Review: Asteroid City
by Jennifer Espinoza
Asteroid City is the kind of movie I should hate. Its gestures towards stuffy formalism, its worn, twee, cutesy signifiers overlaid upon ugly human realities, and the way the middle class, emotional repression of the characters seems to suffuse every element of the craft of the film should all be a turn-off to me—a working-class Latina transsexual lesbian poet who thrives off of raw, naked emotional expression—but, instead, I personally experienced Wes Anderson’s latest work as a film that utilized those aforementioned elements with a careful intent towards trying to understand rather than simply portray the emotional stuffiness of bourgeois ennui.
It’s one thing as a writer/director to showcase the experiences of an economic class you’ve lived in your whole life—it’s another thing to try to explain it. Anderson achieves this not didactically, but rather via formal choices, such as a striking moment towards the end when a scene from the black and white “real world” portion of the film begins to intermittently introduce color during striking pull-back shots of various characters. Everyone in the scene chants “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”. It is a haunting moment, one whose imagery suggests an unexpected (and perhaps unintentional) homage to the 50s-black-and-white sitcom town-themed film Pleasantville (the first shot of the aforementioned scene begins with a Dutch angle, a shot that was used extensively throughout Pleasantville). The 1997 film similarly uses an artificial setting played as real by almost everyone in it.
Like Pleasantville, Asteroid City portrays a nostalgic image of a bygone America in order to challenge the idea that it ever existed. Where Pleasantville leans into melodrama, wonder, and emotional frenzy (all to beautiful effect), Asteroid City takes Anderson’s trademark fussiness and spins it around like a flying saucer cheekily dancing above a desert crater, leaning us towards the absurd in the process.
Anderson does what the best artists do as they mature—you grapple with your choices as an artist, try to understand them, and in doing so you come to a deeper understanding of yourself and of the cultural and historical contexts that produced you. Asteroid City is ultimately a film containing multiple stories that are all also one story; in the same way that we are a product of an unknowable maelstrom of circumstances beyond our grasp or measure, so are the stories we tell.
Like the tragic writer of the play-film within the film, we are all destined to fail to tell the story of ourselves. The best we can do is to embrace every outlandish and bittersweet moment, set the materials of our lives into motion, and let the players do their thing.