Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 1 - Asteroid City

1. Asteroid City, dir. Wes Anderson

It was inevitable. Wes Anderson was bound to make the Best Movie of the Year one of these years. And I think Asteroid City might be the single best movie he's ever made. Maybe the only out-and-out comedy on this Top 15 list too. Way out of character for me.

Nobody else is out here doing it like Wes Anderson. There are plenty of directors making strange, experimental, very formalist films. But they are not getting wide releases and being a reliable a money-maker while doing it. Anderson has only gotten weirder since the main criticism of him became "oh he's just so twee". (Whatever the fuck that means.) I think every time somebody claims his style too affected, he doubles down yet again on his aesthetic. Mainstream American filmmaking has been painfully realist for a century now, especially with a focus on "naturalistic" dialog. Meanwhile, Anderson has invented a very retro yet also timeless patter in his conversations. Everybody is under-acting yet hamming it up. Why would you not love that? Even the critics might be getting tired of Wes Anderson at this point. Asteroid City had a mixed reception for him. But ultimately, it does not matter what the audiences or the critics think, the fact of the matter is: everybody wants to work with this guy. Wes Anderson has all-star casts of incredibly diverse actors, young and old, from Tom Hanks to Maya Hawke. People want to be a part of these. Maybe because these are their last chance to do something bonkers that audiences actually will see.

There is a crushing density to the layers of cultural reference at play in Asteroid City. That could be exhausting, you rarely see so much cross-connection happening in a movie, versus say, high literature. Thomas Pynchon can go from a Batman pun to experimental physics in the span of a page in Gravity's Rainbow - it is much rarer to see that happen on the screen. I'm going to struggle to do Asteroid City complete justice. That Slim Whitman song in the soundtrack is not just Fifties flavor, it's a nod to Mars Attacks!, a great Tim Burton movie that seemingly nobody but this author likes. I caught that reference at least

Also, Asteroid City is a jumble of a thousand ideas, somehow being about extremely contemporary issues while a period piece. If I cannot grasp all the meanings, well, that may be fitting, since Asteroid City has a running theme about the lack of easy, singular resolutions. How even an artist can get lost in their art. And maybe getting lost is great, you can learn a lot while making a mess.

Definitely the most striking thing about Asteroid City is its art style. Anderson has had a lot of inspiration over the years and made some really fun decisions, yet I don't think his work has ever looked as good as it does in Asteroid City. The intense saturation of color, the thick teals and oranges, the whole movie feels like Norman Rockwell fused with Chuck Jones. It is a Wile E. Coyote vs Roadrunner universe of vibrant inviting landscapes, staged so perfectly as to be both sumptuous and as radioactive as the perfectly plumed atomic tests landing just in the background (with exact comic timing). The mushroom clouds are just one of several running gags, one being Asteroid City's own roadrunner. It's a fun little puppet that dances over the end credits. Meanwhile, the frame story is a crushing black and white, a stark and bleak in comparison.

In the Wes Anderson universe, the artifice has increasingly become the point. Asteroid City is continuing a trend that he's been building up in previous works like The Grand Budapest Hotel and especially 2021's The French Dispatch where the stories are dense and confusing layers of metafiction. The plot part of these stories only exist four or five layers into story-within-a-story, a kind of Scheherazade of mediums within mediums within mediums. Asteroid City's "Asteroid City" part exists as a Fifties live broadcast of a documentary about the making of a stage play. So it is a televised non-fiction behind-the-scenes of a theatrical work of fiction that we are seeing as a movie. Feel free to uncross your eyes after working that out. Asteroid City finally shatters the order of reality by going recursive and increasingly experimental. The frame story can no longer hold. Anderson's style of perfect mathematical symmetry makes you think he is in absolute control. Yet Asteroid City is shaking and quaking, ready to collapse into meta chaos due to tough, impossible to answer questions.

The "central" Asteroid City part of this movie is about a group of genius adolescents and their guardians traveling out to Southwest for a science contest. This allows for a typically Anderson-y collection of character actors to play odd roles, as these people wander around, ponder philosophy, and get embroiled in nonsense. Our central leads are Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a newly widower-ed war photographer, who enters a fling with Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful Marilyn Monroe-esque actress. There are dozens of other Anderson regulars like Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, and Edward Norton. Bill Murray barely missed being in this movie thanks to coming down with COVID. (Which is fitting.) Suddenly the pleasant blues and yellows of this desert landscape are interrupted by an alien landing in one of greatest choices of non-realistic special effects ever. You will cheer seeing how this is pulled off. It is as delightful as when Hayao Miyazaki gave his bird big gnarly teeth. The alien invasion causes the government to crack down and seal the town up, and suddenly Asteroid City is a pandemic metaphor.

It is interesting that the main romance between Augie and Midge takes place with shot-reverse-shot of them staring out each one's respective cabin, framed within their square of communication, talking at length and falling in love because there is simply nothing else to do. In today's world we do a communicating at a distance, framed within our digital rectangles, especially during the pandemic years. Years that paradoxically tore us our wider communities to pieces but made us closer to each other in our bubbles. Meanwhile, everybody else from the MacBeth-ian trio of adorable little girls witches to the singing cowboy to the motel owner selling land speculations out of a vending machine are just here. They merely hang around, waiting for something. It is very funny, but waiting for what?

There is a sense of nervousness and tension as the entire world has been changed irrevocably, yet in some ways, not at all. The tension eventually breaks, and they all stare around, blink a few times, and mostly they meanders back to doing what they were doing before. It was the most important moment of all these characters' lives and also, just an unplanned relaxing holiday in the sunny desert. Out in the distance these unspeakable terrors of modern science keep exploding, as Asteroid City is yet another sequel to Oppenheimer. But there is no clear revolutionary answer in the alien or the mushroom clouds. How could all this happen to change our fundamental understanding of our place in the universe and yet nothing "happened"?

The shot-reverse-shot framing will recur later when Jason Schwartzman, maybe playing himself now, violently breaks the entire movie to storm out, demanding some kind of great meaning. Only he finds Margot Robbie on a balcony outside the theater. She was playing his wife until her role was deleted. And they have a deeply meaningful conversation with again, that rectangular distant communication. This is an incredibly beautiful scene, which has profound meaning for all these characters. It is this missing piece of the story inserted as externally as it can be outside "Asteroid City" the play, outside the "movie", and indeed, outside the frame story's structure, literally and figuratively. But even this is not really an answer. It's pathos, but so what?

I think I know what this movie really is. Asteroid City could be a useful way of processing the grief of loss or the existential horror that these last four to eight years have been. At times it is just a weird comedy movie about horny people in the desert and even hornier people in the frame story. "YOU CANNOT WAKE UP IF YOU DON'T GO TO SLEEP" chants the entire cast to a confounded star. That does not make any sense, or does it make all the sense?

Well, David Lynch always has seen film as a dream. In some ways, Asteroid City's preposterous universe full of smoking pipes, precocious children, bored generals, Silver Age science gizmos, and who knows what else, is the dream Wes Anderson has had. Ultimately, this is what art is. If you just know the answer, you don't need to invent an entire town full of weird people to explain it. Just say it. But that's the thing, you don't always know the answer. We need imagination to process the parts of our world that do not make sense and might never make sense. You cannot suffer the indignities of reality for too long. Sometimes you just need to sleep and let the irrational parts of your mind deal with the mess of consciousness. Maybe along the way, maybe somewhere in the dream, those pieces can fit together into a coherence that a waking person can never find. And hey, a movie is a lot of fun. Why not dream the cinematic way?