Wes Anderson

ASTEROID CITY: deadpan, witty, whimsical…and who cares?

by
Scarlett Johansson in ASTEROID CITY. Courtesy of Focus Features.

With Asteroid City, Wes Anderson has made yet another remarkably clever movie without an emotional core.

The main story takes place in the Cold War 1950s, in a Southwestern desert motel/cafe/gas station built around a roadside attraction meteor crater. The spot is so remote that it also hosts atomic bomb testing. The military-scientific complex has invited some gifted teenagers, accompanied by their parents, to receive science awards in this Atomic Age setting. After a space alien landing, the military quarantines everyone, and the characters all sit and wait, and then react. They are entirely deadpan, reflecting the absurdity of the setting, the story and the era.

Two of the parents are a noted ward photographer (Jason Schwartzman) who is recently widowed and a movie star (Scarlet Johansson). He is foundering, as he suppresses his grief. She is highly functional despite an extreme case of narcissism.

Asteroid City employs the device of a play within the movie. This gives Anderson three more roles to cast with movie stars – a playwright (Edward Norton), a narrator (Brian Cranston) and a director (Adrien Brody – very funny). It also provides even more emotional detachment – these characters aren’t supposed to be real people; these are actors playing those characters. But the main story is the one set in the desert.

ASTEROID CITY. Courtesy of Focus Features.

Because of Anderson’s singular Kodachrome-in-the-desert color palette, Asteroid City looks like no other movie. And the so-called play really looks like a movie. 

Asteroid City contains some very funny bits; among the best are:

  • The brainiac teenagers, each with a photographic memory, play a name-memory game.
  • An elementary school field trip bursts into an impromptu movie musical dance number. 
  • Little girls ceremoniously bury a Tupperware with their parent’s ashes between motel cabins.
  • Jeff Goldblum is a perfect casting choice for a pivotal cameo. 
  • There’s a perky rendition of Freight Train with a dancing roadrunner in the closing credits.
  • Johansson’s actress gets the funniest line, when she inquires about a photo. 

Johansson’s contained performance as a ridiculously self-absorbed celebrity works well because Johansson doesn’t try to act ridiculous. Schwartzman is playing a Method-type actor playing an emotionally repressed neurotic, so maybe he is trying to be annoying…Along with Schwartzman, Johansson, Cranston, Norton, Brody and Goldblum, the cast includes Tom Hanks, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Matt Dillon, Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, Steve Carrell, Tilda Swinton, Hong Chau, Rupert Friend, Steven Park and Bob Balaban.

Jason Schwartzman in ASTEROID CITY. Courtesy of Focus Features.

The acclaimed Wes Anderson is undeniably an auteur, whose films are highly imaginative. The finest film actors love working with him, and studios will finance his films. Yet, I have very strongly ambivalent feelings about his work. I’ve loved his Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom and pretty much scorned his other movies. After The Grand Budapest Hotel, I refused to even see The French Dispatch, and I only saw Asteroid City because it was extremely convenient for me.

I have friends who enjoy Wes Anderson movies, and I can understand why.  His films are breezy and a relief from all that is stupid in the culture. His backgrounds are filled with Easter Egg witticisms which are fun to scan for, and it’s fun to count off the movie stars (hey, that’s Matt Dillon!). He takes the viewer into worlds that only he can imagine.

But I’ve come to realize that Anderson often makes very clever movies whose characters don’t engage me. I really, really cared about Max Fischer in Rushmore and and Sam in Moonrise Kingdom. I never cared what happened to Steve Zissou or any of the fucking Tenenbaums. All wit and no heart doesn’t do it for me.

In Asteroid City, I really only cared about photojournalist’s son Woodrow (Jack Ryan) and the movie star’s daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). That’s it.

Asteroid City may be a showpiece of deadpan wit and whimsy…but who cares?

The Grand Budapest Hotel: wry and imaginative

by

fiennes
Like all of writer-director Wes Anderson’s films, The Grand Budapest Hotel is wry and imaginative, but it’s not one of his near-masterpieces (Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom). Ray Fiennes plays one of Anderson’s unique creations, the imperious and shady concierge of an Eastern European hotel between the world wars. His sidekick is the rookie lobby boy (Tony Revolori). Together, they navigate a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride involving the concierge’s additional vocations of gigolo and lovable scoundrel.

The cast is superb and absurdly deep.  I counted THIRTEEN Academy Award nominees (mostly for acting, but Jeff Goldblum won an Oscar for a Live Short and Bob Balaban was one of the producers for Best Picture nominee Gosford Park).  It’s overkill, because fine actors like Edward Norton, Tom Wilkinson, Lea Seydoux and Larry Pine don’t really have much to do.  F. Murray Abraham, as the lobby boy turned old man, does stand out.

And that points out the weak spot in The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I kept saying to myself things like, “Look at the makeup on Tilda Swinton”,  “Is that Jeff Goldblum behind that beard?” and “Awwright! Bill Murray!”.  That tells me that I wasn’t fully engaged in the story.  Some critics have pointed out the historical sweep from the post-imperial 1930s through the crucible of WWII to the boring industrial totalitarianism of the 1950s.  For me, that’s still not enough to make a great movie.  But The Grand Budapest Hotel is fun to watch, and that’s not bad.

DVD of the Week: Moonrise Kingdom

by

In the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom, two 1965 twelve-year-olds fall into profound platonic love and run away together, with a cadre of sadly weary adult authority figures in comic pursuit.  Director Wes Anderson has had some quirky hits (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and some quirky misses (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but he’s always original.  This is a hit.

While very funny, the story is deeply sympathetic to the children.  As Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com put it,

Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.

We know that we’re watching something unique from the very first shot, in which the camera swivels to show each room in a home as family members enter their spaces and define their relationships to each other.  As The Wife, pointed out, we look into the family home as would a child looking into a dollhouse.

In a year that is especially rich with able child film actors, the kids here (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman) are excellent.  Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are also very good as the sad, burnt-out adults.  Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel show up briefly in broad comic roles.

Since Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, Baby Boomers will appreciate the Mad Men moments –  a portable record player,  a coonskin cap and adult indifference to a kid simultaneously holding lighter fluid and a flaming torch.  The girl’s books have cover art typical of the era’s quality young fiction (a la A Wrinkle in Time).

This is an excellent movie – and one that you haven’t seen before.

Moonrise Kingdom: wistfully sweet and visually singular

by

In the wistfully sweet and visually singular Moonrise Kingdom, two 1965 twelve-year-olds fall into profound platonic love and run away together, with a cadre of sadly weary adult authority figures in comic pursuit.  Director Wes Anderson has had some quirky hits (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and some quirky misses (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but he’s always original.  This is a hit.

While very funny, the story is deeply sympathetic to the children.  As Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com put it,

Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.

We know that we’re watching something unique from the very first shot, in which the camera swivels to show each room in a home as family members enter their spaces and define their relationships to each other.  As The Wife, pointed out, we look into the family home as would a child looking into a dollhouse.

In a year that is especially rich with able child film actors, the kids here (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayman) are excellent.  Bruce Willis, Ed Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are also very good as the sad, burnt-out adults.  Tilda Swinton and Harvey Keitel show up briefly in broad comic roles.

Since Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, Baby Boomers will appreciate the Mad Men moments –  a portable record player,  a coonskin cap and adult indifference to a kid simultaneously holding lighter fluid and a flaming torch.  The girl’s books have cover art typical of the era’s quality young fiction (a la A Wrinkle in Time).

This is an excellent movie – and one that you haven’t seen before.