The Wesishness of it all: Asteroid City

I'll be straightforward, I liked it a lot, but I'm predisposed to like Wes's work anyway and while this was second-tier Anderson, it's still far more interesting than a lot of the other stuff out there. Asteroid City falls short for me on several points; as great as the assembled cast is, I wasn't keen on how many plates were kept spinning throughout. The government cover-up execution overstayed its welcome, a number of characters were left too superficial to care about (I'm thinking of Hanks, Maya Hawke and Rupert Friend's characters both separately and as a - I guess - budding couple, and even Schreiber's character felt like there should have been more there), and the framing device weakened the entire proceedings for me by being either too clever or just unnecessary. I found myself wondering what I am actually supposed to pay attention to here? Still, as a conceptual piece, Asteroid City succeeds and it wasn't dull, by any stretch of the imagination. However, as usual with each new Anderson pic, it just makes me want to start all over and go through all of them again.

I won't go into too much detail because there's not much to go into; essentially, we are watching a play called Asteroid City, written by Conrad Earp (the ever reliable and fun to watch Edward Norton), framed by narration provided by Bryan Cranston as a framing device that provides a kind of metatextual remove to the play's construction and eventually, to the play and the movie that it is that we as the audience wind up watching. It is clever by half and very much Wes (and Roman Coppola, who provided the story), but it has a peculiar effect of removing us from what could have been more integral, if not critical, relationships and emotional resonances in what is provided as the central drama of the play.

Despite my misgivings about the device/framing structure, it could - perhaps should - be argued that the play's the thing. Again, I'm not fully persuaded that's the case. Much of Anderson's oeuvre is artificial and archly constructed for a reason. He routinely assays issues of failed romance, troubled and often disastrous relationships and marriages, and death. The treatment of these themes often feels light to the point of floating away except that there is a genuine heartfelt sentiment that buttresses these rather uncomfortable aspects of our emotional existence. 

Take your pick of any of Anderson's heroes/heroines and as eccentric as they seem to be, as stylistic and studied as their dialog is, the undercurrents are there of equally genuine melancholy and wistfulness in the face of the very often crippling realities of the fools we make of one another and the void at the end of it all. In Asteroid City, we don't know why Jeff Goldblum's mo-capped alien comes to retrieve the titular asteroid, inventory it and return it to its setting. When young Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan) opines that the arrival of an alien species might solve the meaning of existence or at least, show that there is one, you share that enthusiasm for a bit. Then you see the alien (a creature design worthy of Edward Gorey) and realize that as advanced as that species might be, it's unlikely there's any deep meaning of life for them, either. 

The Wesishness of it all: there is a jumbled discussion of what the alien really wanted only to find out that it was inventorying an asteroid renders the solar system a shelf in a warehouse. Not likely that there's much more to existence than that. And it's this sense of the absurd that runs through Anderson's work, often to solid effect and affect.

It is this last element that feels somewhat less this time around. Part of it owes to the distancing mechanism of the framing, but the other element is that there is that the center of the narrative is thematic; we have close to a dozen characters in varying degrees of engagement with life, death, and love. For the first time in a good while, I'd add that Anderson seems to be even looking at sex as part of all this and only in the most Andersonish of terms.

While we can certainly find examples of passion throughout his filmography, his films are very often sexless endeavors. Sex and sexuality exist on the periphery, if Anderson engages with either, at all; when he has, sexual elements tend to read as tints or colorizations to the emotional content two (very often heterosexual) people feel toward one another. 

From The Royal Tenenbaums to The Aquatic Life of Steve Zissou to The Darjeeling Unlimited, among others, the relationships are predicated on professed love, if not ardor, and served on deadpan, studied platters of very specifically weighted dialog. The way people speak is as mannered as the set design and this also tends to be read as arch, ironic, and that word, "twee" (which I find almost as overused to the point of uselessness as "quirky"). To some degree, these descriptors are not warranted, but I think one reason why Anderson remains as lauded as he is is because each film is more than the sum of its parts or any single feeling-tone, if you will.

There is a genuine sweetness that pervades his work and that, oddly - because so much of his work has this kind of storybook quality to it, there is little crass sentimentality. Adrien Brody's Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel may come as close to any as the embodiment of a kind of sentimentalist, trapped in a nostalgia for a bygone era, but his is hardly a simpering or treacly sentiment. 

In the current picture, any kind of actual connection seems just out of reach; our main protagonist, Jason Schwartzman's Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer, has kept his wife's death from his four children, all of whom are preternaturally brilliant and/or a little eccentric, as children of the Wesoverse often are. He was apparently gutted and the time was never right to tell them. Besides, only his oldest, his son Woodrow, would understand that his mother wasn't coming back. There are no histrionics, and his three younger daughters bury their mother's ashes in tupperware in the kind of ceremony one can readily accept as how our forebears might have done. There's a kind of purity (and yes, it's actually funny) to this. Again, Anderson is approaching these subjects with an almost picture book expressionism.

Some would say, but that's what he always does, but I think we're seeing different, even more episodic approaches in his storytelling. The French Dispatch, too, took a more mosaic approach in lieu of a singular driving narrative. There, the framing device was the biography of the deceased Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor of the literary journal that provides the film's title. The film tells a series of tales as a collection of articles from a New Yorker type magazine. The anthology approach is curious since we are met with a variety of moods, perspectives, and rumination on the nature of creativity and familial struggles in a variety of forms.

With Asteroid City, we have a similar variety of takes on love, loss, and family, but here, each of these is seen at a remove. There is a greater lack of spontaneity in this film than much of his other work and less vitality. Spontaneity and vitality may be strange words to invoke in describing Anderson's work, but those elements are there. They exist in the sometimes unpleasant surprises a plot will take or even in the peculiar kindnesses one shows another or just when you think a character has no self-awareness, an often show-stopping example to the contrary happens. And again, through it all, even during the happiest moments, there is a wistfulness that asks us to think again about what we value in each other and ourselves. 

The cast is uniformly strong. It would be difficult to imagine everyone on hand here telephoning it in. Schwartzman has most of the heavy lifting, but Scarlet Johansson's Hollywood actress Midge Campbell is beset with her own issues and it's difficult to see her wooing and seduction of Steenbeck pere as anything more than a fling. Even when he is given her address, it's a post office box. Any sense of a genuine relationship seems tenuous for either of them. Johansson does a typically wonderful job of conveying the entirety of this woman's complexity in a typically Wes Andersonish subdued monotone. 

More lively and no less fully formed is Tom Hanks as Augie's father-in-law; and it's worth noting that Margot Robbie shows up in a photo as Augie's deceased wife and late in the movie, the actress who plays his wife but whose scenes were excised later in the play's development. There were others who were introduced and then dropped, like Liev Schreiber's J.J. Kellogg, the father of another Junior Stargazer like Woodrow who has come to see his child win an award. Maya Hawke and Rupert Friend appear and fade and appear briefly again as a teacher who is interested in Friend's Montana, a singing cowboy who is in turn, interested in Hawke's teacher June. The regulars we've come to expect as part of the Wes Anderson Repertory Theater all make appearances that seem to anchor the film as performative reminders that we're in an Anderson movie, and each - Geoffrey Wright and Tilda Swinton, and Willem Dafoe even, particularly - bring a legacy to the movie. Tony Revolori and Bob Balaban may not have as much to do, but their presence feels totemic, as if they were filling some kind of auspicious function in lieu of Bill Murray's absence (Anderson's lucky rabbit foot). 

As it is, Steve Carrell takes what would have been Murray's role as the motel manager, and there are the other kids, other cowboys, governmental officials, and altogether a large number of bodies coming in and out of frame at a fair clip. This, too, isn't unusual for one of his films, but this is one of those rare ones where all of it taken together feels, well, fussy. Even at his most meticulous, Anderson's work rarely feels hectic or slapdash and while Asteroid City isn't out of control manic Marx Brothers lunacy, it does feel as though there are too many people keeping too much going conceptually as well as in performance. 

This is, in the overall scheme of things, hardly the most damning thing you could write about the man's work. That conceptualization is provocative and the various narrative structures employed are, while distancing, clever enough and genuinely well-constructed so as to lend support to the ideas the play within the movie is dealing with, as well as what may lie behind the "real world" interactions of, say, the director Schubert (Adrien Brody, another of Wes's repertory company) attempting to keep his wife (Hong Chau; another actor who can make magic with a minimal amount of screen time), and of course, the meeting of Jason Schwartzman as Jones Hall who plays Augie talking to Margot Robbie as the actress who played Augie's deceased wife (and is now in another play). Hall stepped out of a scene to talk to Schubert to tell him he really doesn't understand the play. 

All of this has the effect of telescoping out from the play itself back into "the world" and by doing so, remind us that we're watching the movie Asteroid City. We also see Earp writing the play by challenging his acting students to come up with ideas (some of whom are in the play we are watching) and we learn that Conrad Earp dies in a car accident toward the end of the play's run, a kind of echo of The Grand Budapest Hotel's Gustave H's demise in that film, another tale within a tale. Death doesn't just happen within the tale, within the play; it happens outside the frame.

It would be ludicrous to say that Asteroid City doesn't measure up or that it falls short as a film overall. It's only in comparison with other Anderson works that might be the case. A second tier Anderson remains a fascinating and involving work by anyone else's metrics and Asteroid City is a prime example of that.