I remembered this as the slightest of Wes Anderson’s live-action scripts with Roman Coppola, most notable for the extreme precision of the film’s Andersonian clockwork diorama world and evocativeness of music and visuals. Yet I was moved to tears by the scene between Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) and Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park) which exemplifies all the film’s themes—which I’d either forgotten or missed the first time—around loneliness and yearning for human connection. That brief moment of connection between a foreign immigrant and an expatriate homosexual both “[s]eeking something missing, missing something left behind” and hoping to “find what eluded us in the places we once called home”.
film reviews as long as the films
20969 words / mins total