Watched “Asteroid City” and Now I’m (More) Depressed
When I finished Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City I felt a profound sense of sadness I hadn’t felt in a longish time. There was something so vibrant, so idyllic in the 50s desert wasteland that crushed the inside of my brain into a tin can and made me wish I was much older but also much younger. It’s the rare film that I find hard to judge because it really is that mind boggling in the scope of it’s absorption. I enjoyed it though but with a heavy heart.
Asteroid City feels in many ways like an ode to the 50s but it’s also a rumination on loss and youth, classic Wes Anderson themes, but specifically the loss of a mother. There is deep and distinct hole in these characters, a feeling of hope and disappointment, an indescribable feeling that a natural tenderness is missing. No scene encapsulates it better than the Tom Hanks scene where he finds his granddaughters burying something in the ground. He asks if it’s their mother and they nod and he says she can stay there for a few days but when they leave they will dig her up and bury her in his garden. It’s a perfect explanation of the film’s theme of loss, that the mother is gone and het her bones are embedded in the Earth wherever they are. Her existence in the past also fits with the idea of Asteroid City as a town, a place where an asteroid once landed, a landmark of natural history where the past lies layered in the Earth, untouchable beneath the surface yet lurking in the air like a ghost. An unfinished overpass that leads nowhere alludes to this heavenly connection, however subtly.
At one point an alien comes down and takes the remnants of an asteroid, prompting a 50s style panic which locks everyone in the town under quarantine while the US does it’s classic gig of trying to convince it’s citizens something crazy didn’t just happen. Later the alien comes back and returns it. As it turns out he was simply inventorying it, assigning it a name and number for it to be remembered by. The alien himself is timid, shy, nothing like the terrifying images we have of aliens in everyday life. I loved the design and writing in these scenes and felt it really tied the films themes together.
There’s a whole meta element to the movie. It is a Wes Anderson film after all. As it turns out the movie in color that we watch is a play and the behind the scenes is in black and white. There’s a series of sub plots which add to the oddness of the ordeal and add some additional quirkiness to an already quirky film. Truthfully these moments don’t add terribly much plot wise, but they do a lot for the tone and pacing of the film. Seeing behind the scenes of this play also allows Anderson to play with his cast in different and inventive ways. Speaking of which…..
The cast of this movie is loaded. Even though Bill Murray couldn’t make it (Covid) Steve Carell does an admirable job taking his place. Scarlett Johansson is great, as is Jason Schwartzman. Margot Robbie is in this film in a picture and a scene. Maya Hawke is amazing as a 50s schoolteacher who is trying, to no avail, to get the children to focus on something besides the alien. Jeff Goldblum plays the alien. Adrien Brody is the director of the play, who is asleep during it’s run. Tom Hanks is poignant and wise. Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton and Bryan Cranston all have small roles that they kill. It’s an awe inspiring cast and they each get their moments.
There is great sadness and beauty in the film. I often felt like I was looking at a painting, a window into a past that didn’t exist, somewhere better than here and better than then. But even in this painted world there is loss and pain, sadness and mistrust. A great longing for something better, something older and grander. It’s a sharp aching pain, like sucking wind with cracked ribs. I felt, as I often do, a desire to be somewhere else, somewhere I had never been and could never go, a place that did not exist in space or time, or even in my mind.
The 50s was a very hopeful time to be young but perhaps a very sad time to be old. As one character says in a speech in the film “My father fought in the war to end all wars. It didn’t.” He concludes by saying that “if you wanted a nice quiet life you chose the wrong time to be alive.” Which is true. The world changed 100 times over between 1900 and 1960 and not all in good ways. They say that when you die the world dies with you, but this was a world that had died many times before.
Asteroid City lives off hope but also nostalgia, a sense that we missed it all and are still missing it, and that are all of our aspirations are simply human folly. Our hopes and dreams are often as tragic as they are noble and our fates are just as much the dirt’s as they are the stars and someday we will simply be dust and tumbleweeds. Perhaps that’s why the film has such a sharp sense of humor, because the inherent idea of the film will crush you, both personally and universally.
It is a very sad thing to lose a mother. Because even stripped down to its most insensitive level it is the death of someone who cares for you. And when you get old less and less people care for you and nothing can replace the feeling of unconditional love. Asteroid City captures this pain in glimmers and slight mentions, an obsession with photography and a brutal honesty. It’s a movie that looks to break it’s internal struggles into splinters and carry them around like a sad glitter that gleams of humanity and dreams.
In the end Jason Schwartzman and his children are the last to leave Asteroid City, leaving it perhaps worse than they found it, but also more idyllic and Edenic that it was before. Ultimately they leave their mother’s ashes in the desert. I don’t have anything else to say about that, or this film. The passage of time always leaves a barren landscape in its wake and there are no survivors, but sometimes the memories are rich and more vivid than even our very dreams.
