Wes Anderson’s Tupperware ‘Asteroid City’

Tuesday, 22 August 2023, 4:29 pm
Article: howard davis

Among contemporary American films directors, only David Fincher rivals Wes Anderson for sheer cinematic invention. His tightly controlled environments are cleverly constructed doll’s playhouses, his characters apparently present only to deliver his lines as fast was possible in his patented, blandly detached, and affectless manner.

Anderson’s latest offering invites us to witness various behind-the-scenes escapades from the titular play, created by the Arthur Miller-like author Conrad Earp (Ed Norton), set in the American south-west of the mid-1950s, and addressing “infinity and I don’t know what else.”

The boxy monochrome world of this old-fashioned television show opens on a ‘live’ theatrical broadcast from a NYC TV studio with Brian Cranston’s Ed Murrow impersonation furnishing the play/film we are about to witness with its first level of reflexivity. This will be a film about a playwright, actors, and acting as much as anything else.

Anderson’s clearly delights in such delectable confectionary froth, full of empty calories and artificial artifice. And why not? His symmetrical pastel colour palette of orange, green, and indigo, combined with tight rectilinear framing that jumps back and forth between Academy Aspect ratio and widescreen format, is as bitter-sweet as a bag of lemon-drops dipped in icing sugar.

But it’s also a period film, evoking an era when nuclear tests in the Nevada desert were all the rage. My ex-father-in-law witnessed one of them. He and a bunch of other GIs were driven to the test site, told to dig a shallow bunker, and prepare themselves for the blast by covering faces with hands. With his eyes squeezed tightly closed, he saw the bones in his hands turn white as an x-ray.

What larks!

3,000 years ago Asteroid City was the site of a meteorite landing, which has become not only the location for a US government observatory, but also the venue for an annual convention honouring the teen inventors of really nifty high-school science projects, such as a fully-functioning death ray. The town has a sign welcoming the nation’s “junior stargazers and space cadets,” playfully inviting us to assume that the phrase ‘space cadet’ once existed in a non-abusive form (it didn’t).

As Cinematographer Robert Yeoman’s camera pans pointedly from side to side and up and down, everything looks exactly like a film set, punctuated at regular intervals by Scalextric-scale cops-and-robbers pursuing each other in ineffective chase. Against this desert backdrop, all recreated seamlessly in Spain and a Hollywood sound stage, Anderson is free to infuse his complex patterns of rapid-fire banter with a level of verbal dexterity not seen since Billy Wilder’s ‘Ace In The Hole,’ a movie referenced briefly in the carnivalesque atmosphere that develops in the town as the plot progresses.

But the ‘plot’ is only part of the point - and a rather minor one at that. Jason Schwartzman’s pipe-smoking ‘photographer’ is named Steenbeck, which is printed on all his ‘baggage.’ A Steenbeck is also a flat-bed editing machine that can play and rewind one picture reel and two sound reels in synch. Back in the day of Rivas ‘Butt’ splicers when razor blades and perforated sticky tape were employed to make cuts on 35mm celluloid by hand, it was the German-engineered technology of choice with which to cut feature films from the mid-sixties to the late nineties.

That’s another two levels of self-referentiaility in play. See how the doll’s house works?

Peter Bradshaw noted that, “Asteroid City’s eccentricity, its elegance, its gaiety, and its sheer profusion of detail within the tableau frame make it such a pleasure. So, too, does its dapper styling of classic American pop culture. With every new shot, your eyes dart around the screen, grabbing at all the painterly little jokes and embellishments, each getting a micro-laugh.”

Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola litter their trademark dialogue with cute, deadpan exclamations (“Gadzooks”) and nerdy awkwardness (“I love gravity”), accompanied by a parade of sandals and pulled-up socks, boxer shorts, golf shoes, plaid trousers, and pressed shirts. When Johansson tells Schwartzman that their characters are “two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depth of our pain because we don’t want to,” Kermode found it hard to know “whether to shrug, sympathise, or smirk.” The vacuum-sealed atmosphere of tortured Tupperware and smug Formica modernity becomes increasingly suffocating.

And then there’s Anderson’s abiding interest, most evident in ‘Sunrise Kingdom,’ with preternaturally precocious children, an interest he shares the another iconic fifties writer JD Salinger. The Eisenhower era encouraged national spelling bees, math prizes, and science competitions, which became as deeply ingrained into the American psyche as the great Western Cowboy/Indian dichotomy which defined an entire generation’s idea of masculinity in terms of shooting people with black hats and dark skins. Anderson reminds me of the depressive French composer Maurice Ravel who would seek out the children at social events to which he had been invited and talk to them for hours in order to avoid the adults in the room.

Frank Kermode observed, “This latest feature from the world’s most famous corduroy fan may nod cheekily towards the heyday of the Actors Studio (James Dean, Marilyn Monroe), but it is as detached as ever, a Swiss watch-style meta-puzzle of interlocking stories with a faux-nostalgic, sub-Spielbergian edge, and a stellar cast acting like animated mannequins.”

Schwartzman’s widowed war photographer gets his cranky father-in-law (Tom Hanks) to look after his kids (“the three witches”), while he falls for a gorgeous movie star played by Scarlett Johansson. Jeffrey Wright plays the general in charge, Steve Carell is the motel owner, Matt Dillon the town’s mechanic, Rupert Friend the local singing cowpoke, Hope Davis and Live Schreiber number among the parents, and everyone delivers their lines with absolute seriousness.

Other big-name cameos come and go (Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Margot Robbie, a washboard-wielding Jarvis Cocker) and Slim Whitman’s ‘Indian Love Call’ even pops up on the soundtrack for a brief hoe-down. Meanwhile, back in East Coast TV Land, the start-to-finish production story of this “apocryphal fabrication” plays out at the Tarkington Theatre, with the same key actors now playing actors and switching between equally artificial worlds (East Coast Broadway meets Hollywood West), sometimes accidentally, but always very deliberately.

Simply because he summarizes it so well, I’ll let Bradshaw have the last word - “The movie rattles cleverly and exhilaratingly along, adroitly absorbing the implications of pathos and loneliness without allowing itself to slow down. It is tempting to consider this savant blankness as some kind of symptom, but I really don’t think so: it is the expression of style. And what style it is.”

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz