ASTEROID BARELY GRAZES
latest jaunt with Wes has me dizzy
Space Tourists,
On Friday, I saw Asteroid City, the latest from Wes Anderson, who created me.
I loved the big scene with the alien, and I was delighted by a number of other moments too -- gags, actors in silly hats finding gravitas, really fucking good vintage signage (the lunch counter!).
But overall it didn't do much for me. I watched the film at a remove, distressingly distant from my pops. That may have to do with some life stuff on my mind. But it's essentially the same feeling I had in The French Dispatch.
I feel like Wes has gone down a trail that not all of us are built for. There's a sheer density of information in these last couple films that I find bewildering, especially in the absence of one or a couple involving central threads that pull me along. If I'm intellectually overwhelmed & not emotionally involved, that really doesn't work for me. I don't enjoy the films of Shane Carruth or the books of Thomas Pynchon. They are niche pleasures, for audiences smaller than Wes has turned out for his big commercial successes, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is sort of similar in narrative construction, but vastly more emotional. (I know Asteroid did well this last weekend, but with a RT Audience score of 62%, I will eat my hat if it continues making real money. Those grosses are inflated by the “experience” ticket prices at the Sunset 5.)
In Asteroid, I was frustrated trying to keep up with the sheer number of framing devices -- is this the-play-within-the-movie or the backstage-of-the-play-within-the-movie? -- and I lost my bearings early & hard. There's also the range of references to real-life figures and invocations of bigger ideas. Dispatch was a worse offender in this regard: It's about The New Yorker, which I read every week, but by the middle of the second vignette, I had no fucking idea what was going on.
But this latest film has an added layer of thematic complexity that I admire but suspect is something of a trap, even for great filmmakers, and that's what I feel compelled to email you about…
PhD Films
Pastiche, Historical, Dense.
So the movie takes place in 1955, and between the atom bomb tests, repression, & Ed Norton playing Tennessee Williams, it's attempting to capture & comment on so much of that period. But the movie also has a quarantine, journalistic suppression, and a divided public square. So it's about the fifties, but it's also about now, I guess? Could've worked! Didn't for me.
That may because Asteroid is reaching awfully high: to be something like The Great American Novel, in film form. The aim, it seems, is to both evoke and cure our nostalgia for midcentury America. To show what was cool, and what was wrong, but also what has been lost since. To capture & reckon with it all, as a comprehensive history, a cultural critique, & a human story.
And I don’t know that film is the best medium for that? A doorstopper-sized book, like Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, feels appropriate for the task. Meanwhile I honestly don’t who has pulled off this sort of storytelling in the feature film format — at least in a way that’s widely resonant as of late.
I made a list of recent-ish films that seem similarly ambitious: period pieces grandly concerned with the American experiment, dense with historical allusion, yet lavishly budgeted…
Asteroid City
Inherent Vice
White Noise
Mank
Hail, Caesar! (dying to revisit…)
The Nice Guys
The Irishman
Bad Times at the El Royale
And the only one that worked commercially: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
(If Beale Street Could Talk and The Fabelmans are both movies I love that didn’t resonate widely that could be in this group. But I don’t think they were especially dense with information.)
(Last, I haven’t seen Babylon or Motherless Brooklyn, but I suspect they’d belong here too.)
The business side of these movies follow a pattern: The only filmmakers who get to attempt this sort of thing have been boomer genius white guys at moments in their careers when studios have been thrilled to work with them i.e. Noah Baumbach's $100M+ White Noise was greenlit after Marriage Story, which was Netflix's big Oscar play & overperformed on the service; Bad Times at the El Royale was greenlit after Drew Goddard's bulletproof script for The Martian made Fox about half a billion more than they expected. These movies happen because of filmmaker relationships and because they reflect what studios think will win Oscars. But none of them has won Best Picture...
That may be because they are so full of information in the form of dialogue, context, and allusions, and you appreciate all of that more if you know the history i.e. Most people weren't down with Mank, which I get, but it might be because there simply isn't space in a film to explain that the governor's race in the background, which has dire humanitarian stakes and in turn endows the movie with an emotional depth... that nobody got. I feel like there’s a lot of that sort of exclusion-by-lack-of-information happening in Asteroid and, to varying degrees, throughout the list.
Of the movies above, only one worked out commercially: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It may not be as ambitious: it’s less a novelistic reckoning than a counter-history fantasy. It's also the only one that I consider to be conservative -- a straightforward revenge fantasy against the hippies -- but it also stands apart because it works as a wild, sexy entertainment. Shane Black's The Nice Guys is its kinder-hearted twin, and it flopped.
Funnily enough, Tarantino just published a paperback novelization of Hollywood.
One last books v.s. movies comparison, of a very different stripe: I was really digging No Hard Feelings, the new comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence as a cougar in Montauk, till it petered out in the last half-hour or so. Oh well. But I was even more absorbed by another story about a down-and-out sexpot in the Hamptons: Emma Cline's new novel The Guest is a must.
Skylight Forever Y'all,
Max