Style and Substance in Anderson's "Asteroid City"

The use of the phrase “style over substance” is at its very core a sophomoric criticism. Style is substance, as much a fundamental artistic aspect as the subject matter or physical medium of a work, elusive and ethereal but multifaceted and omnipresent. In film, it is the grand storytelling tool, below which every other tools is serval. Editing, dialogue, acting, sound mixing all exist to serve a movies style, coordinated to accentuate the narrative and themes of a cohesive picture. A story without style is, afterall, just a description.They also serve as artistic branding, tying unique, standout films to unique, standout directors. We see these cinematic fingerprints in Tarentino’s penchant for using drawn out diatribes on specific subjects to slowly reel in the audience to the scene’s central idea, and in Edgar Wright’s method of swift surgical editing avoiding any lulls for the viewer. So when people complain about “style over substance” what they are really taking issue with is when style, like a tumor, crowds out the substance that is supposed to constitute the story. In some instances the failure of style is due to misuse, like an over use of shaky cam or dutch angles that are meant to invoke a mood or emotion but end up making the movie hard to watch. But, style fails the most spectacularly when it is self important, becoming not a varnish for the narrative but an expression of the auteur creator’s desire to be unique, quirky, and “artsy.” Taika Watiti’s second swing at the Thor series embodies this kind of failure. “Love and Thunder” was stuffed to burst with farcical comedic fluff, the kind that made Watiti’s pervious “Thor: Ragnarok” so memorable. But while “Ragnarok’s” constant jokes differentiated it from the Shakespearean seriousness of Thor’s previous outings and heightened the outlying dark aspects of this film, in “Love and Thunder” they interrupt and lampoon the actual drama of the story, resulting in a film that doesn’t take itself, or more importantly, its audience’s desire for compelling storytelling, seriously. Incompetence of style is amusing, but pretention is irritating.

This is where Wes Anderson enters the discussion, a director whose meticulous set dressing, central symmetrical framing of shots, and monotone matter of fact dialogue make him one of the most recognizable directors of today. Anderson used to be the undisputed master of heartfelt quirkiness, crafting human stories about grief, family, nostalgia and young love set in agonizingly detailed strange worlds. However, as of late he seems to have gotten high off his own supply, accentuating his own “Wes Anderson” stylism to the point of parody, resulting in plodding, directionless films, too constipated to get any kind of point across. Isle of Dogs, his second animated venture, felt little more than a shallow demonstration of his deft style of stop motion animation, showing off massive miniature vistas populated by boring monotone, mono-dimensional characters with a Japanese veneer that came off less as an external reflection of the cast’s internal estrangement (ala Darjeeling Limited) and more like flashy orientalism. He fell farther with “The French Dispatch,” an anthology film that tells three strange tales of journalism and human experience and yet makes none of them feel special due to their uniform whimsy and lackadaisical tone, bogged down by an endless cast of Hollywood Darlings all performing in the same matter-of-fact disengaged way. Like a dusty taxidermied peacock, “The French Dispatch” is full of color and void of life. Meant to serve as a love letter to Wes Anderson’s favorite publication, “The New Yorker,” it fails to come to any point about the magazine besides, “it is cool” and “look at all the actors I can get to be in my movie.” These recent films signal a clear downward trend into obsessive masturbatory uniqueness on Anderson’s part, like an artist that only ever paints self portraits. So when news dropped that Anderson’s next film “Asteroid City” would be a play within a play within a play clogged up with his seeming army of famous friends, my hackles rose. I assumed that it would just be another unserious, engorged demonstration of what Wes wants us all to see he can get away with.

As the saying goes, a pessimist is happiest when proven wrong. Miraculously, Wes seems to have arisen from his happy funk and made a movie with a resonant human narrative, a beating heart that has its blood pumped into it by his precious unique stylism. Regrettably, though the machine still runs, that obsessive “Wes Anderson” style still manages to gum up the gears from time to time.

"Asteroid City," as the above description suggests, is more a three layered Russian nesting doll than a straight forward narrative. The outermost layer, and context of the entire film is that of a black and white television broadcast conducted by a narrator played by Bryan Cranston, who dictates a fictional story of a theater production in order to demonstrate to his audience how plays are made. The second layer is the fictional production he describes in which made up one-in-a-generation playwright, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) assembles a group of talented actors to perform his magnum opus “Asteroid City.” The final fictive level and the main subject matter of the film is the performance of Asteroid City, the story of Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), an austere photographer and recent widower who travels with his four children to the remote one road, desert town of Asteroid City to attend a scientific award ceremony for his prodigy son. During this ceremony, an alien inexplicably and rather comically makes an appearance, leaving Augie's family, along with a retinue of other colorful characters, quarantined in the small town by the government, left to agonize over what they witnessed.

The intersecting plot lines, laundry list of characters, conceptual pseudo-narrative, and litany of fourth wall brakes, make for a sporadically unfocused and meandering experience. And yet, "Asteroid City" still manages to revolve around one central directing idea, saving itself from the vain lack of self examination that hounds Wes’ other films: the unending human search for meaning.

The mantra of the fictional actors putting on the fictional play at the center of this film is “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” The universe never explains itself, and chaotic and inexplicable things are as common as they are cataclysmic, be they the death of a wife, falling in love, or the sudden appearance of aliens. Humans, with our love of patterns and hatred of mystery, enjoy forcing order on this chaos. So, to wake up, we fall asleep. We dream, and step away from ourselves, to get a better look at ourselves. The purpose of art is to assign meaning to an unyielding and scary world, even if only to point out that it is unyielding and scary. More often than not, the most mysterious subject matter art can help illuminate, is the artist themselves. That is what the play Asteroid City is, a reflection of the people that created it. We see this when the fiction of the players and the fiction of the play intersect, such as vignettes when the fictional actress Mercedes Ford (Scarlet Johansson) who plays Midge Campbell in the central play within a play, is encouraged by her director to not abandon the production on the basis that she is both incredibly talented and a self-destructive inadequate diva. This is in turn reflected one layer down in the central play where her character is an actress with a penchant for playing traumatized and self destructive characters in an endless search for experience and validation. Better still is the story of Augie and his fictional actor Jones Hall, who was in a romantic relationship with the creator of the play Earp. Much like Augie's fictional wife, Earp recently and unexpectedly passed away, and Hall, being unable to ask his lover the meaning of his characters unexplained behaviors in the play, leaves the performance of Asteroid City mid-climax. In the alley behind the theater he comes upon the actress who was supposed to play his wife in Asteroid City before her scene got cut out, and the two reminiscing, proceed to act out the exchange they were going to have, allowing the fictional character of Augie to, outside his own story, confront his grief and learn to accept his loss, and for the character of Hall, through Augie's story, to do the same. It is a moment, so transcendently brilliant, that if nothing else in this film had value I would still laud it for facilitating this scene’s existence.

Meaning is something we create within ourselves and put out into the world, and “Asteroid City” uses its eccentric artificiality to capture this to a tee. The production is cerebral and nonsensical, taking place in a manufactured liminal wasteland and operating on dreamlogic, with retro futuristic vending machines, and endless hot rod chases in thee background. However, this absurd, unashamedly artificial play within a play is the only part of the film in color, a seed of the real world buried at the heart of thickly layered fiction. In another example, Augie’s three rambunctious daughters, upon learning of their mothers death, decide to take her tupperware bound ashes and rollplay as witches and monsters, attempting to perform a resurrection spell. It goes about as well as you would expect, but they aren’t too bothered by it. They get the closure they didn’t realize they wanted. The search for meaning in the world and from ourselves is endless and futile but necessary. Its what we are here to do.

While he may have been able to pull off a three layered Gordian knot of meta narrative with a startling grace, Wes Anderson is still Wes Anderson, and wants everyone watching the movie to know that, too. First and foremost of his inescapable cinematic vices is his massive cast, composed so many A-Listers that one must conclude that Wes is either the most gregarious man in Hollywood has a recording of some massive Sunset Boulevard orgy and is blackmailing everyone involved. Either way, rather than actors slotting into the narrative, the narrative is stretched to accommodate this deluge of performers, resulting in everyone hogging the limelight, and no one getting it. Why focus on the grieving of Augie or his budding romance with Midge Campbell when we could focus on Tilda Swinton’s scientist, Rupert Friend’s cowboy, or the inn keeper, the school teacher, the other preteen geniuses and their disinterested parents, the play director and his wife, and so on and on and on. Similar to The French Dispatch, there are so many unrelated narratives, that the audience finds all of them to be undercooked and disorienting. Yet the French Dispatch at least segregated its characters’ plots into discrete anthologies. Here they are all mashed together. If every actor was meant to bring something new to the table, Wes Anderson shoved everything into a blender and forced the thick contents down the audience’s throats with a funnel

It also doesn’t help that, in proper Wes Anderson fashion, he has forbidden his actors from acting most of the time. His demand for underperforming from most every character has pushed his droll style past the point of comedy to the edge of lobotomy. You could switch the dialogue of Augie and Midge, the two main characters of the film, and the delivery would be the same. Because of this stymying of personality, I spent the first act wondering if Augie’s lack of inflection was due to militaristic attitude, grief, boredom, or if a railroad spike had passed clean through his skull the day before. When the death of a mother carries the same gravity as talks on the weather in a DMV line, style has officially devalued the experience of your film. Only Tom Hanks’ character, Augie's gruff, frustrated, yet affectionate father-in-law, escapes this valium overdose, and is consequently the most enjoyable character of the film.

And of course, we cannot forget the ancient Anderson trademark, the superfluous romantic side plot, where two side characters fall in love, seemingly just because they can. That dubious honor goes to Augie’s genius son “Brainiac” who, in the midst of grieving his mother’s death, falls for Dinah, the daughter of Midge Campbell. Instead of allowing us to witness how he deals with losing his mom, seeing an alien, or being a teen prodigy, the audience is instead forced to soldier through a ham-fisted teen romance, that never gains enough steam to justify itself or entertain. It just burns time that could have been better used.

As an experiment with storytelling and an exploration of art and meaningful, “Asteroid City” is a unique and soulful masterpiece. Yet Wes Anderson cannot make a masterpiece without making it a Wes Anderson Masterpiece, transforming it from a movie most enjoyed in a theater into a movie most enjoyed on the ride home afterwords as its being digested in your mind. In essence its more fun to think about than to watch. Its pretty, its humorous, and its definitely memorable, but it’s still cluttered with of Wes’ classic indulgences, and is best viewed with that in mind, and all the leeway that allows. I adore how Astroid City explores the way we unknowingly explore ourselves through our creations. I just hope that Wes eventually reads the script he wrote, and heeds his own message to better understand and censor himself going forward. That way, I may be able to enjoy and appreciate Wes Anderson’s art, when he stops making self portraits.