Ranking the bad dads of Wes Anderson's career

It’s telling that the least-harmful father on this list achieves said feat mostly by not actually appearing in a movie with his kids. Anderson’s 2007 rail-trip dramedy The Darjeeling Limited is the rare entry in the director’s oeuvre to focus more on motherhood than fatherhood, with sons Francis, Jack, and Peter (Owen Wilson, Schwartzman, and Adrien Brody) traveling across India to reconnect with their vanished mom Patricia (Anderson regular Anjelica Huston). But all four of them are haunted by the memory of family patriarch Jimmy, a living saint whose only apparent failing was in no longer being living by the time the film’s events roll around. The brothers’ shared grief over their father’s taxi-assisted death haunts almost every scene of this melancholy journey—while also contributing to one of the most deliberately on-the-nose metaphors Anderson has ever committed to screen, as the trio ends the film by literally throwing away Dad’s baggage in order to get on with their lives.

This is a bit of a cheat of the “only actual fathers” rule, but bear with us: Ralph Fiennes’ M. Gustave does designate young Zero (Tony Revolori, who will eventually become old Zero, played by F. Murray Abraham) as his heir, leaving him the titular hotel at the climax of one of Anderson’s most aggressively bummer endings. And throughout the film, Gustave takes the young orphaned lobby boy under his slightly grimy wing, in standard Anderson dad fashion, demonstrating his gift for gab (and total willingness to sleep with the hotel’s older clientele) to his young charge. Overall, though, Gustave is surprisingly virtuous for a mentor in Anderson World: Despite an initially brusque reception, he does right by Zero at almost every turn, repaying his loyalty with the same in kind—and, ultimately, to the death. (We did mention it was one of the most bummer endings, right?)

One of the themes of Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson’s most openly romantic film, is that most adults are too broken by life to be half as open or as adventurous as the misguided, but unbowed, kids at the center of the tale. Take as Exhibit A for this thesis Walt Bishop, father of runaway tween lover Suzy Bishop, and played by Bill Murray at his most aggressively ambivalent. Walt isn’t exactly a bad father: Once he actually notices his daughter is missing, he contributes actively to the search for her. But he’s so burnt out by his collapsing marriage to Laura (Frances McDormand) that it takes him a good long while to build up that head of steam, and the best he ever really achieves is a more genial sort of irrelevance. (Ironically, the man Laura’s cheating on him with, Bruce Willis’ “sad, dumb policeman” Duffy Sharp, ends up being a far more active and interested father figure than Walt, eventually opting to adopt Suzy’s partner-in-crime Sam. Chalk it up to the power of found families, perhaps.)

We break now into the ranks of the truly awful and self-involved Anderson dads with the director’s first foray into animation, 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. (It’s not for nothing that Anderson’s first adapted work nodded to Roald Dahl, a writer who also had a decidedly ambivalent attitude to the idea that every parent is automatically a wise and loving guardian to the children in their charge.) Voiced by George Clooney at his glibbest, Mr. Fox exemplifies one of the key ideas of Anderson’s films: That you don’t stop being a person—including an awful person—just because you’ve “settled down” and had a kid. Because although he paints his campaign in a positive, protective light, it’s obvious to all involved that retired thief Fox launches his destructive war of thievery against farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean entirely for his own satisfaction—up to and including ignoring his son Ash (Schwartzman) in favor of bringing along his more athletic and talented nephew Kristofferson on his heists. Fox eventually makes good, as Anderson dads often do, but only after he’s nearly destroyed his family in pursuit of his own selfish desires.

We went back and forth on the ranking of this one; say what you like about the man we ultimately settled on as the worst dad on this list, but at least he ends the movie with the same number of living children that he starts it with. The same can’t necessarily be said for Bill Murray’s Cousteau pastiche Steve Zissou, whose short relationship with possible son Ned (née Kingsley) begins with decades-long abandonment, progresses through financial manipulation and sexual rivalry, and ends with death by helicopter misadventure. (And, yeah, the revelation that Steve probably isn’t Ned’s actual father, although the man himself never finds this out.) And yet, there’s a childishness to Steve that makes it difficult to entirely blame him for what a crappy dad he is in the brief window he’s in his “son’s” life. Like several of Anderson’s early films, The Life Aquatic is a portrait of what happens when genius curdles; among other things, it turns out, it leaves precious little room for anybody else—including your kids.

The sins of Royal Tenenbaum are enumerated as efficiently as anything in Anderson’s entire filmography, laid out (by narrator Alec Baldwin) to the tune of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” in the opening six minutes of what is still, arguably, Anderson’s finest film. A philanderer and scoundrel, Royal also seems constitutionally incapable of grasping the idea that his children are children—talking frankly about cheating on their mother, betraying son Chas in a BB gun fight with a cackling “There are no teams!” and offering bluntly harsh critiques of adopted daughter Margo’s first play. There’s a reason it takes a faked cancer diagnosis to worm his way back into his family’s life, despite Gene Hackman’s obvious charms—and even then, he hasn’t so much changed as convinced them to accept him for the genuinely crappy, if charismatic and exciting, person that he is. Royal Tenenbaum may, as his deliberately fictitious epitaph in the movie’s final scene suggests, have “died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship”—but he’s still the one who sank the ship in the first place, too. Worst dad, in a (slow, beautifully choreographed) walk.