A Christmas themed H&M commercial was released recently that follows a most basic holiday story premise—strangers become snowbound in an isolated place, but come together in the end to celebrate Christmas. It is Wes Anderson’s latest directed commercial: “Come Together”. It checks off all the familiar tricks in Anderson’s bag, some of which include: an overachieving professional with his obedient helper, quirky side characters, inexplicable situations played for laughs (especially how they get the Christmas tree). And while it is predictable, it is somewhat required by nature of being an advertisement to lure an audience with familiarity. Anderson cannot get too crazy here, but this brings up an important point for Anderson at this moment in his career.
The style of Wes Anderson is one of the most defined in film history. In an overgeneralization of his style, his past films have followed characters around in kinetic Rube Goldberg motion, which is one of the greatest contributors to the energy they bring and creation for the framework for his humor. Characters are followed around immaculately designed sets that at once create an unreality due in part to their overly symmetric design and color scheme, both of which feel artificial but believable in whatever world Anderson has placed the film in. Character interactions work in mathematical timing: statements made by one character are followed by a jolting comment by another or the use camera space will reveal a character who the others didn’t know was there and is played for laughs. Everything revolves around this “tightness” where a few seconds determines how a particular line of dialogue is received.
That being said, this distinct style lends itself to be able to be picked apart in a line of its components, making it easy to replicate. From SNL skits to student films, others can stitch together pieces of scene and plug it into Anderson’s formula, resulting in an output that at the very least resembles his films on a surface level. Anderson has been called out by critics before for being too over-reliant on this formula, which ironically enough sometimes resembles his famous “list sequences” where a character will ask, deadpan, for increasingly bizarre items to make something.
As his style is increasingly able to be packaged as a commodity (and indeed, many commercials now seem to have been inspired by techniques in some of his past commercial work), his movies run the risk of being diluted into the parodies and homages of/to his work. In one commercial he even parodies the way he directs movies, making it difficult now to tell where the self parody begins and ends. Granted, the H&M commercial is not a full demonstration of his talents and shouldn’t be taken as such, but it provides an interesting look at the bare bones of his formula.
Each one of his movies sequentially pass the previous in technical ability, character size and complexity with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” being a culmination of all his efforts so far. However, the next movie he makes will not only have to be technically impressive, but switch up his formula (though his well written characters often make up for any shortcoming) in order to maintain control over his original vision of what he wanted movies to be. All this being said, Wes Anderson remains one of the best directors alive at the moment, and his movies are some of the greatest examples of filmmaking.
