An Open Letter to My Family About The Movie Asteroid City

Disclosure: This isn’t an exact facsimile of what I wrote to my family. It’s been enhanced in certain places to make it more palatable to a general audience.

Dear my entire extended family. When I mentioned that my favorite film of the year was Asteroid City (although, to be fair, I greatly enjoyed Tetris, Killers of the Flower Moon, Holdovers, Fool’s Paradise, and Oppenheim), I’m flattered that you all took it as a recommendation but I would have told you he has a very stylized way of making films.

Asteroid City is by Wes Anderson who has a very stylized way of making films. He started out in the 1990s with low budget movies (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore) and just a few characters. These were probably not that out of step with regular movies and would have been more palatable to you. Martin Scorsese and James L Brooks were very strong early champions of his work.

Royal Tenenbaums is probably his most effective piece emotionally. It involves a dying elderly man (Gene Hackman) trying to connect with his wife (Anjelica Huston) and adult kids before he goes. The kids are all accomplished geniuses in their field, but they are beset by loneliness and intimacy and are even romantically entangled.

Ed Norton was asked why his favorite director was Wes Anderson and he said that it spoke to people’s need to belong. That’s why he’s maybe my favorite director as well. The characters might be enemies in the middle of or whatever, but they ultimately recognize each other’s humanity at the end. I would also say that for unmarried people, Wes Anderson provides a comfort because he leans so heavily on found family tropes, and not the belief that happy endings are based on romantic ones.

From there, his works have gotten more idiosyncratic with more bloated casts. This, I suspect, might be the turn off to regular moviegoers. If there are 40 speaking roles, it’s harder to form a coherent story.

It’s probably this kind of stuff that has made him fodder for humor when SNL did a skit on him. So if you want to just laugh at him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDIAZCwHQE&t=28s
Amy Poehler once joked at the Golden Globes that he rode to the ceremony on a bicycle made from tuba parts.