Essential: The 6 Best Performances In The Films Of Wes Anderson

“Max Fischer’s not fighting change, he’s determinedly fighting against being pigeonholed. He’s fighting for the renaissance view of the world, and for a sense of himself as an adult. I think that he and Steve Zissou and Gustave are all, in some way, at war with the philistines. They are all kind of righteous,” a wise and insightful Ed Norton said this week about the characters that inhabit Wes Anderson’s unique worlds. “I’ve come to think that Wes’s films are all about the way that your real family disappoints you and so you create the family that you need.” Wes himself could probably not articulate it any better.

This week, as you might well have noticed from our review and interview with the director, marks the release of “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” the eighth film from Wes Anderson, and it’s a particularly intricate and joyous affair from a filmmaker at the peak of his powers, and a definite highlight of early-year moviegoing so far.

It probably won’t be for everyone; those who’ve found his work over-production-designed, artificial and model-boxy will likely be infuriated, because Anderson’s double-downed on Wes World for this particular picture. But we’d still suggest that the haters give it a chance: while he’s best known for the distinctive look of his pictures, he’s perhaps undervalued as a director of actors.

It’s very difficult to find a bad performance in a Wes Anderson film, and once the actors click with his distinctive style magic can happen, and movie stars as diverse as Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Willis have delivered something like career-best work in front of his camera. (“Most of my experience is that you rehearse and what you discover to be natural and instinctive the camera then tries to shoot,” ‘Grand Budapest’ star Ralph Fiennes recently told the Telegraph. “Wes is very much the other way, which is: this is the shot I’ve conceived, and you have to sell it, make it work. Once I got on board, there’s a sort of thrill in making it work.”) So, to celebrate the release of “Grand Budapest Hotel,” we’ve picked out some of our very favorite performances from Wes Anderson movies. Take a look below, and suggest your own picks in the comments section below.

Jason Schwartzman as Max Fischer in “Rushmore”
When asked what the secret is, Max Fischer responds with little hesitation: “I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.” “Boy, that sounds like me,” a 17-year-old Jason Schwartzman told a casting director, who’d met the teen actor at a party through his cousin Sofia Coppola, and who’d told him that the lead in Wes Anderson’s new film was “short, libidinous, wrote plays and liked older women.” Over fifteen years on, with Schwartzman having given a brace of great performances since (including several for Anderson), it can still be tricky to separate the actor from the role, not because he lacks range, but because it was such an indelible, fully-formed turn in the first place. Max Fischer was pretty much an entirely new creation, a furiously bright, academically feckless kid, hugely charismatic yet mostly unpopular, precocious yet naive, confident but a little bit out of his depth—somewhere between Ferris Bueller, Benjamin Braddock, Antoine Doinel and Pip from “Great Expectations.” Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson (who claims that the character is derived from both of them to some degree) had envisioned Max as a young Mick Jagger type (‘that slightly uncooked look,” Wilson says on the Criterion commentary), to be played by someone like a young Noah Taylor, but the Dustin Hoffman-ish vibe of Schwartzman soon won them over, and it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Few others could have captured the same dickish bravado, which just disguises the sweet, wounded little boy without a mother, trying to better himself. For all the film’s other pleasures, including Murray, it simply doesn’t have the right emotional sting without its young stand-out.