Asteroid City (2023) Review

the rating: ****

the story: Young achievers are unexpectedly at the heart of an unlikely alien encounter.

the review: So I've really gotten into Wes Anderson, finally, and predictably it's just when critics have gotten over him.  I mean, they've been over him for at least a decade, and I didn't get into him, really, until a few years ago, so it's not that surprising.  Of course I had to see Asteroid City.  Of course it was likely that I would enjoy it.  I expected to like it more, but I definitely liked it.  The appearances of Tom Hanks and Steve Carell actually created a kind of uncanny valley, that breaks the typical mold of total control on Anderson's part.  Most actors who appear in his films fit the mold perfectly; Hanks can't help but be Hanks, and the same is true of Carell.  Everyone else (Owen Wilson is atypically absent, but Jason Schwartzman, another longtime collaborator, is back in a starring role) very much fits in nicely.

"You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."

That's how the movie ends.  This is not a spoiler.  Just as Amsterdam ends with each of the principle characters reciting the eponymous city name to the audience, and Cradle Will Rock builds to the climactic moment from the 1937 play it's built around, Asteroid City concludes with the cast of stage actors reciting this line.  How much you appreciate the movie is likely tied to how much thought you put into it.  The movie preceding it plays out along two separate tracks: one is a presentation of a play, and the other as if the play were happening in reality and not on a stage.  Schwartzman's character pulls himself out of the play when he struggles to understand why his character chooses to burn his hand on a grill, and so clearly Anderson's intent is for his audience to figure out his intent, too.

"You can't wake up if you don't go to sleep."  There will be plenty of speculation about it for those interested, and so maybe this review isn't really the place for it, but the story pretty happily busies itself with the story of Schwartzman's character in the story trying to have an honest reckoning with himself and his young family, something he's been avoiding for the past few weeks.  Eventually an alien shows up (an absolutely perfect moment, a perfect marriage of Anderson's best live action and stop-motion instincts).  Around all this, as Anderson movies tend to go, a niche community (well, in this case, two) is explored, although it's not really the point, but how the community(s) reacts to circumstances.  

Me, I'd choose, if forced, to interpret the point of Asteroid City to warn against comforting complacency, that in order to make progress you have to challenge yourself.  But this isn't possible unless you're first willing to admit your complacency.

At any rate, Hanks and Carell are the signifiers that although this acts and behaves like a typical Anderson movie, it really isn't.  He is very obviously trying to make a point.  It's very possible this will raise Asteroid City's value for me, later, when I will have more fully digested the results.  But it's certainly another excellent effort on his part.

The films of Wes Anderson

It took me years to become a fan of Wes Anderson, but now I'm as big a fan as anyone.

The first Anderson film I watched was 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, released during the height of my cinema-going mania.  I loved it.  By 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, my trips had slowed to a crawl, so my next Anderson was a copy of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was curious about, finally, because it was a Bill Murray film.  And I loved it.  Then I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I loved it.

But I didn't love Wes Anderson until 2018's Isle of Dogs.  I didn't just love Isle of Dogs, I fell in love with it.  It wasn't just an experience I really enjoyed, but internalized.  I couldn't get over it.  I obsessed over it.  Like Fantastic Mr. Fox, it was stop-motion animated, but it had a heart that swallowed all its eccentricities and maximized them.  It was a perfect movie.  

When I saw 2021's The French Dispatch, I knew I was a fan.  So I had to finally catch up with everything else.

I had first heard of Anderson with 1998's Rushmore, along with pretty much everyone else.  I had been subscribed to Entertainment Weekly since 1996.  When Entertainment Weekly obsessed over something, I was never sure I was actually the target audience.  They also obsessed over Election, starring Reese Witherspoon, and I still have never been completely sold on Witherspoon, have never seen either of the Legally Blonde movies (but love her in Walk the Line and This Means War).  Sometimes Entertainment Weekly obsessed over things I knew I would never like (never became a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), minutiae designed to appeal to geeky insiders.  I knew Bill Murray was in Rushmore, but this was before Lost in Translation (which even that, I didn't see for years, although in this instance not for lack of interest), when Murray's career was in flux.  He appeared, prominently, in Space Jam, and it's never thought of as a Bill Murray movie.  Hollywood seems determined to kill the careers of its stars, and Murray's career had all but been killed at that point.  Rushmore, although I didn't know it at the time, was the start of his comeback.

Entertainment Weekly also gushed over 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums, and this one I sort of actively avoided for years!  I always just assumed it was Keeping up with the Kardashians before anyone cared a thing about anyone named Kardashian (except that one lawyer), just a case of Hollywood preening itself.  

I caught up with 2007's The Darjeeling Unlimited and Moonrise Kingdom first.  As it happened, these were also films Entertainment Weekly had warned against, having themselves cooled to Wes Anderson.  And of course I loved them.  Then I happened upon a Criterion Collection edition of Tenenbaums.  Then I just sought out Rushmore and Anderson's first movie, 1996's Bottle Rocket.  And, darn it, I loved them all!

So I have a definite new addition to my collection of favorite filmmakers.  Bottle Rocket, cowritten and costarring Owen Wilson (he's really pretty much avoided writing anything since, which is a shame), and of course he pops up in pretty much all of Anderson's movies, and he's among the most likeable actors I know.  He was even in the 2022 Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy Marry Me, and of course I loved that, too, so he's certainly still showing up in good material, an unlikely but very solid career.

A different version of this blog (aside from being more active) would do a whole series on Anderson's films, explaining everything that's great about them, but here it's enough to say I haven't encountered any director who has so thoroughly mastered his art direction, who has so completely perfected his style, and who has so consistently delivered.  Even among my other favorites, there's a range of results.  There's really not a weak link in Anderson's filmography.  Critics considered French Dispatch to be just a series of scenes with no real point.  They missed the point.  No real surprise, there.  Where Entertainment Weekly will momentarily cherish Anderson, they're hopping on a trend.  And they hop right back off.  Isle of Dogs didn't even win Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, but it was certainly my favorite movie from 2018.  And, really, it wasn't even close.  (Though that year was ripe with unlikely greats.)

All of which is to say, I will be appreciating Wes Anderson for years to come, thank you very much.  (Of his two upcoming films, one releases on Netflix.  To this point, I have never subscribed to the service, not even to view Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, which remains frustratingly locked onto it.  I bitterly resent the streaming era.  I may have to reconsider, finally.)

Isle of Dogs (2018)

rating: *****

the story: A corrupt politician creates a conspiracy to exile all dogs, but his adopted son mounts a campaign to rescue them.

what it's all about: The exact parallels aren't there, and they don't need to be, but Isle of Dogs might be the first great cinematic response to Trump, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.  Its plot can be seen as a response to Trump's immigration policies.  But regardless of all that, it's a great film, the crowning artistic achievement of Wes Anderson's career. 

Anderson has made a career of creating quirky movies.  He's become increasingly ambitious over the years.  2001's The Royal Tenenbaums was his first widely-acknowledged success, but Anderson took a giant leap forward with his follow-up, 2004's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which can be interpreted as a modern, absurdist's version of Moby-Dick.  2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stylistic herald to Isle of Dogs, saw Anderson begin to break free entirely of conventions, while 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel saw him emerge on a truly grand scale for the first time. 

Isle of Dogs, no matter how you interpret it, even if it's only to be understood as a generic cautionary tale, is a wholly contained accomplishment, a complete vision capable of being enjoyed on multiple levels.  The title itself is a nod and a wink; you can love it if all you are is a dog lover.  This is an era that relishes simple pleasures, after all.  You can relish it for the rich vocal cast, a true embarrassment of riches that continues Grand Budapest Hotel's most simple pleasure, all those small roles filled by well-known actors.  You have Bryan Cranston, still justifiably riding the wave of his breakthrough performance in Breaking Bad, in the lead role.  You have Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber just below him.  You have Bill Murray, you have Jeff Goldblum, you have Scarlett Johansson, you have Bob Balaban, Greta Gerwig, Harvey Keitel.  You even have Fisher Stevens!  You have Courtney B. Vance as narrator! 

You can appreciate it as a boy's quest movie.  You can appreciate it as the rare movie omitting subtitles despite heavy usage of Japanese characters speaking Japanese.  You can appreciate it for subverting the "white savior" concept, despite criticism that it plays into that concept.  Gerwig voices an American schoolgirl who leads a peoples revolution against the corrupt politician, but in the end it isn't her actions that produce the happy ending, but the adopted son's, who is Japanese, and the dogs, all of whom have plenty of reasons not to work together, but do.  And that's as much the message of the movie as anything else, that idea of putting aside differences that seems to have been utterly lost today. 

The music is intrinsic to all this.  Not just the taiko drumming.  Another criticism of the movie is that it takes a white man's poor understanding of Japanese culture and assumes it's being accurate.  The whole point of omitting subtitles is acknowledging the cultural divides that even the dogs represent, speaking English (dogs don't speak English).  It's metaphor, people.  There's nothing intrinsically Japanese about this movie, it's a creative choice, in a movie brilliantly bursting with them.  Very few directors in history have made as many of them, and as many of them as well, as Wes Anderson has in Isle of Dogs.  The constant drum beats, with or without taiko drums, and the anonymous indy-style songs, are incumbent of a talent who has been synthesizing the castoffs of film history for decades, and come up with a masterpiece from them.

I don't know if this is going to remain my favorite movie of 2018, but it's going to be difficult to beat.