Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

[Yakushima]

FWIW, Strand Bookstore is now selling signed copies (signed by Anderson) of Do Not Detonate, “a collection of new and classic writing on mid-century cinema and the American West” including “an exclusive interview with Wes Anderson in which the director details how the pieces collected here influenced the characters, stories, and settings in the film.” You can buy them online as well.

Thank you for the heads-up! Order placed.

[flyonthewall2983]

Wes slays DC and Pixar

[Matt]

Per-screen average of $131,666 this past weekend per Box Office Mojo, which trounces just about every film ever made except, I think, The Master, which averaged $147,000. It doubles what Everything Everywhere All at Once or The Whale took in.

The AI stealth marketing strategy is working.

[jwo17]

Per-screen average of $131,666 this past weekend per Box Office Mojo, which trounces just about every film ever made except, I think, The Master, which averaged $147,000. It doubles what Everything Everywhere All at Once or The Whale took in.

The AI stealth marketing strategy is working.

Grand Budapest opened to $202,791 PTA. A terrific opening for AC nonetheless (though their pta will drop like a mighty stone this coming weekend).

[Black Hat]

NC - I agree with the gist of the part of your post that I had the time to skim thru. This is the epitome of a bubble film but, niche, specifically for cinephiles who have been spooked by the era we're living in which is why I think a few critics wrote glowing reviews. I found it, however, obnoxious and am very curious how this does at the box office (wide, that number posted is severely skewed) because I could see it alienating the general public. It's darker than GBH but, similarly weird, somehow, morally off, and not something I would ever like to see twice.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm curious how you specifically found the film "morally off"? I've read that Wes engages with philosophical themes in a more pronounced way on this outing, so expanding on this broad observation might make for an interesting discussion

[therewillbeblus]

I liked this quite a bit, though per usual with Wes Anderson films, I feel like I need time and at least one revisit to really take in all that's happening here. There's certainly an exhaustive element to his recent Tati-at-2x-speed work, but here more than his other recent projects that feel 'busy for busy's sake', the overwhelming schema seems thematically relevant.

There's a lot of lip service paid to some Big Ideas pretty inelegantly invoked by the characters of the film's metatextual play-within-a-play,

SpoilerShow

(the loss of purpose/existential dread/lack of connection to things outside of themselves that people feel when they're forcibly isolated or quarantined, the inability to properly grieve for a loved one in such a place)

but Anderson seems to equate mentioning these themes with their interweaving into his text, and so they drown in a collection of folksy motifs and character quirks and recurring visual jokes that don't even scan properly or intersect with the film's other visual jokes or its internal logic as a stage production.

I'm not sure I agree with the specificity of Anderson's thematic intentions in your spoilerbox, though the influence of COVID is probably there and escaped me. I saw it as far more broad, and optimistic. During the end of act one, it clicked for me that this was a perfect fusion of two polar opposite influences: Altman and Greenaway. The latter has fueled both Anderson's formalist aesthetic and thematic musings for a while: on the conflict between order and disorder, obsessive control and faith, how we cope with what's known vs unknown. Anderson, like Greenaway, validates the human urge to seek, attend to, and define the external - but also understands that 'letting go' is a crucial step to grow through seeking, attending to, and defining our inner failings, examine self-doubt, and humble ourselves to accept help. This sense of individuality vs connection is present throughout Anderson's work, the latter requiring sacrifice and vulnerability. There's a very pronounced moment towards the end of the film during the 'sleep' metaphor that really emphasizes this point:

SpoilerShow

The "we all need to sleep in order to wake up" bit felt like a synthesis of this juxtaposition put into action: We need to surrender to our limitations, rest our willful cognitive parts' perceived need to have omnipotence over our lives, and invite others in to tend to us during our rest... in order to open our peripheries and enlighten our lives with progress.

This all seems appropriately moral to me. In the scene between Schwartzman and Brody towards the end, it's nailed pretty clearly: We don't need to have it all 'figured out' to participate in life. The meaning is in the journey, leaning into emotions (not covering them up, defensively explaining them away) and accepting our limitations and choosing to connect with others, allows for camaraderie to alleviate our loneliness. So it's not just a nebulous and hopeless rhetorical question of powerlessness. That's an old version of Anderson - one who hadn't quite achieved self-actualization and appropriately-simplified an ethos for himself quite yet (though those films still contain his most poignant emotional material and remain his best work overall). But Asteroid City instead provides a bridge that forges the potential (or, rather, necessity) of pointed agency with a surrender of a rigid, isolated will. It's a more accurate reading of the 'let go and let god' saying, that gives the person an actionable role in aligning their will with the humbling compromises of the universe.

the loss of purpose/existential dread/lack of connection to things outside of themselves that people feel when they're forcibly isolated or quarantined, the inability to properly grieve for a loved one in such a place

I may be misinterpreting your reading, but I think it's achieving the opposite effect. It's not 'this place' where one cannot properly grieve, but the self-constructed confines we perceive of and live in. Yet these can be (and are) removed, even within the place. Connections cannot be authentically formed, people cannot share themselves, and it's inconceivable that ashes can be buried here - it' just 'not done'... but then it is. All of that is done. Space is held for multiple things to be true and to happen, especially once our reality is tested at the end of the first act, forcibly expanding one's attention from the myopia of faux-control and introverted self-examination (that we are amusingly not let in on, though I also see how this is frustrating since it destroys almost all of the adults' chances at a shared characterization with the audience). One of the better example of this 'sharing' is how artistic expressions begin to interrupt, and eventually overtake science class, which becomes more and more accepted as the teacher yields her rigidity and makes the room that was already there all along - just blocked by human-constructed, fear-based walls.

So while this is a film about how we attempt to control our engagement with uncontrollables, or 'the mystery' - be it the corporeal or spiritual grief and irrevocable loss, or infinite space - it also welcomes (and is 'about') a sense of play, as his recent work has found more room in the sandbox for. But even in the 'playful' area, it's evoking a thematic space between the poles of serious questions, to just laugh and love and watch and listen... Life is a theatrical experience. This period of "rest" doesn't need to be an isolated, lonely, banal 'sleep'. It can and should be fun and lively and joyous and free. That's what I think Rupert Friend represents more than anything - so he "might as well be his cowboy hat" but it's that thin simplicity that seems very much the point. These characters are personified vehicles for ideas. They aren't as well-drawn as Altman's characters are in his best ensemble pieces (though many kind-of are!), but Anderson does seem to be operating similarly to Altman in his structural ambitions this time around. Thematically, he's also meditating on the mechanics of Americana with an Altmanesque humanistic sincerity and playful irony - Not stylistically of course, but the more sprawling multicharacter engagement feels uncharacteristic for his usual stance that's grounded on a central narrative and set of characters as focal points, and in line with Altman's typical explorations and concerns.

Jason Schwartzman even draws attention to how little is needed to effect his transformation into his character: all he does is fashion himself fake facial hair and voila, he's a second-rate simulacrum of a tormented family man! Anderson has let these presentation aspects of his films do some heavy lifting before (and they've all worked so much better in other contexts, with more completely realized narratives or themes or even just genres in which he's tried to operate), but never has he given so much to do so little.

I was also bothered by Schwartzman (and, really, all the adults') characterizations, though I appreciated the play-within-a-play structure and Brechtian breaks to highlight the humanity often occurring more naturally behind the scenes. Anderson is obviously aware of the artificiality of his emotional aesthetic, and so the the self-reflexivity was welcome, while also leaving room for some raw experiences in black-and-white, especially between Schwartzman and a big-name cameo near the end, which contrasts with his mostly-flat scenes with Scarlett Johansson in the play (the intimacy of which is cheekily elided). I'm not sure if this was a deliberate artistic move, or if it's even all that effective, but I admired how instead of giving us the nth iteration of a Wes Anderson Adult Struggling, he broke things down into the facades we put up, and the need to collaborate (artistically behind the scenes, realistically with other 'characters' we meet by chance -*not planned or controlled*- in our lives) by making his characters' mannered personas more transparent as vehicles to convey honest emotions through feigned means.

However, the kids were fantastic, and the performances' contrast across age is staggering and must be intentional (I don't have the energy to go down analytical rabbit holes to properly express inferences about this theory, but I've already made enough of them around Licorice Pizza related to the concept of 'maturity', and specifically how youth retain a sense of freedom to explore without accumulated traumas-hardening-as-obstacles for accessing life's bounties). The witch daughters brought a kind of loose playfulness to the film that I don't think Wes Anderson has ever permitted before and doubted he was capable of presenting so organically. The circle of genius teenagers embodied a familiar yet striking honesty about youthful engagement - the desire to be 'seen' as significant, and also the devaluation of wider significance in favor of the present moment in front of them, like a romantic crush or the details of a novel social encounter or an opportunity to stealthily pull one over on the grown-ups. It's an interesting bookend film to Moonrise Kingdom, where the kids have located a kind of middle-ground 'answer' to the questions plaguing the more seasoned yet 'lost' adults, because they are literally trapped in that developmental stage of not-knowing and forced-engagement with accruing new life experiences.

Is Anderson only giving us all this time with the vapid adults here to shine the spotlight on the power of youth? The time is too equitably-spent on Schwartzman et al. to really sell that theory, but I suppose his intent doesn't necessarily matter if the effect works.

SpoilerShow

The whole film eventually collapses into pure noise

Even before this finale, the environment is chaotic, with flat characters acting like everything's ordered when it's not, which allows the profuse mise en scene to serve a thematically-referential purpose. But I actually loved that collapse and how it (and any catharsis in the narrative between the central lovers!) dissipates by the empty lead literally vacating the play. It's so anti-climactic, it's absurd. But we don't really need another eruption into sustained zany farce, not in a film this preoccupied with the place Schwartzman literally and figuratively ventures to as he exits the play. His character having a happy ending with Johansson that the audience sees and engages with on the screen would be a shrugfest after what little we've been given. Again, that doesn't redeem the careless interplay between them - it's quite possibly a flaw the film isn't conscious of, or even if it is, that doesn't necessarily excuse its ineffectual components - but his exit does signify something wonderful. That, as adults, sometimes we just want to escape the noise, the chaos, the hurt, the confusion.

It's wonderful to see a character leave life to get wisdom from life's director and then encounter a conjured memory of their dead wife. These catharses are achieved through artificial means (humorously, in the 'real part' of the story, where the play resembles the life they are trapped in) but are still subjectively 'real'. Does this signify that we can't access such tangible and fulfilling answers in reality, and must just stay and bear the noise? Or are they inside of us, accessible, and waiting if we choose to get vulnerable and seek them? Is life just a play of self-constructed chaos, where we can choose to act in ways we often cannot fathom, and is the authentic self a place we actually can escape into like Schwartzman does in the end, with mindfulness techniques and the like? Are these 'cathartic answers' only part of the puzzle, and don't we all awake like Schwartzman at the end, with people gone, life resuming, responsibilities static, and a new day to face?

I liked that the film asked these questions and seemed comfortable holding space for all to be true - the overarching message I took from the film. We have answers within us, but only some, and we need to do uncomfortable work to get them. We need answers from others, and our environments, and we get some if we choose to engage with them. We also won't get answers, and that's okay too. It's okay to play. It's okay if Rupert Friends exist in your peripheries solely to amuse on a surface-level. It's okay to embrace the chaos and noise, and also to tap out early when it gets to be a bit too much. It's actually quite nice. I think Anderson has been quietly evolving his own existential journey since the beginning, and even if his recent period hasn't been as consistently enjoyable for me, it's cool to measure his peacefulness with some pretty difficult, universal material. And it's hopeful to observe, having seen and related so strongly to his work that was a lot less secure with tapping out of the emotional surge, or flat-out unable to resist 'blending' with a part embedded in that chaos.

[Michael Kerpan]

The (new-ish) main critic at the Boston Globe hated this -- hovering between giving it zero and one star (settling on the latter). Too busy to see this right now -- and out of town next week -- I wonder if it will still be in theaters after July 4?

[therewillbeblus]

I wonder if it will still be in theaters after July 4?

It 100% will be, at least at the regular two places (Kendall, Coolidge).

I haven't read his review, but I can understand -and even share- frustrations about this one. Never Cursed talks about its bifurcated structure, and I'm not so sure I would break it in 'two' (is it bifurcated between the play and within the play? the kids and adults? the zoomed-out chaos or the zoomed-in "intimacy") However, there is a focus of this film that seems to not really work by design (i.e. the zoomed-in central-character adult stuff, some of the zoomed-out play stuff), and then there are layers and elements that do (i.e. the zoomed-in kids' depth, peripheral adults' thin antics, a lot of the self-reflexive play work). So for me it's allowed to be both an interesting failure (though, again, I can see how that part would be uninteresting to others!) and a very fun, funny, and insightful success - especially since the 'failure' part can help inform the value in what Anderson is getting insightful about

[Brian C]

I've always been a huge Anderson fan, but watching this, I felt like I finally knew what it was like to watch his movies through the eyes of his detractors. Nothing landed with me in this one, and it had the very odd effect of feeling simultaneously overlabored and lazy. It's a cliche to complain about Anderson's fussiness at this point, and this one is as exacting as anything else he's done, but yet it all feels so barely there. The jokes, the characterizations, the visual design, the emotional cues - all endlessly labored over and yet it all seems so perfunctory and even half-assed. Like, what's the deal with the bridge to nowhere? It's a prominent design feature of the town, and Anderson calls attention to it throughout, and yet, there's nothing to it except a half-joke of a "road closed" sign put up in front of it. And the whole movie is like that, start to finish; everything's so busy but none of it is grounded in anything recognizable to me. It's like a Wes Anderson movie made by AI - it superficially looks right, but everything feels off.

I've always thought it'd be a lot of fun to be an actor playing an Anderson role - there has always seemed to be such joy in the performances in his movies! - but everyone here gives the impression that they're just going through the motions. In fact, I'd go a step forward and say that the actors frankly seem bored. Actors even seem badly miscast, another thing I never remember feeling in an Anderson movie before (none worse than Hanks, who can be an affecting actor but plainly had not the foggiest idea what he's doing here - in fact, it seems weird to me that the Steve Carell role was supposed to be the Bill Murray role, because the Hanks role is so obviously perfect for Murray and the Carell role is completely extraneous).

There were signs, I thought, in The French Dispatch that Anderson was losing sight of his muse, but I did not expect things to come crashing down so completely and so suddenly. This is a catastrophe in my eyes - like the equivalent of Arcade Fire's Everything Now album, one that lets fans know that the good old days are over and it's time to move on. But hey, the Coens survived Hanks in The Ladykillers and began an amazing run of films after that, so maybe Anderson can regroup too.

[soundchaser]

I definitely liked this more than Isle of Dogs, but not as much as I was hoping to. His last three have all been guilty of what Never Cursed discusses: an inability (or a refusal) to weave the meta-narratives and production design into the main thrust of each film. Grand Budapest works so well in part because the frame narrative and the main narrative are thematically intertwined: each about nostalgia, longing, and appearance. With Asteroid City, it felt like the frame was *deliberately* working against the in-play bits, and while that may be an interesting choice I can't say it's an entirely effective one. I think it's fair to say this is Anderson's most difficult film for that reason alone, and I suspect I'll be trying to mull over its implications for a while. Or I'll give up and declare it a mess.

Good roadrunner tho.

[dustybooks]

I thought the film was wonderful, magical, hilarious, delightful, etc.

SpoilerShow

I agree with many respondents to this film here and elsewhere that Anderson seems to be very preoccupied these days with an ethos he basically introduced in The Grand Budapest Hotel, centering largely around the value and importance of art and specifically on writing. Formally and thematically, though, I think this is the most persuasive version of the story he's made -- whether the best I can't say yet, but I did find its aesthetic appearance very accomplished and haunting. Creating these characters and this place but then dramatizing that same act of creation doesn't create distance from the "play," it just contextualizes it the same way our own analysis of any given story would; rather, our speculation over what one person's motivations may have been for crafting the play's dialogue and people in the way he did humanizes, and displays curiosity about, the creative act in a way that feels unusually intimate for the movies. In Nick Pinkerton's review he said that the movie is less effective than Budapest because there's no natural connection between lefty theatrical writers and the kind of desolate western America Asteroid City (the play) depicts, but it seems to me that's the entire point Anderson is making here: what does prompt a person to write what they "don't know"? I can appreciate that some people find the thesis about falling asleep to wake up too on-the-nose, but I also think it's the most basic and eloquent answer to that question. The writer uses his craft to put a shape to things, and then people use art to add texture and understanding to their own lives, and that doesn't just mean spectator but also performer. Without all this, a person -- at least, a person like Anderson and probably a lot of his audience -- just fumbles.

A film that ryannichols7 and I both thought of as we departed was Drive My Car, which climaxes similarly with a treatise on how the experience of an actor might affect the resonance, inward and outward, of existing dialogue: the work remains elastic, even if superficially unchanged. (The hiccup here being that the Margot Robbie scene hinges on dialogue that was cut from the play -- it's not a perfect analogy, but it still sprang to mind.) The difference of course is that Ryusuke Hamaguchi didn't show Chekhov at his writing desk.

[Yakushima]

I've always been a huge Anderson fan, but watching this, I felt like I finally knew what it was like to watch his movies through the eyes of his detractors. Nothing landed with me in this one, and it had the very odd effect of feeling simultaneously overlabored and lazy. It's a cliche to complain about Anderson's fussiness at this point, and this one is as exacting as anything else he's done, but yet it all feels so barely there. The jokes, the characterizations, the visual design, the emotional cues - all endlessly labored over and yet it all seems so perfunctory and even half-assed. Like, what's the deal with the bridge to nowhere? It's a prominent design feature of the town, and Anderson calls attention to it throughout, and yet, there's nothing to it except a half-joke of a "road closed" sign put up in front of it. And the whole movie is like that, start to finish; everything's so busy but none of it is grounded in anything recognizable to me. It's like a Wes Anderson movie made by AI - it superficially looks right, but everything feels off.

I've always thought it'd be a lot of fun to be an actor playing an Anderson role - there has always seemed to be such joy in the performances in his movies! - but everyone here gives the impression that they're just going through the motions. In fact, I'd go a step forward and say that the actors frankly seem bored. Actors even seem badly miscast, another thing I never remember feeling in an Anderson movie before (none worse than Hanks, who can be an affecting actor but plainly had not the foggiest idea what he's doing here - in fact, it seems weird to me that the Steve Carell role was supposed to be the Bill Murray role, because the Hanks role is so obviously perfect for Murray and the Carell role is completely extraneous).

There were signs, I thought, in The French Dispatch that Anderson was losing sight of his muse, but I did not expect things to come crashing down so completely and so suddenly. This is a catastrophe in my eyes - like the equivalent of Arcade Fire's Everything Now album, one that lets fans know that the good old days are over and it's time to move on. But hey, the Coens survived Hanks in The Ladykillers and began an amazing run of films after that, so maybe Anderson can regroup too.

Brian C, you expressed quite perfectly my own feelings about the film, and my anxiety about Wes Anderson's future works. Wes Anderson is my favorite living director, and I loved all his films up to The French Dispatch, parts of which I still enjoyed, but overall found lacking. I do hope too that Asteroid City is not a new normal for him, and that he will regroup.

On a separate note, I am very glad I ordered Do Not Detonate Without Presidential Approval: Inspirations for Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" prior to my watching the movie (otherwise I definitely would not) - it is a very interesting read.

[hearthesilence]

Bill Murray appearing in an Asteroid City-related short.

[pistolwink]

Thanks for that link!

I can't tell at what level of the film's metafiction this short is supposed to exist (in that fiction, "Asteroid City" is a pretend stage play, not a pretend movie as Murray's character here indicates) or whether we're supposed to make anything of the fact that Murray is reading awkwardly from cue cards. Probably just a lark. I am relieved that Murray appears to actually have come down with COVID (and recovered) and that this wasn't a cover for Anderson having participated in his "cancellation."

[barbarella satyricon]

I really liked this enough that I'd want to purchase and own

SpoilerShow

the paired photo prints of the alien and of Midge in her bathrobe, to hang on a wall side by side somewhere.

Anderson's overachieving has been exhausting since at least Budapest, but the tendency is tempered somewhat here by humor and wryness that are recognizably human. The show-offy production quirks are mildly annoying sometimes, when they weigh down a mostly light-touch comedic approach, but they're also not stultifying.

The twice-repeated joke with the schoolkids who

SpoilerShow

can't stop talking about anything other than the alien made me smile and laugh both times, but a good end to it would've been when the last kid says he wrote a song. I rolled my eyes when the cowboy band dragged in right after. Even though the number is cute, it took the charm out of that recognizably realistic childlike moment for me. At such times, Anderson's like a hovering, overbearing parent who can't stop "helping" with their kid's school project.

More than the over-fussed production style, it's been the verbosity that's often brought on Anderson-fatigue for me. I enjoyed seeing the trains and cars running through the landscape in this, just taking in the scenery, no explainer character in the back seat, no Ken Burns documentary narration. But all that other made-up "apocryphal" stuff about the legendary American playwright, the greatest the country has ever known, etc, all the fake mythologizing – something that's so easy to bang out (because none of it's true) shouldn't be so exhausting to listen to even in short blasts.

SpoilerShow

It's a rare and amazing moment, then, when every character in an Anderson movie is struck speechless, all together in one scene even. I wasn't expecting it, and loved it.

Verbosity, and eloquent overexplanation. That's probably also why one scene that I found unexpectedly poignant was where

SpoilerShow

Clifford haltingly explains, while seemingly thinking through and discovering in the moment, why he's always "daring". It feels like a moment of genuine realization or insight for the character, and he rather fumbles toward it, not just quickly formulating then flatly declaiming. Brainiac adolescent realizing they need to stop and think through the present moment and also other moments up to then. A small character detail, with shades of a third-act Max Fischer.

And this last thought will probably now take me into the realm of verbose over-complaining, but one more instance where I thought Anderson was gilding the lily (and this also unrelated to the production design) was

SpoilerShow

Jarvis Cocker's song that plays over the closing credits. The acting students' scene where the mantra that is the song's title is first heard, and which culminates with an unexplained reappearance by the alien, was just so striking to me, almost riveting, that I was satisfied to take its cryptic meaning and significance as something to mull over for a while. The song, by comparison, was a draggy anticlimax, with the most banal lyrics. No, I wouldn't say You wrote a bad song, Petey, but Wes Anderson! Leave well enough alone?

Overall, Anderson's best since Moonrise, less successful as a narrative film than that one, but perhaps more to unpack in it.

[Matt]

My first movie in a theater since Little Women, and the first truly enjoyable Wes Anderson film for me since Fantastic Mr. Fox. It reminded me of The Darjeeling Limited with the strong emotional undercurrent of grief and loss under all the stylistic filigree.

Fantastic to look at, and it was so great to see Jason Schwartzman give a complex yet restrained lead performance again. It made Rushmore feel like a lifetime ago, and I guess it was, but it was also satisfying to see Schwartzman having grown into a role like this.

Also enjoyable were the new additions of Margot Robbie (in a one-scene knockout), Scarlett Johansson (doing something worthy of her talent again), Brian Cranston, Tom Hanks, Hope Davis, and Liev Schreiber, but the real pleasure was the kids, especially the triplets playing Schwartzman’s daughters and the actors playing Woodrow and Dinah. Anderson is always so good getting honest and credible performances out of kids, and I generally dislike precocious children in movies.

I should add that the film was slightly out of focus (which I thought might have been either my bad eyesight unused to watching things farther than 10 feet away or a stylistic choice to replicate the slight mis-registration of a vintage color printed postcard) and was severely cropped on the sides (which I also thought might be a conscious stylistic choice). It was only on watching the trailer on YouTube after the show that I confirmed that it was just bad projection in both cases. Still better than the last time I went to this theater and found a fresh, glossy turd in the hallway.

[Constable]

I thought the film was wonderful, magical, hilarious, delightful, etc.

SpoilerShow

I agree with many respondents to this film here and elsewhere that Anderson seems to be very preoccupied these days with an ethos he basically introduced in The Grand Budapest Hotel, centering largely around the value and importance of art and specifically on writing. Formally and thematically, though, I think this is the most persuasive version of the story he's made -- whether the best I can't say yet, but I did find its aesthetic appearance very accomplished and haunting. Creating these characters and this place but then dramatizing that same act of creation doesn't create distance from the "play," it just contextualizes it the same way our own analysis of any given story would; rather, our speculation over what one person's motivations may have been for crafting the play's dialogue and people in the way he did humanizes, and displays curiosity about, the creative act in a way that feels unusually intimate for the movies. In Nick Pinkerton's review he said that the movie is less effective than Budapest because there's no natural connection between lefty theatrical writers and the kind of desolate western America Asteroid City (the play) depicts, but it seems to me that's the entire point Anderson is making here: what does prompt a person to write what they "don't know"? I can appreciate that some people find the thesis about falling asleep to wake up too on-the-nose, but I also think it's the most basic and eloquent answer to that question. The writer uses his craft to put a shape to things, and then people use art to add texture and understanding to their own lives, and that doesn't just mean spectator but also performer. Without all this, a person -- at least, a person like Anderson and probably a lot of his audience -- just fumbles.

A film that ryannichols7 and I both thought of as we departed was Drive My Car, which climaxes similarly with a treatise on how the experience of an actor might affect the resonance, inward and outward, of existing dialogue: the work remains elastic, even if superficially unchanged. (The hiccup here being that the Margot Robbie scene hinges on dialogue that was cut from the play -- it's not a perfect analogy, but it still sprang to mind.) The difference of course is that Ryusuke Hamaguchi didn't show Chekhov at his writing desk.

Wait, people found the falling asleep to wake up business too on the nose?? I couldn't make heads or tails of it. What does it mean?

[The Narrator Returns]

I was also baffled by that on my first viewing, to the point that it threw a wrench in whatever I thought about the movie before then. I wouldn't even say I figured it out on rewatch, more that I accepted that it means many things without one explanation sticking out, much like the movie as a whole. The most reassuring read is that it's an "it's always darkest before the dawn"-type mantra, but its presentation is too threatening (leaning into the Invasion of the Body Snatchers connotation of the phrase) to make it that simple and semi-inspirational. My own interpretation is something like Jeff Tweedy's "you have to learn how to die if you want to be alive", not comforting and not hopeless either; you must submit to all the scariest and most uncertain parts of life in order to keep living and maybe find the light at the tunnel. But befitting a movie so preoccupied with death (as all Wes Anderson movies are), there's also the implication that this is the most permanent kind of sleep, that the only relief from the agony of life will come when we're finally done with it. And I'd believe it if somebody else here came to a completely different conclusion, it's a microcosm of a movie that's intimidatingly dense and built around whatever the individual viewer brings to it.

[pistolwink]

Are we sure it's an idea the film or its makers "endorse" or see as essential to the meaning of the film, or could it just be a parody of the almost cult-like qualities and self-serious mantras of midcentury acting schools?

[therewillbeblus]

A second viewing revealed many more rich details in the mise en scene (of course), but also a few amusing and smart running joke/thematic indicators I didn't quite connect the first go-round

SpoilerShow

like how, in the first act, each time a character breaks from an uncomfortably sad moment into a positive distraction (“If you could have anything to eat right now, what would it be?” ; “I love gravity, I think it may be my favorite law of physics currently”) we drop out of the play into the meta 'behind the scenes' stuff, mirroring the characters' anxious impulses to escape, but also refusing to grant it - as these 'meta' scenes actually contain the deeper, darker, rawer stuff the colorful characters in Asteroid City can’t reach at within themselves.

I've also gained a greater appreciation for all the adult characters in the film. Scenes like Schwartzman-the-Actor questioning actions and lines that occur later in the play, attempting to grasp at what the character is feeling, where even he and the writer can't sum it up in a neat little package - and yet, we have that part within us that wants so desperately to be able to do that easily, and just be "okay" with consistency, in this difficult, strange, unpredictable and unfair world. Edward Norton suggests putting in the interpretation Schwartzman has of the character's motive for burning his band in the waffle iron, but decides to leave it out, because why force subtext to become text when the characters themselves can't authentically diagnose what's wrong.

But in addition to all the chaos and isolation and noise and fear, is a bunch of wonderful details all around us to tap into. I appreciate Rupert Friend's character more than maybe any other - a guy who keeps it simple, but is entirely 'other'-focused, a kind soul just trying to stay grounded to the present without spending time glancing at the past or the stars. I'm not going to go back and check right now, but I don't recall him being present for the alien invasion or any other kind of collective existential collapse. He's always aware of what happened, he maybe saw it or believes it, but that's not where his focus is. He'd rather strike up a romance or console some kids or play music. I love that. It's not the antidote to Schwartzman et al's sorrows, but it does provide a framework that they can maybe try to connect with a bit more, if just to help sober them to the wonders of life that frequently exist less visibly under the tangible, intrusive pain.

It’s so very funny, and so very sad. Plenty of themes are overstated (particularly in the B&W meta-scenes with lines of advice about life that feel taken from an Existential Philosophy 101 abstract), but within those moments are exchanges that also feel less pronounced and humbler in directing us towards the emotional process of 'letting go' and sitting in the muck of it all, alone and with others. I'd roll my eyes a few times only to see the words be put into practice and then become awestruck. I wonder if that itself was intentional - to deliberately overstate annoying rhetoric as such, because trying to excessively reason and think and explain doesn't hold the utility: the experience of applying it does. And sometimes that just looks like sitting in a cafe and saying few words to a surrogate father figure who doesn't like you too much, but does connect with you around an opinion of a woman you may or may not love or have a future with. Huh, life doesn't end with slow-motion dancing, Van Morrison doesn't soothe families at funerals, we don't just shed all our luggage at once and get rid of the demons and conditioned parts of ourselves we don't like.

Anderson is communicating that here in many ways that overwhelm, and some that underwhelm, and this time he's taking a great risk by choosing to deliberately underwhelm the audience (Norton deprives a character of a line that would make him a more interesting character to us, the audience of his movie!) in order to communicate that theme. It's bold, not showy (well, that piece), and destined to disappoint. But it's also arguably Wes' most 'adult' film. I still prefer most others, but this is a special movie that I look forward to re-evaluating my relationship to over the seasons of my own life.