Asteroid City

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Wes Anderson

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Rating * Has redeeming facet

Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos & Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson

A few points of coincidence connecting these two films ruled in many ways by their creators’ tight, almost stifling grasps over the possibility of chance: both films opened in Taipei (where I’m staying for the next few months) on the same day and formed the first films I’ve seen overseas in many years over the course of a cross-town double feature, both films feature animation as a key component of their appeal, both films pinball between different aesthetic styles, and both films star Jason Schwartzman, though the one I saw at the SPOT cinema was *not* the one where he plays a character called The Spot.

The two films also find the particular “brands” to which they belong to at a certain point of crisis. On the one hand, Wes Anderson remains as alternatively beloved and derided as ever, seemingly having made a nigh-irrevocable advance/retreat into worlds of his own imagination, whether they be futuristic Tokyo, a provincial French town, or the eponymous Southwestern hamlet (population size: 87, filmed entirely on sets in the Spanish desert), piling on further structural and metafictional challenges for himself. In contrast to Anderson’s benevolent intractability, the forces on the other side are eager to cast their work as a superior, if not entirely separate entity from the sinking ship that appears to be the superhero mega-blockbusters that have very nearly swallowed Hollywood filmmaking whole. Where the MCU and DCEU appear to be faltering at last, Sony Pictures Animation, as marshaled by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, aims to pick up the slack. Not only does the studio run with the conceit of super-powered beings aiming to prevent the end of the world for the umpteenth time, but also with the concept of the multiverse that has paid dividends both financial — making for boffo box office of the otherwise middling grosses of the MCU Spider-Man and Doctor Strange sub-franchises — and critical, with the Russo Brother-co-produced Everything Everywhere All at Once earning Oscar glory off of its own gussied-up multiverse riff.

The trends have remained steady with these latest entries. Asteroid City was fairly tepidly received at its premiere at Cannes, only to get a rapturous near-unanimous reappraisal upon its stateside release. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has been even more beloved than its predecessor Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — reports of abominable crunch-time overwork notwithstanding — almost wholly escaping the sharp critical downturn in the wake of Avengers: Endgame and its (for better and worse) summative cap on a certain era of superhero filmmaking; while everything else is accurately seen as desperate flailing, the further extended adventures of Miles Morales and company continue to attract acclaim, including from many who swore off superhero films close to a decade ago.

It’s probably already clear where my sympathies lie; Anderson has been and remains one of my favorite American directors, even as my ardor for any given one of his films can vary wildly, while I remember quite liking Into but have since cooled on it, the extravagance of some of its images slipping away while the bad aftertaste of the gobsmackingly formulaic narrative became less and less obscured. It’s certainly worth noting that none of the three directors of that film returned to this one, at least in the same role; I never saw the Jump Streets or Clone High and barely remember anything of The Lego Movie, so I can’t speak to exactly how strong Lord and Miller’s voices are apart from these very linked films (though I still suspect that I’d prefer Ron Howard’s version of Solo to theirs).

With all that being said, it’s worth examining in conjunction why one aestheticized unreality works (to me) and the other ultimately doesn’t. After all, Anderson could reasonably be said to be working in, if not the multiverse, then in alternate planes of fiction in a similar way. The central conceit of Asteroid City (completely hidden in the trailers) rests on parallel tracks: a play about a group of civilians, juvenile scientific geniuses, residents, and military personnel who are quarantined in a tiny town in the Southwestern United States when they come into contact with an alien in a meteorite crater, shot in rather lovely 2.39:1 pastel color; and a television recreation of scenes from the mounting of that play in 1.37:1 black-and-white (all shot on Anderson’s customary 35mm by Robert Yeoman). While the film largely stays in that former realm, the boundaries are porous, even moreso than the storytelling devices that Anderson’s previous film The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun used; where that film largely let the reminiscences of Swinton, McDormand, and Wright’s characters remain on that level (with Bill Murray’s editor one tier up and remaining at a slight remove from the action) and explicitly situate the “base” narrative as flashback, the inherent fictiveness of play and production alike — “Asteroid City is not real,” as Bryan Cranston’s Rod Serling-esque television host intones — displace the viewer, leaving them to reckon with the mystery of the relationships between play and production, which, if they do illuminate each other, often do so in oblique fashion.

Asteroid City, to a greater degree than any Anderson film, is about its filmmaker’s belief in the power of the performative gesture, of the ability of artifice to get at something contradictory and thus deeper in the heart of its character and setting. Perhaps it’s for this reason that I connected with it to a greater degree than any of his films since his 2014 masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel, whose situating of adventure and the beauty of personal storytelling against the sweep of history still feels leagues ahead of anything he has done before or since. The ambition of Asteroid City, necessarily, lies in smaller, more furtive gestures; Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck is the closest thing to an anchoring presence like Hotel’s M. Gustave or Royal Tenenbaum, and the film (or at least the play) begins and ends with him, but it truly is, depending on how generous you want to be, a communal or an overstuffed film, and thus there is less room for the sort of reveries that Hotel was filled to bursting with.

Anderson’s directorial command can be taken for granted these days, such is the recognizability of his frames, albeit not just his frontal symmetrical close-ups: one look at the striking arrangement of faces at perpendicular angles in both Academy and Scope ratios reveals a still galvanizing eye that remains at all times his own while refusing to be pigeonholed. It’s not just enough that, in an emotional split-screen phone call, Schwartzman and (brilliant first-time Anderson player) Tom Hanks are placed as if they are looking at each other; little stripes at the top-left and the bottom-right (the former, if I’m remembering correctly, is from the edge of the phone booth) accentuate a visual symmetry that might be wholly unnecessary if it wasn’t immensely pleasurable to spot it and productive to speculate why it might be there. Similarly, the inclusion of a few shots of Academy ratio footage in the play scenes call attention to themselves; it can be easily surmised that these are meant to be from the camera on hand to film the ceremony during which these shots take place, but the perfect framing, at extreme angles that the camera couldn’t possibly find from its locked-down place in the back of the proceedings, emerges as artifice-within-artifice-within-artifice, with too many potential readings to explicate.

In a sense, such gestures, especially the second microphone that Jeffrey Wright’s military officer or Tilda Swinton’s scientist stride towards during their ceremonial speeches, demonstrate how much performance factors into all of these unfamiliar situations that the temporary denizens of Asteroid City find themselves in. The close encounter is more than anything a device, an Act 1 deus ex machina in the most existential of senses, where people locked into their routines suddenly find themselves confined with each other, having to confront how they relate to strangers in strange lands. This is not to say that the means by which this is achieved is at all secondary: the initial sighting, an extended, seemingly stop-motion UFO landing, is conducted with an awe that’s of a piece with the climax of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou or the wolf in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Redolent of Space Race/Cold War anxieties — the town is also periodically rocked by nuclear testing, with the distant mushroom clouds recalling the controversial atomic bomb invocations found in Isle of Dogs — the alien is a tangible representation of everything that is unknowable and ungraspable, love (familial and romantic) chief among them.

Lest that sound like a trite summation, Anderson’s metafictional structure constantly destabilizes, not least because of the opportunity for alternate characterizations, surface non-sequiturs (an acting workshop led by Willem Dafoe’s Method-espousing Saltzburg Keitel chief among them), and appearance changes it provides. One of the signal moments in the film comes at the tail end of an early scene between the play director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) and his ex-wife Polly Green (Hong Chau), where, as she exits, she mentions that at the end of a specific scene in Act 3, Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell should say a line after she leaves the room and not before; after Schubert takes that advice, Polly leaves the set where he currently resides and then says goodbye, a literal and figurative echoing across narrative levels. If that wasn’t enough, unless I’m forgetting, there is no moment when Campbell actually does that in the play; Act 3 is specified in the intertitles (heretofore regularly broken up into sections of scenes) to be played continuously without break, though at least one scene is likely omitted. One could even construe as this early “non-diegetic” scene as being essentially an airlifted substitute for the emotion of that scene, which is deliberately curtailed otherwise.

At the end of the day though, Anderson has never relied solely on his aesthetic to carry his films; it’s not for nothing that each of his films has had absolutely magnetic, screen-commanding performances, extending to the audio-only stylings of George Clooney in Fantastic Mr. Fox or Liev Schreiber in Isle of Dogs. Even amidst the parade of faces, plenty of people stand out, old and young, large roles and small; the shaken poise of Maya Hawke’s schoolteacher, the affability of Steve Carell’s motel manager, the ornery searching of Edward Norton’s Tennessee Williams-esque Conrad Earp, the playwright of Asteroid City. And Anderson’s greatest non-Murray or Wilson stalwart, Schwartzman, stands atop them all. His greatest moment comes during an already celebrated scene with Margot Robbie, his deceased wife in the play whose scene was cut. Heavily bearded in the play, he removes his fake facial hair and gets a close-up without encumbrance for the first time, and the effect is chilling: the defiance of Max Fisher is still there but wizened, even weathered, an almost wolfish, hollowed stare into the camera lens as his struggles with how to play his character reach across time. Not unlike Jean-Pierre Léaud with François Truffaut or even Lee Kang-sheng with Tsai Ming-liang, Schwartzman has been in roles small and large for Anderson, and the effect of that gaze as it has evolved over the years pierces the artifice.

It is true that Anderson’s films tend not to be tectonic shifts in style or in ultimate purpose, but that speaks to the enduring appeal of his concerns, and Asteroid City both makes that text and complicates it. The former comes in the play itself: after the quarantine is lifted, Augie and his family awake to find everyone, including Midge (who he had embarked on a tentative fling with), gone without another word. The nuclear tests resume, the charmingly absurd police-criminal gun-blazing car chases streak through town once more, and everyone picks up their routines which the span of a week did little to disrupt. The whole extraterrestrial event feels, if not completely hushed-up, then left on the backburner, something to marvel at for a few moments then abandoned in favor of more quotidian concerns. Asteroid City all but compares it to a fantasy: in the acting workshop, Earp wants the play to, among other things, get at the sensation of dreaming. In electrifying, unprecedented-for-Anderson canted angles, the actors spring up and begin reciting the line “You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep.” It is stated that this experience helped shape the formulation of the play, yet no such equivalent utterance appears. Rather, it is the concatenation of sensations and invocations that predominates: obscure yet haunting; lullaby-like yet foreboding (as accentuated by an unnerving Jarvis Cocker end-credits song); unrelated yet defiantly — by dint of an almost Hongian play with two narratives clanging off each other in often successful, always daring ways — vital.

Would that such complexity were afforded to the film that actually made narrative, and in particular the fungibility of superhero storytelling itself, the explicit subject. To its credit, Across initially switches up its focus: the first fifteen minutes or so take place in the dimension where Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) resides, the single most visually bewitching realm in the film that seems to simulate watercolors dripping off the walls in deep blues and purples. These, like the rest of the film, can be inconsistent (some frames play much more with abstracted environments and people than others), but much of the charm of the Spider-Verse films, like Dash Shaw’s underrated My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, is their hodgepodge nature, giving different characters and environments a corresponding look that speaks to the mutability and creativity of the animated comic-book form.

But for the first of many, many times, the basic plot, always digging itself into holes then taking the easiest way out, comes to dominate the proceedings. While (at least initially) Across avoids the staid self-actualizing of Into, content to leave Miles and Gwen to deal with day-to-day life, the film quickly devolves into the ratcheting up of personal dramatic stakes between child and parent(s) that become numbing when played out for the umpteenth time. Across, across its numerous acts, withers amid its almost unceasing rising tension; fun and reasonably diverting when it allows itself little moments of Miles by himself or with Gwen, or his parents discussing their child together, but disastrous when it has to go through the motions of a teen unable to communicate with his parents. It certainly doesn’t help that Miles’s universe, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the film, is stultifyingly bland in comparison. Without engaging interpersonal relations, this large chunk of the film feels like a holding pattern until the multiverse hijinks ensue. Of course one could say this is meant to be the point, that, after experiencing universe-altering events, ordinary life must seem like even more of a slog than it already is, but it only partly ameliorates that issue.

This isn’t to say that Across isn’t pretty funny or engaging in this early section, which ends up being by default the post-opening highlight, not least because The Spot, one of the main villains of the film, is an inherently amusing idea whose ability to open inter-dimensional wormholes leads to some funny fight scenes, with limbs and bodies sprawled across a series of portals. The early glimpses at other worlds, encompassing, among other things, live-action and Lego stop-motion, are delightful in their media mixing. In general the Spider-Verses are best at bemused affability, at leaning into the comedy inherent in seeing people from different walks of life awkwardly interact, something which, for example, a scene where Miles-as-Spider-Man tries to talk with his father and convince him that Miles is a good son adroitly gets at. And the eagerness with which Miles and Gwen act upon reuniting, the ability to enjoy each other’s presences and feel like they have true companionship in the world, is quite touching.

But in the age of go-ahead hell-bent apocalyptic superhero filmmaking, nothing can “just” be frivolous, and a series of subterfuges ultimately lands Miles among the Spider-Society, a vast array of Spider-People dedicated to tracking down villains unstuck in spacetime and restoring them to their proper place, headed by Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac). From here, all pretense of complexity or flexibility basically goes out the window, with every character too locked into their ways of thinking to budge, with typically destructive results. It’s basically impossible to see Miguel as anything other than a misguided villain, someone so obsessed with doing the right thing that our hapless, headstrong protagonist gets caught in the crossfire.

The main contention is the head-slappingly literal term “canon events,” those moments which come to define any Spider-Person’s life, centered almost always on death: that of an Uncle Ben-like figure, a cop relative of a loved one, and so on and so forth. These are displayed in a hologram simulation, with an array of Spider-People crouched solemnly over a dying corpse, including the live-action MCU-precursor Spider-Men. I won’t go into further plot detail than this, except to note that the ludicrously distended film (140 minutes, the longest mainstream American animated feature ever) takes what feels like 20 minutes after the climax to get to its final, offensively reductive twist, a lugubrious stretch well after I had soured on the film.

That sudden downturn is linked more than anything to those images of death, which in a charitable reading would be an indictment of this whole multiverse concept that numerous films have attempted to make a viable device to no success. It speaks to a fundamental issue with the supposed ambition of this idea, of having putatively unlimited options only to arrive at the same characters and scenarios, only done up with a palette swap. Sure, it’s funny when it’s a Spider-Horse or baby Spider-Girl or whatever, but such changes run only skin-deep, and the lack of imagination becomes grotesque and moribund when there’s an insistence on retaining the same tropes, where the same great powers can only lead to the same great responsibilities.

I could talk about many other things that bothered me: the vagueness with which each person’s powers and fighting ability are treated, the muddled representation, the roteness of some of its humor. But I’d like to mention my favorite part of Across: brief editorial explanation text boxes that appear a few times in the film, which almost reminded me of the “(Historical)” notes on the intertitles for Abel Gance’s Napoléon. Those text boxes, enmeshed as they are within all the action, can sometimes be difficult to read and quick to go away, yet they epitomize a certain spirit of fun and innovation that much of the rest of the film sorely needs, a clear nod at a comic book art tradition that nevertheless challenges the viewer to think and slow down in a way that the general slapdash shock-and-awe of the rest of the shifting aesthetics rarely allows for. Meanwhile, in Asteroid City, where even the beginnings of a freeway built in the air inspires thought, that sense of searching, resonant ambiguity lies everywhere.