Wes Anderson's Film Music Comes Alive at Hollywood Bowl

There is a moment in “The Royal Tenenbaums” when Margot, in a fur coat and holding a cigarette, steps off a bus in slow motion while Jackson Browne sings “These Days.” That scene stopped being merely a scene a long time ago; it became a shared memory for an entire generation of viewers. When Browne steps onto the Hollywood Bowl stage these nights and sings the same song live, under the open Los Angeles sky, he is in effect returning to the audience something it claimed as its own years ago.

The concert series titled “Music From the Films of Wes Anderson” runs from July 10 to 12 and closes tonight with its final evening. Bill Murray hosts all three nights, an actor whose face, ever since “The Life Aquatic,” has become almost inseparable from Anderson’s directorial voice. Murray is no mere presenter here; he is part of that world, a man who ushers the audience into symmetrical frames and grief muffled by irony like someone who has spent a good part of his career inside them.

The lineup reads like a carefully chosen soundtrack in its own right: Beck, Jackson Browne, Jenny Lewis, Jason Schwartzman and composer Mark Mothersbaugh, the man who gave Anderson his musical signature back in the early films. Friday and Saturday were backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under conductor Thomas Wilkins, performing original film scores by Mark Mothersbaugh and Alexandre Desplat, many of them heard before a live audience for the first time.

Why does Anderson’s music demand this kind of stage?

Anderson has never treated music as decoration. In his films a song is not a bed for emotion, it is the emotion, often the only moment in which his seemingly cool, designed world suddenly opens up and lets something honest leak through. That is why lifting these compositions out of their cinematic context and placing them on a concert stage is not just a nostalgic gesture. It is a test: whether the music, stripped of its images, still carries the same dramatic arc.

The open-air amphitheatre, with its shell-shaped stage and audience scattered across the hillside, feels like the logical place for such an experiment. The Hollywood Bowl has that same measure of slightly artificial beauty that Anderson cultivates in every frame, a space that is at once grand and intimate, serious and gently theatrical. When the Philharmonic plays Desplat’s themes from “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or “Isle of Dogs,” they take on a scale that small cinema speakers could never give them.

Who stands behind this sound

It is worth remembering that two very different musical sensibilities sit behind Anderson’s films. Mark Mothersbaugh, a former member of Devo, brought the playful, almost childlike melodic brightness of the early titles. Alexandre Desplat, a French composer with a string of film awards, later added a richer, orchestral dimension. Their alternating presence in the Hollywood Bowl program shows just how layered Anderson’s world is in sound, beneath that recognizable, tidy surface.

For an audience that has watched these films several times over, tonight’s concert is a chance to hear how much of the story the music was actually carrying, the story we thought we remembered through the image. And for all of us who played “These Days” at least once after watching the Tenenbaums, one question remains: how many of Anderson’s memories are really musical first, and cinematic only after that?