is played with black rimmed eyes and fur coat by Gwyneth Paltrow. And there is youngest son Richie, played by Luke Wilson, who was his father's favorite and briefly a tennis pro, but who has a long unrequited love for Margot that caused him to melt down mid-tennis match.

As with "Rushmore," these characters are all slightly exaggerated and slightly caricatured. All wear signature costumes and grew up in rooms that seem more like stage sets than actual residences. But, as with "Rushmore," these facts allow Anderson and his artistic staff to load the film with telling details. There is, as an example, an unexpected triangle between Etheline, Margot, and Owen Wilson's western author, Eli Cash. And it's not just that Margot is having an affair with Eli, nor that Eli has sent Etheline grades and newspaper clipping for years like she was his surrogate mother. It's also that all three have a fascination with so-called primitive cultures. When we first meet Eli as a boy, he is wearing Apache warpaint, a motif that will recur throughout the film. Margot, in the meanwhile, has a childhood room painted with a faux-African masks and repeatedly writes plays set in jungles. And Etheline has an office filled with woodcuts of various tribesmen, which seems like it would interest an anthropologist rather than an archeologist.

Each has explored this interest in non-European cultures in different ways. Before the start of the film, Margot was something of a sexual tourist around the world, while, during the film, Eli is engaged in exploring the world's drugs, smoking opium from a Chinese pipe, eating South American mescaline, and buying cocaine from Egyptians. (In one of the film's subtlest nods, he also has a taste for porn that features nonwhite actors.) And all three, in their own way, are interlopers into the world of the Tenenbaums: Etheline married into it, Margot was adopted into it, and Eli seems to be trying to screw his way in.

The Tenenbaum brothers, in the meanwhile, couldn't be less similar. Royal describes himself as half-Jewish, half-Irish, and Chas seems to have gotten all the Jewish (he even names his sons Ari and Uzi) while Richie wound up with all the Irish. Chas has a lonely childhood of crunching numbers, represented, sadly, by the presence of a bunk bed in his childhood room -- it's never clear who the other bunk was meant for, perhaps to share with Richie, perhaps to share with a friend, but it is clear that one bunk went unused. In the meanwhile, Richie was a successful jock who wanted more -- he's always shown reading atlases, chatting on a HAM radio, and painting childish images of Margot, which he carefully hangs around the house.

The film is packed with details, and it could take forever to unravel them, and, as with "Rushmore," it causes the film to deepen with each viewing. I don't know what to say about the fact that Richie attempts suicide, and this is sandwiched between songs by Elliot Smith, who would later kill himself, and Nick Drake, who already had, but it provides the scene with an undeniable melancholy. I likewise don't know what to say about the fact that at the moment of Royal's greatest rejection by his family, over his shoulder is one of Richie's childhood paintings, but it is not of Margot. It is of Richie, as a child, surrounded by tennis awards, with Royal seated behind him. 

In general, these small details contribute to a larger story, and it is one in which the very things that made the Tenenbaum children remarkable are the things that now represent betrayal, and each has retreated into something else, something they also did as children that wasn't tainted by grief. Richie stopped playing tennis -- literally during a tennis match, sitting down and weeping while staring at Margot and her new husband, the neurologist played by Bill Murray. And so he travels, setting out on a tour boat. Margot continued to write plays for a while, many detailing her sexual obsessiveness, but eventually that faded and was replaced by her history of running away, which eventually simply became a practice of sexual infidelity and extreme secrecy. (There is an extremely subtle example of this, in a long flashback sequence, when we discover in a flash that she had slept with a television newsman; we see him interviewing Eli Cash at another point in the film.) And while Chas never stopped being an obsessive businessman, he used it to destroy his father, repeatedly suing him, getting him disbarred, and eventually sending him to prison for a stretch. Chas had a second hobby, exercising, and it is hinted that he is now engaging in this obsessively, and forcing his sons to as well.

The physical details of the film, as splendid and theatrical as they seem, constantly reinforce this story, and it is a remarkably melancholy one, even though it is one in which an old man seeks redemption and his suicidal son helps him find it. It's not just that Margot and Chas both have closets filled with identical clothes (blazers and ties for Chas, striped country club dresses by Lacoste for Margot), it's that Margot's closet also contains costumes from a play she did as a child that was shrugged off by her father in an especially ungenerous move. It's not just that Margot's room has a library full of bookshelves; it's that she has multiple locks on her door, but leaves her windows unlocked for lovers. (And that Richie knows about the window, and is unexpectedly practiced at climbing in.) It's not that Richie gives up his bedroom for his father, who is feigning a fatal illness, but that Richie moves into a tent in the ballroom, and sleeps on the same sleeping bag he had used to run away with Margot when they were children

For fans of Anderson, "Tenenbaums" represents the end of one era of  Anderson's filmmaking and a segue into a new era. This would be the last film he would make with Luke Wilson and the last film he would write with Owen Wilson. This is the first film to feature Anjelica Huston, who would be featured in Anderson's next two films, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and "The Darjeeling Limited," which are sort of grouped together as being Anderson's second period films. For a lot of filmgoers, this second period was one of increased whimsy, but lacked the emotional depth of Anderson's early films, especially "Rushmore" and "Tenenbaums."

And there's no doubt that Anderson's films changed after this, and a lot of it was due to the absence of Owen Wilson as a writer. It's hard to know precisely what Wilson was responsible for in any of these scripts, but Anderson's movies would lose the really off-the-wall spaciness of his early pieces, such as Eli Cash's improbable cowboy lifestyle. There's also some marvelously ambiguous lines of dialogue that may or may not have been authored by Wilson, but, with his absence, seem to disappear, such as Dignan declaring that he can't get caught because he's innocent, or Richie, in this film, declaring "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow" and then immediately slashing his wrists. It's not always clear what was lost when Wilson stopped contributing to the scripts, but something is lost, and it's hard not to watch the next two films without feeling that loss.

But for those who think that Anderson's movies somehow became less melancholy or less heartfelt -- well, the next two films have plenty of both.

"Rushmore": There may be a ghost in this image.

"Rushmore" was Wes Anderson's second feature-length movie, but the first that felt truly like a Wes Anderson movie, thanks to Anderson and co-author Owen Wilson, inspired by the writing of Roald Dahl, setting the movie in a slightly heightened reality. "Rushmore" is still fondly remembered, and is a frequent fan favorite.

The film would also begin a long series of collaborations, including 17-year-old Jason Schwartzman in the lead role as the precocious but academically challenged Max Fischer. Schwartzman had never acted before, and was instead the drummer and songwriter for a band called Phantom Planet, but he's terrific fun in the film, mannered, smirking, and willing to completely throw himself into whatever the film asks of him, which is plenty. Schwartzman is also from America's most accomplished cinematic family: His mother is Talia Shire, who is, of course, Frances Ford Coppola's sister, and he came recommended by Frances' daughter, Sofia. Anderson would later have a series of fruitful collaborations with Sofia's brother, Roman, who collaborated with him on "The Darjeeling Limited " and "Moonrise Kingdom."

This was also Anderson's first of many films featuring Bill Murray, who liked the script enough to do it for scale and became one of Anderson's biggest supporters, most famously by offering to underwrite an expensive helicopter shot in "Rushmore," but also by appearing in every single subsequent Anderson film, sometimes just as a cameo. And Murray's affection for the filmmaker is understandable: His character, the aging and bitter millionaire Herman Blume, managed to transform Murray from the sorts of jokey manchildren that dominated his early career to the sorts of wounded older men he now specializes in.

"Rushmore" is also, in a lot of ways, the essential text for modern twee cinema. Although the marvelous cinematography by Robert Yeoman (who has lensed almost all of Anderson's films) draws largely from the French New Wave, the film's storyline feels borrowed from mid-20th century prep school movies, the soundtrack is almost entirely British invasion, and the troubled spirit of the movie seems lifted from 1970s films. Anderson was one of the first filmmakers that deliberately referenced filmmakers like Robert Altman, Miloš Forman, and Coppola (there's even a line in "Rushmore," "Couldn't we just let me float by? For old times' sake?, that deliberately borrows from Tessio's death in "The Godfather." (Even more directly, the teenage Max Fischer has a habit of mounting absurdly ambitious films based on 70s films and events, including "Serpico.")

For many, myself included, there was something essentially appealing about the story, in which a child and an adult man go to war with each other over the affections of a woman that rebuffs them both. Additionally, unlike the often cynical films that inspired it, "Rushmore" closes on a third act in which Max Fischer tries to make amends, mostly through small gifts and preposterously oversized gestures. Anderson's heroes, despite their abundant flaws, often earnestly want to be decent, and his films are filled with heartbreaking acts of decency as a result. This fact is the reason why Anderson's was labeled the leader of a movement called "New Sincerity," although it was never really a movement, he wasn't actually the leader, and the term fizzled.

Nonetheless, for all its affectedness, there was a genuine heart beating at the center of "Rushmore." This was undoubtedly informed in part by the fact that the film has a lot of autobiographical touches. It was inspired by Owen Wilson's own experiences of getting kicked out of a prep school and having to relocate to a public school, as well as Anderson's own young adulthood of staging school plays. There are hints of the film's creators throughout, such as Fischer sitting in class reading a newspaper, which Owen Wilson actually did in a playwrighting class he shared with Anderson. The filming location for Rushmore, St. John's School in Houston, Texas, was Anderson's alma mater (and, oddly, the location that acted as the film's public school, Lamar High School, is directly across the street from St. John's.) Anderson and Wilson had extensively mined their own experiences and then enlarged them to slightly cartoonish levels, and then set-dressed and costumed them within an inch of their lives.

The film's meticulous art direction isn't excessive or incidental, although they would contribute to an ongoing criticism that Anderson builds dollhouses instead of making movies. Instead, Anderson seemed to have latched onto an observation offered by French film theorists (and later New Wave filmmakers) that American studio filmmakers hid a lot of narrative details in art direction. It was director's way of introducing additional themes and story elements into films constrained by the studio system, but Anderson seemed to realize that it also gave him the opportunity to tell much of his story visually.

So let me discuss some of the visual elements of "Rushmore" and mention how they contribute to the story. Unlike the rest of the students at Rushmore, Max Fischer insists on wearing his school jacket with its Rushmore patch, which he has additionally decorated with two pins with bees on them, rewards from the school for attendance and punctuality. These pins have become something of a fetish item for fans of the movie -- it is possible to buy replicas of them online, and its no wonder, as they are a marvel of costume design, a marvelous icon in red, black, and gold. But the bees recall the fact that Fischer was the president of the Rushmore Beekeepers, one of the many clubs he belonged to. During Fischer's conflict with Blume, he makes use of these skills to fill Blume's hotel room with bees -- in fact, it is the incident that starts his war with the older man. Later, when he makes up with Blume, he offers him one of the pins as a peacekeeping gesture.

And there is more embedded in this pin. There are two ghosts that haunt the film: Fischer's mother, who died years earlier of cancer, and Edward Appleby, the deceased husband of teacher Rosemary Cross, who is the subject of Fischer's unwanted romantic affections. They aren't ghosts in the traditional sense, but their presence haunts the movie anyway, a source of submerged but occasionally visible pain for both the teacher and the student. Fischer's mother was responsible for Max's entry into the school -- he wrote a play and she submitted it to the prep school, gaining him entry and a scholarship. Fischer makes occasional visits to her grave, and she gave him a portable typewriter inscribed, heartbeakingly, with the words "Bravo, Max!"

Appleby, in the meanwhile, has an entire room of his own, his childhood room, where his widow lives under his awards and photos. (It is Owen Wilson in the photos, by the way.) Appleby drowned, and this is represented by a book by Jacques Cousteau that he gave his wife and she passed on to the school library. But Appleby, who attended Rushmore, is represented in one last way: He founded the Rushmore Beekeepers, and is therefore the source of the bee that now is Rushmore's logo, and is on their pins.

There is one last detail regarding the pins that I especially like, and it is this: Max Fischer is never on time and frequently simply leaves class to do something he is more interested in. There is no way he could have received awards for punctuality and attendance. But Fischer is also skilled at manipulating his teachers and the school administration, and so it is entirely believable that he would have gotten the pins anyway, just because he wanted them. As they would be for audiences, the pins were fetish items for Max Fischer.

I want to mention the Jacques Cousteau book as well. Never mind that it inspired "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou," or that it is one of the first of many books to appear in Anderson's movies. It becomes meaningful to Fischer because he finds a handwritten note in it. And never mind that Anderson loves handwritten notes. These are just the specific form the art direction has taken. It is important because Max Fischer also writes in books: When he first meets Blume, it is at a chapel meeting, when Blume is lecturing the students. Fischer grabs one of the prayer books and jots down excited notes about the lecture.

The subject of Blume's lecture is class. Despite being a millionaire, Blume comes from a troubled past, including a tour of duty in Vietnam. And so he tells the students to take aim at the rich kids, "Get them in the crosshairs. And take them down." Aside from the fact that he is using military metaphors to encourage class war at a prep school, it is a prep school his twin sons attend, and he despises his twin sons. After the lecture, Fischer hurries to Blume to tell him how much he liked the speech -- inadvertently outing himself as one of the poor kids, although he'll spend most of the movie pretending his father is a brain surgeon.

Through Fischer's notes in a book and Rosemary Cross's notes in another, a disastrous (and, for Cross, unwanted) love triangle develops. More than that, they lead to events in the rest of the film: Fischer does take aim at a rich kid, although the kid he chooses in Blume, and Fischer also decides to make one of his oversized gestures to Cross by building her a multi-milllion dollar aquarium. "You think Edward Appleby would've built you one?" he asks Cross. (He's also likely inspired by another visual in the film: Cross has a number of smaller aquariums in her class, and Fischer helps her feed the fish when they first meet.)

Parenthetically, the ghost of Edward Appleby actually does make an appearance in the film, sort of. One of the early shots of Fischer has him in goggles, seated at a go-cart, inspired by a fanous photograph by Jacques Henri Lartigue. Several people in the background rise go-karts around a circle, and one of them is Owen Wilson, the movie's Edward Appleby. And I'll note there are two autobiographical elements in this scene: Firstly, it is no accident that the movie recreates a famous photograph: Owen Wilson's mother is Laura Wilson, herself a professional and rather extraordinary photographer. Secondly, Anderson had a childhood love of go-karts, and he's in one of the other karts in the shot.

I'll leave off here, but I don't really need to, as there are so many additionally visual elements in the movie that communicate a wealth of information about the films story, from the stage curtains that open the various scenes to the Russian fur cap that Fischer wears when he's especially depressed (it's the same one he wore in Rushmore's student UN.) The film is filled with what Guillermo del Toro calls "visual protein," and Anderson would increasingly rely on this to deepen his stories and sometimes provide a counterpoint to the unreliable narration in his film's dialogue.

But this increasing reliance on art design as a storytelling tool is, I think, part of the reason Anderson finds himself often subject to criticism that his films are shallow and obsessed with style. It's very hard to read a film in the same way you would a painting -- viewers don't have the time to luxuriate on small details as they rush by. Or, at least, they don't on first viewing, and most directors can't rely on their audiences to watch films twice, or dozens of times, to catch the nuances embedded in the mis en scene.

I don't know if it's deliberate, but, nonetheless, Anderson's tendency to fill the art design of his films so full of fetish items (at least, to tweer audience members) serves the purpose of encouraging viewers to watch his films repeatedly. We may be doing it as a sort of cinematic version of Pinterest, mentally pinning wallpaper and books and songs and costume elements in order to buy them later. (At least, I am.) But nonetheless, we end up absorbing these nuances, and Anderson's films become richer on each viewing as the secret language hidden in the wallpaper, books, songs, and costume elements reveal themselves.

Luke Wilson, Robert Musgrave, and Owen Wilson in "Bottle Rocket."

There is a third Wilson brother, Andrew, who didn't appear in the "Bottle Rocket" short, but had a hand in it. He had some background in film before "Bottle Rocket" was ever made, including creating a campaign spot for Ross Perot's failed presidential run, and gets occasional credit in print for helping produce the short. He's had his own career in film since, often in small roles, although he limned a marvelously wounded, spacy performance as a coach in the 2009 roller derby film "Whip It." Andrew has appeared in a selection of Wes Anderson's films as well, and I'll mention him when he appears, because it's often in surprising and delightful places.

He has a role in the feature-length "Bottle Rocket," and I'll get to that in just a moment, but I wanted to mention Andrew Wilson upfront because he was part of a small gang that, behind the scenes, had some responsibility for the existence of "Bottle Rocket," and for its transition into Wes Anderson's debut feature. There was also L.M. "Kit" Carson, an actor and screenwriter who had at least one terrific, Texas-themed art film under his vest (the screen adaptation of Sam Shepard's "Paris, Texas") and one terrific, Texas-themed cult film (the delirious, campy "Texas Chainsaw Massacre II").

Carson was acting as a sort of film guru to aspiring Texas filmmakers, and Anderson and Owen Wilson made him, in their words, an adoptive father. He took a shine to their "Bottle Rocket" script, suggested they submit the short to Sundance, and used his industry connections to introduce the pair to two people. There was Polly Platt, a film producer and production designer, and her frequent producing partner James L. Brooks, who boasted an extraordinary resume of television programs that he created or cocreated, including "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Taxi," and "The Simpsons." Brooks liked the short enough to produce the feature-length expansion, locating approximately $7 million, setting Anderson and Wilson up in a Hollywood office to work on rewrites, connecting them with industry professionals, and setting up a distribution deal with Columbia.

And that's it, more or less: The path by which two young men in Texas go on to make a film. "Bottle Rocket" seems to exist in an uncertain place in Anderson's oeuvre -- it received ambivalent reviews, didn't do very well in the box office, but has gone on to develop a cult audience. It introduces a number of themes and stylistic elements that would become Anderson's signature, and also introduced a handful of actors that would become part of Anderson's stable. But it is also the least Wes Anderson-y of his films, featuring a casual eccentricity and a meandering storyline, instead of the increasingly formal oddness and theatrical plotting of his later films.

As a result, the film has its own charms, different from Anderson's later work. The movie really belongs to Owen and Luke Wilson, and I honestly don't think either has ever been better. Owen's expanded version of the aspiring Dignan is a nervy, crew-cutted, nakedly neurotic creation with the inchoate ambition and easy hurt feelings of a 10-year-old. He maps out a five-year plan for a criminal career in a school notebook in carefully crabbed handwriting (actually Anderson's; he would continue to do this in later films). When Dignan is humiliated -- and he often is -- he nearly crawls with discomfort, and it's obvious that Luke Wilson supports Dignan's criminal ambitions merely to keep Dignan from feeling bad about himself.

Luke Wilson, in the meanwhile, plays an unambitious 20-something slacker recovering from a recent emotional crackup -- it's never clearly explained, but one gets the sense that Wilson's character, Anthony, just sort of got sick of his middle class life in Dallas. He's aimless but strong-willed, which is a strange combination, one that frequently causes minor but explosive conflicts with Dignan. Anthony also has a habit of distractedly sketching, and his drawings are childlike, an early version of the art of his later character Richie Tenebaum, who had failed to develop as a painter.

The pair have a third friend, Bob Mapplethorpe, played by Robert Musgrave in an expanded version of the dour hipster he played in the short film. Owen Wilson and Anderson fleshed out his role smartly, making Bob a bullied, hangdog sad sack with a mindlessly vicious older brother named, for no clear reason, Futureman and played by Andrew Wilson. Bob lives in an exquisite Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house (the first of many gorgeous sets used by Anderson), abandoned by their jet-setting parents, where Dignan makes plans for low-rent criminal schemes while all the while planning to cut Bob out. Dignan and Andrew rob Andrew's parents house, and then the three of them rob a bookstore, both in service of demonstrating their criminal competence to a shady, deeply weird landscaper/criminal mastermind named Mr. Henry, played by James Caan.

The robberies are terrific, by the way, shot with genuine verve by Anderson. They'ds hould be inconsequential, netting almost no money -- in fact,  the bookstore manager seems mostly irritated to be bothered by these wanna-be criminals. But Dignan dives into them with a mix of incompetence and high-strung lunacy, at one point putting tape on his nose as a sort of makeshift disguise. "Why would you put tape on your nose?" Bob asks, and Dignan grins back at him. "Exactly!" he answers.

After the robberies, there is a long middle section in a mid-century motel in the middle of the desert, during which Anthony develops a crush on a housekeeper named Inez, played by Lumi Cavazos with a series of subtle, sideways, delighted glances. This romance is simultaneously genuinely charming for the audience and profoundly inconvenient for Dignan. It leads to a little blow up, quickly resolved, and then on to the film's final set piece, a robbery of a cold storage business that goes disastrously wrong.

If the film doesn't feel as Anderson-y as later films would, it may be because it only hints at the stylized production design found in his later work. Characters in Anderson films don't so much wear clothes as they do costumes, but the closest we get in this film is an orange jumpsuit Dignan puts on late in the film and then never takes off. The film does offer occasional cutaways to props -- most significantly, in Anthony's room, when he stops to tidy up an orderly row of tin soldier toys. But these cutaways don't have the bravura that they later would, when they often stop the action of the film, and, as a result, have neither the comic nor the iconic weight they later would.

The film features infrequent uses of pop music, but mostly relies on a lovely score by Mark Mothersbaugh, who would go on to be a frequent collaborator with Anderson. But there aren't the Martin Scorsese-inspired scenes set to oldies music that Anderson would later make terrific use of, sometimes over slow motion, but for a climactic chase at the end of "Bottle Rocket" scored to “2000 Man” by the Rolling Stones. Scorsese himself loved this moment in the film, by the way -- his exact quote was "I love the scene .. for me its a transcendent moment.  And transcendent moments are in short supply these days."

It is transcendent. It's the most Wes Anderson-y moment in the film. Right near the end of "Bottle Rocket," we get the clearest look at the sort of filmmaker Anderson would turn into, and it's joyous, and it's absurd, and it's something you want to see more of.

Owen and Luke Wilson in the "Bottle Rocket" short film.

It's impossible to discuss twee without discussing Wes Anderson, who never makes a move that doesn't invite commentary from all nearby, and that commentary is always "oh, how twee." In fact, IFC once ranked all of Anderson's films in order of twee-ness, placing 2012's "Moonrise Kingdom" at the top, declaring "this movie makes Garden State look like Chinatown."

Anderson has an understandably ambivalent relationship with the word. "Well, it's not annoying," he told the Huffington Post. "It's just, you know, my real honest response is just ... nothing. It's just white noise to me. It's lost all its sting over the years." And it's understandable that the word might once have stung, as it has so often been used to dismiss his films as being style without substance, whimsy without content.

Whatever Anderson feels about the word twee, if, in the future, cultural historians see it as a movement -- and they will -- he will be one of the bigwigs. And so we'll be looking at his complete filmography here on Twee Magazine, starting with the short film "Bottle Rocket," made in 1994 and later remade and expanded to a feature length film which would serve as Anderson's debut.

The "Bottle Rocket" short is episodic, showing a few snippets from the lives of two aspiring but incompetent criminals, played by brothers Owen and Luke Wilson. Anderson had met Owen at a playwrighting class at UT Austin, had cast him in a play he had written, and later the two would be roommates. According to the story, the windows in the apartment would not close, the landlord was not helpful, and so they staged a break-in to apply pressure on the landlord to make their place secure.

The two were tickled enough to write a script -- either full-length or not, depending on who you ask -- about someone burglarizing their own house, which is the first scene in the short and is repeated in the feature film. This was Anderson's first true collaboration with Owen Wilson, who created for himself a character that is as unconventional as his name: Dignan.

Everything Wilson would later be known for is in this role: The spaciness, the neurotic and adenoidal outbursts, the strange charisma. His brother Luke, playing opposite, seems impossibly young, and offers the same sort of beleaguered everyman quality he would bring to later Anderson films. Luke Wilson hasn't been in an Anderson film since "The Royal Tennebaums" in 2001, and it's not clear why, as Wilson continues to use Owen. I can find no evidence of a falling out, and it may just be that the sort of character Luke excels at -- privileged but pained, fratty but lost -- just doesn't have a place in the Anderson universe anymore.

The "Bottle Rocket" short suggests another sort of filmmaker that Wes Anderson might have turned into. His choice of music is less eclectic, drawing mostly from cool jazz standards. Anderson shot the film in high contrast black and white, and there's a hyperactive and pop culture-savvy quality to it that Anderson almost immediately dropped. The film is self-consciously hip, and makes use of a marvelous actor named Robert Musgrave, who seems right for this sort of film.

Musgrave has a hangdog quality and suspicious eyes. He's not a career criminal, precisely, but he's the sort of character you might find in a film about career criminals -- too smart to be caught up in stupid choices, but too unlucky to avoid it, and doomed as a result. He just sort of hangs around the Wilson brothers in this film, regaling them with tales of an illicit pot garden but otherwise treating the brothers -- Owen in particular -- with wariness. His role would be expanded in the feature film, but in this one he seems like a character who dropped in from an early Jim Jarmusch movie.

But if there are points when Anderson seems to be aping the deliberate coolness of other independent filmmakers, there is a lot of the DNA of later Anderson films in this one, and those are the sorts of things that would be expanded upon in the feature film. The Wilson brothers don't just seem youthful in this film, they often seem childlike, making plans the way children might and then arguing over them while playing pinball. When Luke Wilson breaks into his own home, it's a fastidious place with bold wallpaper, and the bedrooms are still that of children, with their toys and school trophies and ribbons carefully displayed.

Additionally, on a soundtrack dominated by Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane, there is "Happiness Is" by Vince Guaraldi from the composer's "Charlie Brown Suite." The world of the Wilsons in "Bottle Rocket" is not far removed from the world of boys, and this is detail that would be highlighted in the feature-length version of the film, which would contrast Luke's troubled movement toward maturity with Owen's childlike fantasies of the world of criminals.

More on that when I review the "Bottle Rocket" film. The short version is available online; watch it below: