I’m not a moderate on most things, but when it comes to Wes Anderson I feel I’m one of only a few centrists. The heatedness of the debate between whether he’s brilliant or horrible sort of baffles me. He’s certainly an auteur, although this doesn’t settle much. The mantle has been expanded to include people like Michael Bay and Zack Snyder because they have a distinct directorial style with various visual and thematic preoccupations. Wes Anderson gets put into a different category of auteur, though, a certain rarified camp of heavy-hitter, modern canon filmmakers that deal with big themes, but he shares a kind of kinship with the Snyders and Bays of the world that many would never acknowledge. That’s not meant to be a put-down. The viscerality and purity of cinema spectacles merits consideration not necessarily of non-present depths within the films themselves but for their place in the industry, for how they function as entertainment—the value of art as a form of amusement.
Wes Anderson has just as much a preoccupation with visual flair, although admittedly his aesthetics are more sophisticated. But sophisticated or not, it’s the aesthetic in any case that takes precedence. I always got the sense of Wes Anderson as an odd boy playing house with an elaborate network of dollhouses and figurines. And just as any drama a child dreams up in his imagination during playtime may illustrate his inner life, Wes Anderson’s quaint, dioramic vaudevilles carry some deeper meaning than the entertainment itself. But I think if that style constitutes the engine of a piece of art, then it’s perfectly fine not to enjoy said art because the aesthetic qualities are grating to you, and that doesn’t make one an anti-art philistine that “doesn’t get it”.
Then again, if you wanna sit around and pretend Wes Anderson isn’t talented, then you’re not serious. It’s called taste. We all have our own.
Asteroid City is a pretty good movie, but if Wes Anderson’s rush(more)ed dialogue and affectless performances irritate you, then that will detract from your enjoyment of the film. If you feel the recurring interest in his films stems from the incessantly growing star ensembles and recognizability rather than consistent quality, that will detract from your enjoyment of the film. If it feels like he keeps hiring kid actors that can’t enunciate words, you’re right. Good or bad qualities of Moonrise Kingdom aside, I couldn’t understand half of what the kid in that movie was saying. That’s a legitimate grievance! So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can move on to Anderson’s latest venture, a film with many good qualities that I enjoyed while being attuned to the more irritating habits that tend to alienate his critics, and sometimes myself.
Like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Asteroid City involves a nesting narrative. Instead of reaching into the past via narrowing aspect ratios, Asteroid City alternates between reality and artifice, from a black-and-white, academy ratio Edward R. Murrow era special on playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) writing and staging the play “Asteroid City” with a company of troubled actors on the outside, to a hyper realistic rendering of the imagined world of the play on the deepest level, and where we spend the bulk of the film. Anderson’s storytelling gymnastics always entertain, and here they are indispensable to the film’s deeper meaning. In seeing a broadcast of the story of a play which in its telling comes to life on the screen, Wes Anderson creates the framework for a commentary on storytelling, on the mechanics of getting a vision produced, and on the feelings that are worked out in the process.
The play, and in effect most of the film, takes place at a roadside motel in the middle of the desert where an asteroid once landed and left a tourist-attracting crater. It’s the 1950s, and a group of teens and their parents are gathering for a youth space convention in this eponymous Asteroid City to receive awards for having come up with various inventions. Jason Schwartzman stars as the central character, Augie Steenbeck (and Jones Hall, the actor portraying Augie), a war photographer whose son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) invented a system for projecting images onto the moon. Augie has yet to reveal to his children that their mother died three weeks prior, and that after the convention they’re set to visit her disapproving father, Stanley (Tom Hanks). While there, Augie develops a restrained romantic connection with Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a reticent film star attending the convention with her whiz kid daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards).
The motel and crater grounds abound with a flurry of activity, including observatory visits with astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), a field trip full of precocious kids led by their chipper, naif teacher (Maya Hawke), and lively meals organized by the sunny and mild-mannered motel manager (Steve Carrell). But the anchor point always seems to be the relationship between Augie and Midge, two guarded and weary adults. As Midge observes, they are “two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of [their] pain because [they] don’t want to.” And with that, a central theme of Asteroid City is vocalized.
The film, like many of Anderson’s films, deals heavily with grief and inner turmoil. In concept, the film explores the topic with nuance and ingenuity. A war photographer with a deceased wife embodies the feeling well, though Jason Schwartzman’s trademark dryness and detached sense of irony, which he brings to almost every role, frankly mutes the effect. There’s a sadness in his eyes, but much of the scenes dealing with his wife’s death, such as when he breaks the news to his kids or discusses his wife’s affairs with his father-in-law, are stiff and contain little feeling. Then again, that’s Wes Anderson playing with his dolls again. The characters, here, like in most of Wes Anderson films, carry immense pain and anxiety while maintaining a wooden demeanor and painted-on countenance. There’s a therapeutic role-play quality to the writing and acting. Conrad Earp expresses these themes in his play schematically, and therefore so does Wes Anderson.
A key scene occurs later in the film that illustrates this eccentric, roundabout act of emotional processing. In the midst of a chaotic scene, Jones Hall breaks character and stops playing Augie. He exits the stage and takes a break out on a balcony. Across from him on the neighboring balcony is an actress (Margot Robbie pulling a one-scene-wonder) previously cast as Augie’s late wife, a role subsequently cut from the play. Their conversation reminds him of crucial backstory, and reveals needed context for Jones to truly understand his character, and, going further, provides what Augie needs to come to terms with his wife’s death. Wes Anderson, through the use of his trademark pageantry and layering, illustrates the way storytelling and imagination serve as tools for excavating truths, truths which are as intimate to the practitioners, collaborators, and workmen involved in staging art as they are to the fictional characters within. The application of the creative drive brings these revelations to the surface in an indispensable way. As the characters repeat feverishly in the final act of the film, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”. | Nic Champion
