Story by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
Screenplay Written by Wes Anderson
Directed by Wes Anderson
**** (four stars)
RATED PG 13
I have often expressed upon this blogsite that the actual creation of a motion picture of any quality amounts to existing as a minor miracle. But, to truly create a movie that represents one's personal, singular vision over and again, and to such a repeatedly high standard and individualistic aesthetic, it is a feat that more then deserves to be cherished...whether it happens to be one's cinematic cup of tea or not.
In the case of Writer/Director Wes Anderson, it is extremely rare to find a filmmaker of his longevity and status who has amassed a cinematic body of work whose overall quality remains uncommonly high. For nearly 30 years and now 11 films, Anderson's filmography contains not one clunker in the entire bunch. Certainly, there may be entries that I an enraptured by more than others but in totality, and like his cinematic contemporary Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino, who has amassed 9 films in roughly the same amount of time, Wes Anderson has created a true cinematic universe fueled by an uncompromising vision that is proudly idiosyncratic and wholly unique to any other filmmaker. His signature style of artificial environments that are unquestionably emotionally true to the human experience have kept me enthralled since "Rushmore" (1999), making every new film an event for me.
With our increasingly precarious film landscape, it remains a miracle even still that a filmmaker like Wes Anderson is a figure and artist able to continue to be able to create films on his own terms but to also have them released in theaters, no less and to critical and box office acclaim. With movies succumbing to homogenous franchises, Anderson's confections always arrive as the perfect blast of fresh cinematic air at the right time, and I am thrilled to announce that "Asteroid City," his latest, is not only no exception in the least, it is possibly his furthest reaching film to date.
Set in the 1950's, Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" centers itself within the titular location, a desert town which contains a massive crater created by a fallen meteorite years earlier, and is also on the far outskirts of an army base performing atomic bomb tests.
As our story begins, the city is welcoming a group of Scientifically inclined teenagers for the Junior Stargazers awards ceremony. We meet awards recipient Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), his three younger sisters and his Father, Augie (Jason Schwartzman), a war photojournalist mourning the death of his wife and who has been unable to tell the news to his children. Additionally, we meet awards recipient Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards) and her Mother, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a wearying and famous Hollywood actress, and throughout, both teenagers and adults will gradually fall in love.
A local motel provides lodgings for our cast who further incudes three more teenage honorees Ricky Cho (Ethan Josh Lee), Clifford Kellogg (Aristou Meehan), Shelley Bordon (Sophia Lillis) and their families; five star General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), a busload of school children chaperoned by their teacher, June Douglas (Maya Hawke), a country western singing group led by Montana (Rupert Friend) and Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), Augie's Father-In-Law and Woodrow's Grandfather who arrives in town to retrieve the Steenbeck sisters after the family car breaks down.
On the night during which the teenagers are scheduled to receive awards for their Scientific inventions, events unfold that ultimately threaten to upend the everyone's individualistic world views forever.
Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City," as with all of his films, serves itself up to all of us as a sumptuous gift to be opened and savored. For my personal cinematic sensibilities, and especially so since "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014), Anderson's films have truly become an even greater pleasure to view and to even listen to as the motion picture landscape has become more homogenized, and his latest is no exception. In fact, there were points where I felt that I had to keep up with the luxurious dialogue which is presented with a clipped alacrity that invites you to lean in so as to not miss a word. Is this what years of Marvel/DC movies and CGI bombast have done to us as film viewers? Have we been conditioned to not hearing dialogue and monologues that are so clearly and beautifully composed? To seeing films where so much of the action is decidedly and defiantly in the performances and the language? Anderson delivers a story, filled with rich characters and dialogue that feels as if it was as equally meant to exist within novel form as much as the cinematic.
Speaking of the cinematic, Wes Anderson's visual aesthetic remains as peerless s ever and no matter how many of you feel that an AI program can replicate his style, trust me, there's nothing like the real thing and the legitimate human thought and attention that went into every single visual composition that could be suspended in a freeze frame to be studied due to its meticulous, luscious detail and care.
Anderson and his team, including Cinematographer Robert Yeoman and Composer Alexandre Desplat, have concocted another multi-layered audio/visual spectacle that celebrates the playful and pathos in equal delectable doses, making a true feast for the eyes that fills us with surprise, awe and wonder in ways that, once again, the Marvel/DC movies have all but bludgeoned out of the movies and our experiences with them, through sheer ubiquity. If you truly wish to see cinematic world building at a peak form, what Wes Anderson has conceived with "Asteroid City" is a true universe to lose yourself within,
For his admirers and detractors, Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" firmly announces itself as the most Wes Anderson-ian entry in his entire oeuvre to date. While filled end to end with his trademark blend of whimsy, laugh out loud moments combined with honest existential angst, it is also a work that finds Anderson at his most inscrutable as he delivers a series of puzzle boxes or better yet, the experience is the cinematic equivalent of a Matryoshka doll.
For all of the action and activity set inside of the film's titular city, it is all indeed a fabrication. Building greatly upon the Anderson conceit of presenting his story within the context of either a play as in the aforementioned "Rushmore," a novel as in "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001) or a series of magazine articles as depicted in "The French Dispatch" (2021), "Asteroid City" is a movie of a fictional television production presented by a nameless host (Bryan Cranston) of a famous fictional play written by famed and fictional playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and directed by the controversial and still fictional Schubert Green (Adrian Brody).
Nothing is real and yet, we still feel. Isn't that what the movies are all about? Movies as an art form are all confections and constructions, pieced together with all manner of tools, from the mechanical to the actors themselves and all originated from the ephemeral reaches of inspiration and dreams, to deliver an experience for you and I to hopefully have an emotional and intellectual response--essentially the mining of truth through the act of artifice.
In essence, Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" is a story about storytelling, a movie about movies or furthermore, a Wes Anderson movie about Wes Anderson movies and why he makes his movies in the way that he chooses. In its own proudly unorthodox fashion, Wes Anderson has conceived of an experience that could be a cinematic cousin of works like Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood" (2019) or Steven Spielberg's fabulous "The Fabelmans" (2022). Yet, to me, this film felt akin to Martin Scorsese's deeply undervalued, gloriously magnificent "Hugo" (2011), a cornucopia of a fantasia that ultimately brought the viewer upon a journey into the vibrantly beating heart of hearts of Scorsese's life as a filmmaker, as far as I am concerned. While Wes Anderson may never fully express the depth of his views and inspirations to us explicitly, "Asteroid City" gave me what I felt was the closest glimpse yet into what the movies and the creative act of movie making just may actually mean to him.
There is a quotation from playwright/poet Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) that I have loved ever since I became acquainted with it: "Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it." Somehow, as I think of "Asteroid City," that quotation feels more than fitting.
For all of the dollhouse designs of his films, Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" presents a catalyst in its story that sends essentially every character into some level of existential crisis, therefore, threatening to break apart the entire proceedings directly in front of our eyes. This film possesses Anderson's key themes of fractured families, precociously gifted children who become sad adults, emotional stagnation and arrested developments, loss, endings, mortality, grief and mourning, all congealing into his specialized brand of gentle yet potent melancholia. The trio of Steenbeck sisters parallel the three adult brothers of "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007). The teenage romance echoes the campground love of "Moonrise Kingdom" (2012). Every conceptual piece fits into its place perfectly within this film and therefore, this film with all of Anderson's past work.
Furthermore, it is the film's sense of pristine order and how it is threatened that I felt revealed something about the possible purpose of Wes Anderson's films as a whole and how it is all illustrated within "Asteroid City": the theme of creating a world of such painstakingly diligent order within an unforgiving universe that by its very nature is chaotic...essentially to enact control when truthfully, none of us really possess it. And in that, there is the delicate balance and dichotomy that sits within the heart of Wes Anderson's existential comedy and crises throughout all of his films and especially within "Asteroid City."
We witness it over and again. The Scientific teenagers play intricate and endless memory games in which none of them could ever lose, thus illustrating the utter futility of the exercise. The quiet, genteel nature of the city itself juxtaposed with mushroom clouds looming with heavy menace in the background. The sense of inner tragedy with Augie capturing photographs of key moments to hold onto forever even as he mourns his wife. And then, of course, there is the film's main conceit of being a story within a story, a play within a television show, characters housed inside of actors being portrayed by real actors in a Wes Anderson movie. And like that Bertold Brecht quotation, the metaphorical hammer arrives and fully disrupts everyone's sense of purpose where the film's narrative is shaken up to an almost irreconcilable degree.
In a sequence that doesn't feel to far removed from Writer/Director Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, N.Y.(2008), Margot Robbie appears late in the film and delivers a beautiful monologue that cuts straight through all of the mechanisms, weaving everything together w hie simultaneously breaking the word apart and the ultimate effect is stirring and undeniably moving as I felt it spoke directly to the nature of grief and loss. To that end, the characters all begin to chant the mantra of "You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep." And dear readers...what happens when we sleep?
If the movies are dreams or the product of dreams or both, then what we have with Wes Anderson is a front row seat into his idiosyncratic visions. I wrote in my review of "The Grand Budapest Hotel" that even after already having created films as wholly unique as "The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" (2004) and the stop motion animated "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009) to name a few, all of those films now feel to have been warm up exercises for what Wes Anderson could really do if he let his imagination run wild. From "The Grand Budapest Hotel" onwards, it feels as if we have been receiving Anderson's imagination completely unfiltered!
Without Wes Anderson's ability to dream, we would not have his films at all--a sentiment that works for any artist of any type or any person of any vocation in life. His films are the result of his dream state in action. And when chaos inevitably occurs, threatening to unravel everything in its path, what to do?: Just keep placing one foot in front of the other and keep telling the story. Keep creating in order to just maybe make sense of what is ultimately impossible to make sense of. And we watch and respond for the same reasons, to try and understand what it means to be human, to be alive, to exist.
Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City," while maybe not his finest film to date, it is unquestionably a terrific one and after all of this time, I applaud him further for his unwavering desire to keep dreaming and reaching further as that train of life continues rolling along its tracks. It is a film I am excited to revisit as well as it makes me dream about what Wes Anderson could possibly create next.
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