Revisting Wes Anderson

My wife has a job in Bangkok next month, a photo shoot for a Japanese company that wants to riff or perhaps rip off The Darjeeling Limited. She needs to go see it soon. This coincides with my recent fascination with Armond White, who loves the film. I reread his review with a mind to seeing the film with a different perspective.
I don't think I can do it. My previously noted opinions stand. White praises Anderson's emotional honesty. To me, every actor seems to be holding his breath until "cut" is called. I don't see anything real being expressed. Emotion is certainly represented. White states, "... it returns common emotional power to today’s fragmented, disingenuous popular culture." I could easily rework that sentence as follows: ... it rejects common emotional power in favor of today's fragmented, disingenuous popular culture. Everything about Anderson's films is mannered -- the acting, the camera work, the music, the art direction, the writing. He merely reiterates and stylizes the luxury icons of the 70s and 80s - Mercedes, Porsche, Louis Vuitton, Cazal, Sulka, et cetera.
White also defends Anderson's idiosyncratic style as being an antidote to the "mass hypnosis of self-reflexive trash like Superbad". In defense of Superbad, it doesn't take itself seriously, present any stylistic stamp nor call itself cinema -- it's popcorn and laughs. I don't need an antidote for popcorn and laughs. I need a remedy for Anderson's relentless and deliberate artifice overelaborated in its delivery and stilted in every way from beginning to end. Were it the least bit ironic instead of pleading some deeply affected ennui I might find his work tolerable.
For irony to come across it would require that the full significance of any of Anderson's characters' words or actions are clear to the audience but unknown to the character, but the dead-pan tics of his actors betray a self-consciousness so pronounced that they appear to be depending on the significance of what they're saying for the very breath that they're holding during every take.
White calls Anderson's self-consciousness "plangent". Affectedly melancholy yes; sonorous, not in the least. He confers undeserving intelligence on Anderson the visual stylist with comparisons to Fellini. "The title metaphor of The Darjeeling Limited converts Fellini’s road-of-life metaphor in La Strada into the train itself (it’s an Orient Express seen through Anderson’s storybook wonderment)." To me, that's like saying The Gap ad that appropriated West Side Story (designed by my friend and former boss Happy Massee) "invokes the warring families of Verona in the mean barrios of New York expressing the clear superiority of Gap khakis over those sold by J.Crew." Just because Anderson makes a film set in India and uses a score from Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy doesn't mean he "... also tracks “the road of life” that is the actual translation of Ray’s classic Pather Panchali". Maybe that is what Anderson's up to, but I tend to think it's more like directions I used to hear in the art department when shopping for props for a 60s-themed commercial: "Copy this Lee Friedlander photo except get an Eames chair for the African-American to sit on." More crass commercialism than honoring the antecedent.
My wife is on her own when it comes to Wes Anderson. At least she'll be quoting a commercial bit of pretense for her commercial work rather than a work of art.

Unswayed,
Signore Direttore