Wes Anderson’s Summer Palette

Summer is the perfect time for coming-of-age in cinema. Life’s practicalities are on pause, and in that liminal space is an opportunity for characters to embark on journeys of self-discovery and rebirth, sharpened under the heat of the sun. Wes Anderson has played with different seasonal palettes throughout his career, but the 56-year-old director is always interested in coming-of-age—at any age. The symmetry and intricacies of his visual style are not just decorative; more often than not, Anderson is looking for inventive ways to reflect the growing and changing inner worlds of his protagonists.

The cold of winter hangs over The Grand Budapest Hotel, while Fantastic Mr Fox provides autumnal delights—but in the films below, Anderson’s characters bake in the sun, which disinfects their souls and drives them towards transformation. True to the director’s oeuvre, the summer season is depicted with visual splendour, but the hot weather also finds him at his most contemplative and melancholic.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)

Anderson shot his critically maligned, since re-appraised, follow-up to The Royal Tenenbaums along the Italian coastline, making the most of how the location’s warm hues contrast with the irritable nature of the titular character, played by Bill Murray. Oceanographer Steve Zissou is a trademark Andersonian dad, eager to blame others for his failings—the estrangement of his ex-wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), the success of his rival Alistair Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum)—and slow to confront his inner pain.

Like any good summertime film, The Life Aquatic is interested in how characters change in liminal spaces—in this case, what happens when people are literally out at sea, confronted with their own mortality and foibles away from the stability of land. Zissou hunts down a fabled shark that killed his best friend, Esteban, joined on his journey by a reporter (Cate Blanchett), his potential long-lost son (Owen Wilson) and his German first mate (Willem Dafoe). Along the way, each character forces Zissou to confront his inner resentments and take responsibility for himself. On release, some critics found Anderson’s deadpan scripting too emotionally rigid, but as Zissou’s Moby Dick-esque journey takes him closer to the source of his pain, Murray performs Zissou’s transformation with a surprising tenderness. 

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

The Darjeeling Limited is permeated by the heat of India, through which brothers Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) are travelling on a reunion trip one year after the death of their father. The film matches the emotional beats of any great coming-of-age drama, with each brother facing a personal crisis that they help one other untangle over the course of their journey. Each has put their lives on hold for the trip, but that’s as much about bonding over their father as it is about running away. Francis is recovering from a self-destructive motorcycle crash, Peter has left the side of his heavily pregnant wife and Jack is reeling from heartbreak.

Using India as the backdrop to their journey is part of Anderson’s trademark playfulness, with the director wholly aware of stereotypes of Westerners who travel there. The three brothers expect enlightenment to come easily, but their desperation for this, and a shared blend of selfishness and naivety, holds it at bay. When their train runs off course, a fellow passenger tells the brothers they don’t know where they are, saying, “We haven’t located us yet.” Francis yelps and literally asks, “Is that symbolic?”, with a shrillness that indicates he urgently needs it to be.

Of course, it is symbolic, and like any good summer vacation film, the brothers have, in some way, located themselves by the end. That enlightenment arrives in ways they least expect —like a traumatising attempt to rescue young boys from a river, or an illuminating encounter with their mother. As they run for another train at the end, literally shedding their baggage, one can’t help but feel proud of these adult children. Wilson, Brody and Schwartzman tossing suitcases into the hot, dry dust is one of Anderson’s most obvious, but undeniably most cathartic, visual metaphors. The brothers were capable of enlightenment all along; they only needed each other.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

A story of two young souls exploring identity in a world that misunderstands them, Moonrise Kingdom finds Anderson in the perfect genre for his trademark visual symmetry, and his equal-parts whimsical and bittersweet humour. The film is as much about the thrill of possibility in summer, as it is about the pain of its ending—and how this chimes with the strangeness of growing older, and realizing adults aren’t always the smartest people in the room. To that end, Anderson is playfully literal with his symbolism; Suzy (Kara Hayward) lives with three brothers and her mother (Frances McDormand), who she gradually realises is as troubled as she is, in a house called Summer’s End.

On the fictional New England island of New Penzance, Suzy and Sam (Jared Gilman) run away and create their own paradise called Moonrise Kingdom, but are pursued by Sam’s scout group, Suzy’s family and Social Services (played by Tilda Swinton). Sam and Suzy’s adventure is drenched in warm colouring, and Anderson’s zooms and dolly shots imbue the film with a storybook aesthetic, as though viewers are being told a classic, Enid Blyton-esque tale of heroic explorers creating a new world.

But under this facade is the creeping seriousness and violence of the real world, like when Suzy catches glimpses of her mother’s affair through binoculars, or when the Scouts’ dog Snoopy is killed by a stray arrow. Like in any good summer film, the real world eventually catches up with Sam and Suzy, but that initial unfurling of possibility gives way for new selves to emerge. At the end, Sam is seen painting a landscape of Moonrise Kingdom that’s far richer and more detailed than his juvenile sketches from earlier in the film. The fantasy may not have lasted, but at least Sam and Suzy have learned to see the world in colour. 

Asteroid City (2023)

Despite being Anderson’s most overtly sun-drenched film, Asteroid City is doing so with intentional artifice. An ensemble of characters, including grieving widower Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and depressed actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), meet in the fictional desert town of Asteroid City for a youth astronomy convention. They are soon placed under military quarantine when an alien arrives and steals the meteor that gave the town its name. Depicted in rich pastel colours, it’s easy for the audience to lose themselves in this story—even though it’s known from the very beginning that this is actually a play, and the film is interspersed with black-and-white chapters about its creation.

The characters within the play are troubled by their pasts: Augie by the death of his wife, about which he has been unable to tell their children, and Midge who jokes about her substance abuse, which hints at her overwhelming exhaustion with the world. Outside the play, we see Schwartzman and Johannson play Augie and Midge’s respective actors, Jones Hall and Mercedes Ford, who are themselves coming to grips with their characters’ turmoil, and the lines between real and fictional pain begin to blur.

Unlike in Moonrise Kingdom, where the saturated visual palette made for a storybook adventure, in Asteroid City it becomes something more contemplative and melancholic: that the vibrant, colourful fictions we create are more liveable than the real world. With every shot constructed like a vivid diorama, the strict presentation of Asteroid City (the play) suggests humanity’s need to organise in the face of chaos; to tell stories, as Joan Didion famously said, to make sense of the “shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” The film’s most memorable exchange lays this bare, summarising our need to simply follow, with instinct, the narratives we create. “I still don’t understand the play,” Schwartzman says as Hall prepares to play Augie. Adrien Brody’s director responds simply, “doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.” The alternative is unthinkable.