Asteroid City
The second feature film of director Wes Anderson, “Rushmore,” released in 1998 and still recognized as a classic, is about Max Fischer. The teenage boy is arrogant and also something of an academic disaster he has so many extracurricular activities he can’t keep up with his classwork but he’s also a tireless “can do” guy who’s busily enacting his own adolescence in ways that will save him from having to experience certain difficult parts of it. This includes falling in love with Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), the mom of two of his classmates at Rushmore Academy and a first-grade teacher who represents a type nurturing, unattainable from within the lower depths with which I’m sure many boys have been besotted since time immemorial.
As you know, Wes Anderson makes highly stylized movies, as you may also know, some critics have argued that this very stylization is what prevents them from being emotionally credible. I think those critics are wrong or at least misdirected: With its rather operatic blend of adolescent self-seriousness and grown-up melancholy, “Rushmore” strikes me as Anderson’s most aesthetically perfect and simultaneously most poignant movie, but this may simply be because it was the first one I saw by him at just the right age.
And anyway, for all their heightened artifice and candy box palette (or maybe because of these things), I’ve never found Anderson’s films alienating or overly neat. His frames are lively but not too busy, the colors are vivid without feeling garish, everything feels always just right to me. So it’s hard for me to say whether “Asteroid City,” his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman or any other work bears comparison to what he himself has done before now. And yet if forced I would have to admit that yes, this may be the loveliest of all their movies so far certainly the one I found most emotionally overwhelming. Think of a beautiful butterfly alighting on your heart and then stinging that heart with barbs you never knew it had.
Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) is a playwright. He’s also, we learn, a veteran hit maker: “Asteroid City” is just his latest success, but he’s written many others. Conrad is a writer who seems cripplingly shy for himself or, perhaps more accurately, he’s shy for his words’ sake. He can’t bear to have them spoken aloud until they’re perfect; if only he could find someone capable of speaking them in such a way as not to make them sound merely adequate.
The film begins in black and white and Academy ratio (1.37:1), mimicking the look and feel of an American television documentary from around 1955 about the making of “Asteroid City,” by Carter Earp (Conrad’s father? Conrad himself under another name?). My wife having asked me before the movie started whether there would be voice over narration (“Will this be one where he does voice over or no voice over?”), Bryan Cranston appears, dressed nattily in period appropriate attire, to tell us exactly what we’re going to see: A story about a play that takes place in New York City in 1955 and concerns among other things “love” and “outer space.” Then Anderson gives us something completely different full color and widescreen and cinematic brio that still feels like an approximation of what actual 1950s movies looked like.
If already this sounds hard to follow, it’s not. Anderson’s newest movie is his most cleverly thought-out and flawlessly executed nested anthology yet. Earp’s drama takes place in a secluded Western meteor crash site that serves as a kind of Space Camp. The spot is traditionally for an Anderson movie gorgeous both geographically/geologically (the desert orange with the cloudless blue sky is like eating a Creamsicle on a sunny day) and also architecturally in terms of building layout and design, none of the details are extraneous, from the copy on the diner front to the vending machine displays.
What all these brilliant children have in common, you see, is that they’re going to be stolen from by the U.S. government (here presenting its kindest face via Jeffrey Wright’s General Gibson). This small almost-town Space Camp has brought together several scholastically gifted teenagers who have brought future tech with them one kid has what amounts to a disintegration ray and each invention will come back out in fewer pieces than it went in. But the kids all bring their own drama too: Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is war photographer Augie Steenback’s (Jason Schwartzman) oldest son, who hasn’t told his teenager or his three young daughters that their mother died three weeks ago as this competition for some scholarship begins; Dinah (Grace Edwards), another “Junior Stargazer” like Woodrow (“Brainiac,” his beloved mom called him), happens upon an immediate affinity with him; Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), Dinah’s mother and also a movie star whose commitment to her craft is matched only by her free floating sadnesses, watches curiously from nearby. Other Stargazers have other problems: Ricky Cho (Ethan Josh Lee) is healthily skeptical of authority; Clifford Kellogg (Aristou Meehan) compulsively dares adults to dare him to do ill-advised things.
What the movie does in terms of stuffing characters and their odd traits into a never-flagging narrative (the thing fizzes and buzzes over 105 minutes) is remarkable.
The human drama of the Asteroid City section Augie, his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks), Stenback’s children, etc. negotiating with awful grief is interrupted by not one but two visitations from an alien spacecraft. The new knowledge of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe doesn’t solve anyone’s problems; it just means they have to stay in the desert another week at least. Looking out their cabin windows at each other, Augie and Midge compare notes: “We’re just two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because we don’t want to,” says she.
Johansson here is half enigmatic, half quietly blunt and absolutely beguiling. Schwartzman’s performance is revelatory. The actor who played Max Fischer has hardly ever not been in an Anderson film since but here shows new colors or something like maturity/gravitas, whatever you call playing a helpless man instead of a stunted adolescent (“I’m thinking about my daughters!”). And Schwartzmanas Augie as an actor playwright for Earp for a second there as Starlet Bambino starts up two separate romantic affiliations for himself (one maybe, one definitely, it’s a hell of a thing to pull off twice as an actor and doubly pleasurable to watch.
All the action there really is so much of it, all reveling in creation/achievement/invention of human beings reaching for cosmic splendor joy eventually funnels down toward that banal yet consuming question “What is the meaning of life?” Of course, not everybody phrases this inquiry quite so plainly.
In this case, the statement seems to be expressed as a request “I don’t know what’s going on in this play.” Then comes the heart-breaking question, “Am I doing it right?”
“Asteroid City” presents itself as a beautiful collection of people wearing many masks, performing art and performance life while trying to do it right. It’s sui generis but its heart is in the modern classics I kept hearing echoes of “Our Town,” “Citizen Kane” and whatnot. But clearest of all, by the end, was another master’s voice. When I recommended it to an old friend, I said that “Asteroid City” was like Jean Renoir’s “The Golden Coach,” another great cinematic celebration/interrogation of performance as life, life as performance. Yeah, it’s that good.
For More Movies Visit Putlocker.