Asteroid City

Year 15, Day 258 - 9/15/23 - Movie #4,546 - VIEWED ON 7/25/23.   

BEFORE: OK, as I mentioned back in my review of "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen", I snuck out to the movie theater again, after getting my hearing aid fixed, to see "Asteroid City".  There were only a couple AMC theaters still showing it in Manhattan, because "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" had just opened the week before, taking up most of the available screens.  Whatever, you watch those films, and I'll catch the new Wes Anderson, before it completely disappears.

It wasn't completely going to disappear, I know that, because it was already available on digital platforms for a $20 rental at home, and there was much speculation online that "Asteroid City" would follow the "Cocaine Bear" release strategy and appear on Peacock only 45 days after leaving theaters.  That would theoretically make it available to me in mid-August, and I've been holding a slot for it in September.  So, I still MIGHT have been OK if I hadn't made it to the cinema, assuming it came on to Peacock or a similar service as predicted.  But what if it didn't?  Well, I still could have rented it at home for $20 - and if you think about it, that's not TOO bad of a deal.  Compare that to spending $7 at the AMC (on a "discount Tuesday" for Stubs members) and then when you factor in a $10 bucket of popcorn and a $3 bottle of Mountain Dew that I snuck in, that's 20 bucks right there.  Add in a subway fare of $2.75 and it really WOULD be cheaper for me to rent it at home.  (I'm only counting 1 subway fare, not 2, because I was already in Manhattan for another reason, so it was just 1 EXTRA subway fare to get up to the Lincoln Square area and see the film at the most convenient time for me.)

If I think about it, I probably have NEVER seen a Wes Anderson film in a theater before, except for "Isle of Dogs".  I came around so late to "Moonrise Kingdom" that by the time I saw it, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" was also on cable.  And then I snuck into the online Academy screening room to catch "The French Dispatch" because I was sure it would be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, and it just wasn't.  But I think I've seen every Wes Anderson picture, from "Bottle Rocket" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" to "The Life Aquatic"  and "The Darjeeling Limited". Honestly, I think his films just keep getting better, so I'm very excited to catch "Asteroid City" as soon as possible, even if I'm going to sit on the review for about two months. 

If I've planned this right, then Liev Schreiber carries over from "The Last Days on Mars". 

THE PLOT: Following a writer and the creation of his world-famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed son to small, rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever. 

AFTER: Yes, yes, this film kind of fits right into Wes Anderson's oeuvre, there are so many actors who he's worked with again and again, building up a nice little company of talent (Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori), but then there are actors who couldn't make it for this one (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson) and then also new additions to the troupe (Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Maya Hawke).  And I think when you factor everything in - the unique weirdness, the over-emphasis on design, and the play-within-the-play structure, somehow this ended up being one of the most Wes Anderson-ey films ever made by Wes Anderson.  Can I say that?  I think I said the same thing about "The French Dispatch", so he just keeps getting more Wes Anderson-like, whatever that means.  I think this is a compliment, like Hitchcock kept getting more Hitchcock-like as he grew as an artist, and his later films like "Psycho", "The Birds" and "Frenzy", many would argue are among his best.

The whole time, I couldn't tell if the desert scenery was real or not, those mesas looked pretty fake, but who knows?  And sometimes it felt like there was a backdrop just ten feet beyond the train tracks, like maybe none of it was real.  But that's OK, because all of the framing devices used here.  Although it looks like a technicolor movie to us, the events taking place in Asteroid City are really a play, as explained by the framing device, which is in black-and-white and narrated by Bryan Cranston.  The b&w scenes show us how the play was conceived, written and then cast, while the color scenes ARE the play, which is set at the site of the amateur stargazers competition in the Arizona or New Mexico (?) desert.  Every once in a while, an atom bomb test can be seen in the background, which makes sense because the play is set in 1955, and that's what was happening back then. (Wait, is that right?)

Let me go back to "The French Dispatch" for just a second.  Anderson's previous film was a series of small, barely-connected vignettes.  The only thing they had in common was that each short represented an article from this American newspaper's French bureau, reprinted in the newspaper's last edition after the death of its acclaimed editor/publisher.  So there was sort of a "Paris, I Love You" feel to it, only all of the shorts were made by the same director, who just wanted to explore a whole host of different short ideas.  If I had one complaint about "French Dispatch" it was a lack of focus, none of these stories were strong enough on their own to be a feature-length story, so sure, by all means, lets mash them together and jump from one to the next.  God, if this guy could only pick ONE of these stories and really, really develop it, maybe he'd have something.  Instead he told multiple stories and had MANY somethings, but still, the stories were largely unconnected, except that each fictional reporter worked for the same editor.

Maybe Anderson got the hint, because there's only ONE story here (OK, two, really) and it's feature length, and he really took the time to develop the situation around this fictional 1955 desert town, famous for its crater and the asteroid that landed there. (NITPICK POINT: Even if this were an "asteroid", which it's not, it's more likely a comet, once it enters the Earth's atmosphere it becomes a meteor, and then if it hits the Earth, it becomes a meteorite.  So the film should be called "Meteorite City", only it's not.  One character mentions this, but it's quickly discarded, I guess the name's just not as catchy.). But then my question becomes, do we really NEED the framing device?  Would "Asteroid City" work better without it?  It doesn't really matter, because Wes Anderson has earned the right to put a framing device in his film if he feels like it belongs, or if he thinks that actors like Willem Dafoe and Adrien Brody just look better in black and white.

The whole time though, whenever it would cut back to the information about how the play was written or how the actors were chosen or how the director got divorced and essentially lived in the theater for the whole run of the play, all that took me out of the reality of the color scenes, each time it brought to my attention that the events depicted in Asteroid City were not real, and that messes with the illusion of film, the suspension of disbelief.  If you DON'T tell me the film's not real, then by default it IS real.  Reminding me that nothing is real is not helpful at that point, it only reminds me that there are different levels of reality.  Not just two, but three - I'm watching actors like Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks, who are real people, playing fictional actors who are also appearing in a play as fictional characters, and then it starts to resemble either "Birdman" or "Inception" or something. (Forget "Inception", that's not right, let's stick with "Birdman", where Michael Keaton played Riggan Thompson, who was appearing in an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler play. Again, three levels of reality there, and then you throw the "Birdman" fantasy stuff in on top of that? Genius. It might be time for me to re-watch "Birdman".)

I really want to believe that it was always this way, that there was always going to be this framing device, BUT I am forced to admit that it's ALSO possible that Wes Anderson wrote the story for the colored scenes in the desert town first, and then the events depicted were so fantastic, so out-there that he had to add the framing device to kind of throw some cold water on the fantasy, rein it in and remind everyone that nothing in any film is really real, all the world's a stage and all the people, merely players, or something like that.  Now I don't really know how it all came to be, but I would like to find out. 

I don't want to talk too much about what HAPPENS in "Asteroid City", the play or the movie, but I suppose it's inevitable, I've got to get into it, just a little maybe.  It's clear this film was made during the pandemic, not just because some typical Wes Anderson actors (like Bill Murray) weren't available, but because of what happens one night in the desert town, all of the visitors get quarantined there for an extended period of time.  So this was filmed between August and October 2021, with one of the widest, weirdest casts to ever be in a "bubble" together, and sets were built in Spain.  Yeah, the desert landscape was just one big diorama (sorry) and everything was fake, the garage, the diner, the observatory.  It's typical for a film, sure, why look all over for the sets you need when you can just BUILD them to Wes Anderson's specifications?  

In this year of actors playing double-roles, and I'll try to cover this again at the end of regulation play this year - "The Green Knight", "The Flash", "Glass Onion" and "The Devil's Double" among them - nearly everyone here is playing a double role, if you think about it.  Jason Schwartzman is playing an actor named Jones Hall, who gets cast to play war photographer Augie Steenbeck in the play.  Scarlett Johansson plays Mercedes Ford in the framing scenes, and she's cast in the play as Midge Campbell, who is...also an actress. We don't know many of the other names of the actors in the play, they don't get much screen time in the black-and-white scenes, but we KNOW that almost everyone is doing double-duty. (Question, do the actors get paid double for technically playing two characters?  I heard that was a thing.)

And then late in the film, there's a scene where the play's writer, Conrad Earp, is appearing at an actor's workshop to get some advice, his writing is at a critical juncture, he feels he wants to include a scene where the whole cast is made to fall asleep at the same time.  So he asks the actors in the room (many of whom later join the cast of the play, it seems) pretend to be asleep, and then as one they all keep repeating the same line, over and over.  I won't say here what it is, but it's intriguing, also confusing and maddening - what does it mean?  To date, Wes Anderson has chosen not to reveal what it means, or how it is relevant to either storyline.  So yeah, I'd love to learn what that's all about, eventually at some point.  But first I think I need to re-watch both "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "Birdman", for comparative purposes. 

This film had an enormous cast - so no matter where I put it in the chain, I'm going to feel like maybe there could have been a better place. Like, should I have saved this for a time when I really REALLY needed it, and only a film that had both Adrien Brody and Maya Hawke in it would keep my chain going?  And then, like, where do I go from HERE, when there are so many possibilities, and this is like a gateway to a thousand different paths?  That sort of thing drives me mad, so maybe it's better that I'm clearing it off tonight - it's serving a purpose, connecting the Liev Schreiber films with the Tom Hanks films, and that should be enough to satisfy me.  But damn, the places I could have gone from here - this could have linked to "The Whale", "Three Thousand Years of Longing", "Jerry and Marge Go Large", "Daybreakers", "The Daytrippers", "Clockwatchers", "Babylon", "Gretel & Hansel", "80 For Brady", and that's just the stuff currently on my watchlist - what about "Barbie"?  Eh, who knows if I'll even watch "Barbie", ever?  I should just learn to be content with the linking that I've already set up for this year, then I'll worry about next year next year. 

Also starring Jason Schwartzman (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Scarlett Johansson (last heard in "Sing 2"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "News of the World"), Jeffrey Wright (last heard in "Say Hey, Willie Mays!"), Tilda Swinton (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Edward Norton (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Adrien Brody (last seen in "See How They Run"), Hope Davis (last seen in "The Nines"), Stephen Park (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Maya Hawke (last seen in "Human Capital"), Steve Carell (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "A KIss Before Dying"), Hong Chau (last seen in "The Menu"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Northman"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "Dope"), Jake Ryan (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Sophia Lillis (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Fisher Stevens (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Ethan Josh Lee, Grace Edwards, Aristou Meehan (last seen in "The Contractor"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Ella Faris, Gracie Faris, Willan Faris, Ivan Lopez, Celia Bermejo, Zoe Bernard, Brayden Frasure, Preston Mota, Elvira Arce, Paul Kynman (last seen in "Tristram Shandy"), Sam Marra, Ara Hollyday, Seu Jorge (last seen in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"), Jarvis Cocker (also last seen in "The French Dispatch"). 

RATING: 8 out of 10 famous people mentioned in the "Memory Game".