Several years ago, I went with my family on a rare trip for us all to see a movie together. I don’t remember what we went to see, probably whatever was the blockbuster out in December 2004 that seemed like it would appeal to everyone. What I do vividly remember is that when we got to the theater, my family surprised me by telling me that they’d gotten us all tickets for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, simply because I’d said I was looking forward to seeing it.
During the scene where the crew finds the jaguar shark, and Bill Murray delivers the line, “I wonder if it remembers me,” I burst into tears. Afterwards on the drive home, I said that I’d loved it. The rest of my family said some variation on “I’m glad you liked it. I didn’t get it.”
I mention that mostly to illustrate how awesome and generous and kind my family is. But also to say that I now understand exactly how they felt. I watched Asteroid City, and I had the clear impression that it was trying very hard to say something profound, and I just plain didn’t get it.
When I finished it last night, I was content to say that it was very pretty, and I appreciated that it went so hard on its 50s aesthetic, and it did actually make me laugh a few times. (The only one I remember is when the stop-motion alien realizes he’s being photographed, and he poses with the meteor). And I thought it was interesting to switch between the movie and the movie as a play about the development and production of the play that is the movie.
But when I woke up this morning, I was bizarrely, irrationally, irritated by it. What was the point of all that?!
I guess I can appreciate the notion of Wes Anderson attempting to take the twee artifice of his movies as far as it can possibly go. Asteroid City makes the deliberate, tightly-controlled artificiality not just a stylistic choice, but an idea. An insistence that the style of unnatural compositions; stilted delivery of overly-wordy, mannered dialogue; and scene structure that leaves the purpose of each scene enigmatic; is all just presentation, but it’s not the point. That all of it is artificial, down to its core, but the point isn’t to make people believe the artifice, but to understand and feel the universal ideas floating underneath in a way that’s emotional instead of intellectual.
So, for instance, you can be looking at too many recognizable actors crammed into a fake submarine looking at a clearly fake fish and still be suddenly moved to tears. I got the sense that the equivalent scene in Asteroid City was supposed to be the one in which Jason Schwartzman’s character steps out of both the movie and the play-that-is-the-movie, and he listens as Margot Robbie’s character describes her scene that was cut from the production. But if there was something there that was intended to hit me like an emotional ton of bricks, I deftly avoided it, somehow.
I saw a blurb from a review where the reviewer confidently and simply summed it up as being “about grief.” But that’s a topic that seems to run through all of Anderson’s movies; it’s kind of like patting yourself on the back for saying a Martin Scorsese movie is “about Italians.”
Maybe it’s an extension of the idea of mannerisms piled on mannerisms, to the point that we’re completely out of touch with how we feel and why we do things. Like the conversations with Scarlett Johansson’s character, where she reveals that she’s been acting so long that she’s aware of how she’s supposed to feel, and she can perform emotions, but doesn’t actually feel them. Or the repeated scenes where the moments of genuine emotional connection in Asteroid City are described instead of performed. Or for that matter, the whole format of plays within movies within plays. (Which they completely undermine by having Bryan Cranston appear in the color segments, just for what felt like a gag that didn’t land, which annoyed the hell out of me).
Anyway, the whole point of “One Thing I Like” was to keep myself from rambling on trying to interpret everything about a movie, so I’ll just name one thing I like: Tilda Swinton’s performance as Dr Hickenlooper. There wasn’t a bad performance in the movie; everybody was doing exactly what was required by the handbook of How To Act In A Wes Anderson Film. But Swinton somehow seemed to be so thoroughly present. (I thought the same about Cate Blanchett’s performance in The Life Aquatic).
Not really naturalistic — because a naturalistic performance in this kind of movie would feel tone-deaf — but simply like she actually existed in this universe, instead of being an actor playing a character who exists in this universe. I realize I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that Tilda Swinton is an astonishingly good actor, but this relatively small part made me think that I would believe her in anything.
Oh, I also liked that in the scene where Jason Schwartzman’s character is auditioning for the part in front of the playwright (played by Edward Norton), we get increasingly clear shots of the homoerotic art hanging on the playwright’s walls. The focus is on the performance, while a painting of a bare ass is clearly visible in the background, in spotlight. It’s never addressed or explained. (But I would’ve greatly preferred it if it had been left completely unaddressed, and hadn’t ended with a kiss that makes it feel like a cheap gag).
