No One Quite Understands Unpacking Grief Like Wes Anderson

Grief is something you don’t necessarily get until you’ve gone through it. There are different layers to it and whether it is over a parent or a loved one, grief doesn’t really leave us. Many movies and television shows unpack it, some better than others. While I stand by the thought that WandaVision is one of the best explorations of grief and its staying power, I think that creatives like Wes Anderson have mastered the art of grief in its many forms.

Three of his most acclaimed works focus on grief of some kind and all three have a different approach to it. The Royal Tenenbaums focuses on the loss of time and grief as it happens. The Darjeeling Limited reflects fresh grief and trying to over come it. Now, with Asteroid City, we’re seeing the aftermath of it all with Augie (Jason Schwartzman) losing his wife. All three are about exploring that heartache and letting ourselves grow from it.

The Tenenbaum family is dealing with their father returning, knowing he won’t be with them long, and overcoming that. All three Whitman boys are still reeling from their father’s death and their mother even says that they won’t be okay. Asteroid City has Augie and his children all dealing with the death of their mother in their own way even if the timing is all different for each of them.

To me, these three movies make a perfect trilogy of understanding our own pain and starting to cope through it. It’s not easy to watch a movie and overcome your own never-ending sense of grief throughout it, but Anderson manages to make that viewing experience fun through his own pop of color and fantastical lens.

Grief is never-ending and Wes knows that

To get personal, I love Wes Anderson movies and there were a few I hadn’t watched prior to the release of The French Dispatch. So my friends and I went through Anderson’s filmography from the start, rewatching what we’d already seen and filling in the gaps. One of the films that was showing in the Wes Anderson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was The Darjeeling Limited. At the time, my father was dying. I knew it; there wasn’t much I could do. But I’d seen The Royal Tenenbaums before and yes, it did hit a bit differently with the imminent loss of my father looming over my head, but The Darjeeling Limited really was what just hit me and refused to leave.

“I’m sorry we lost your father. We’ll never get over it. But it’s okay. There are greater forces at work. Yes, the past happened, but it’s over, isn’t it?” Patricia (Anjelica Huston) says to her sons, to which Francis (Owen Wilson) responds, “Not for us.”

In the grand scheme of Anderson’s aesthetic and vibe, it is this scene in particular that hit and stayed with me long after I watched the movie—and sure, in part because my own father died at the time I was experiencing this for the first time. It does, however, make movies like Asteroid City hit even harder because I understand that desire to move past it and realizing that you never will be able to.

Anderson understands a lot about the world and sells it to us behind symmetrical camera shots and beautiful outfits. And still his exploration of grief is one of my favorite things about his filmography as a whole.

(featured image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Focus Features)