CRATER LOVE HATH NO MAN

Opening in theaters today:

Asteroid City--In Golden Age of Television black and white, a stentorian TV host (Bryan Cranston) tells us that we're about to see a documentary about the writing and staging of a new play. The drama in question is titled Asteroid City, and it's set in a tiny desert community near the impact crater from an ancient meteorite. It's the Cold War mid-'50s in this, Wes Anderson's latest; mushroom clouds blossom in the distance from the occasional nuclear bomb test.

Soon we shift to color, and to a stylized milieu that looks like Midcentury travel-poster art of the southwest. A large roster of characters assembles in Asteroid City, many of them for the convention of the Junior Stargazers, an organization of youthful science prodigies and inventors.

At the center of this ensemble, insofar as it has a center, is a bereaved young photographer (Jason Schwartzman) who hasn't yet broken the news to his kids that their mother has passed on; he's one cabin over from a movie star (Scarlett Johansson) with whom he bonds, as do his son and her daughter. Along with these familial tensions, the gathering sees military intrigues, scientific experiments, quarantine and even alien close encounters.

I really wish I liked this movie better than I did. Anderson is a one-of-a-kind comedic artist, and his 1998 Rushmore is one of my favorite films of the last thirty years. His debut feature Bottle Rocket is a gem as well. Most of his subsequent films have been brilliant but uneven; the best of them, like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, have been flawed near-masterpieces, dazzlingly imagined and acted but marred by heavy-handed touches of sour violence and labored narrative conceits.

All of this is regrettably at work in Asteroid City. It has a beautiful look, the title setting is beguiling, there are patches of funny dialogue (by Anderson and Roman Coppola) and strong visual gags. The cast is without peer for current Hollywood prestige, glamour and chops. The star power is almost too abundant to name; check the poster above for the listing. It's the sort of bunch that only Woody Allen used to be able to command. But all of this, alas, falls short of overcoming Anderson's misguided habits.

Most ruinous is the frame story, about the play. It looks great, but it distances us from the main story while adding no perspective on it that I could see, is of minimal amusement in itself, and diffuses the later part of the picture into hazy anticlimax. But even within the Asteroid City story, Anderson strikes a curiously flat tone. Deadpan is a wonderful comic technique, unless everybody's deadpan, and then it just becomes monotonous.

A couple of the actors, like Liev Schreiber, Tilda Swinton, Hope Davis and Steve Carrell, manage to escape the Jack Webb Sound-Alike Contest and texture their performances a bit. And Tom Hanks, as Schwartzman's dour father-in-law, somehow finds a tone that's fully in keeping with the movie's style but also seems entirely naturalistic. Hanks seems to be indestructible.

PRO & CONCIERGE

Opening this week:

The Grand Budapest Hotel--Wes Anderson’s latest is set in another of his seamlessly-imagined alternative realities. This time, it’s a fortress-like resort hotel in a mountainous eastern-European nation. At the core of a couple of nesting-doll-like frame stories, the main action concerns the adventures of the Grand Budapest’s hapless but unflappable concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) and his sidekick, the neophyte lobby-boy Zero Moustafa, charmingly played by Tony Revolori as a boy. F. Murray Abraham plays Zero’s older self, telling the story in the 1960s to a young writer (Jude Law) staying at the now-shabby hotel.

Gustave sees his duties as including gigolo services to the hotel’s wealthy, elderly—in some cases octogenarian—female guests. When he is implicated in the murder of one of these ladies—who has left him an impressive legacy—he and Zero are chased across “Zubrowka” by the sinister agent (Willem Dafoe) of her rotten son (Adrien Brody).

This is, I think, about as simply as the plot can be explained. There are dozens of characters, all manner of intrigues, subplots, chases, gun battles, romances, delicious-looking baked goods, and eccentric characterizations by a cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Saoirise Ronan, Bob Balaban, Edward Norton, Mathieu Amalric, Jason Schwartzman and others, all in good form. Fiennes gives maybe his funniest and most endearing performance. It’s the usual Anderson shtick, and if, like me, you buy into his visions, you’ll probably find The Grand Budapest Hotel a delight.

Or mostly a delight, anyway. Grand Budapest is slightly marred, or at least was marred for me, by odd touches of violence—fingers severed by a sliding door, prison guards massacred during an escape, a casually murdered pet—that feel jarringly out-of-key with the general atmosphere of stylized whimsy. Other Anderson films have shown this trait—the arrow killing the dog in Moonrise Kingdom, for instance, or the fatal helicopter crash in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I’ve always guessed that it’s Anderson trying to force some dramatic gravity into his fictions, to keep them from seeming too trivial.

He probably felt even more pressure in this direction with The Grand Budapest Hotel, because of the setting and the period. On the whole, Europe in the mid-20th Century was no picnic, and since there are no Nazis or Fascists in the movie, the gruesome touches in The Grand Budapest Hotel may have been the director’s attempt to reassure the audience (especially its older members) that he knows this.

But this doesn’t seem any more substantial than anything else in the film—just less good-natured. F. Murray Abraham’s magnificent voice, narrating from weary decades later, carries all the poignant melancholy the movie needed to offset its lightness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is the work of mature master confectioner; its violence seems self-consciously scribbled on its surface, by Anderson’s adolescent inner vandal.

Raze—Violence is also the issue in this exploitation melodrama, opening today and playing this week at Filmbar Phoenix. It stars the marvelous actress and stuntwoman Zoe Bell, best known for Tarantino’s Death Proof, as Sabrina, one of a bunch of women who have found themselves abducted and imprisoned in an underground bunker and forced to fight each other, mano a mano, to the death, in an elimination tournament.

They’re told that if they die, their loved ones will be murdered, and the survivors are shown videos to prove it. Running this vile spectacle is a husband-and-wife team (Doug Jones and Sherilyn Fenn) of unctuous sickos; the audience, watching on video monitors, are rich scumbags.

I sat there watching this film, directed by Josh C. Waller from a script by Robert Beaucage, wondering why it seemed so toxically more vicious than innumerable action films with very similar premises, in most of which the combatants were male—just last year, for instance, I enjoyed the Keanu Reeves-directed Man of Tai Chi, the plot of which, in bare outline, is close to identical. Was my reflexive revulsion to Raze just cultural Victorianism because the cast was distaff?

It can’t have been only that, because while I don’t much like the Hunger Games flicks, which also employ this idea and a warrior heroine, I’m not appalled by them in the same way I was by this film. Perhaps it’s because the fight scenes in Raze are so furiously savage and concentrated, and the actresses—among them Tracie Thoms, Bell’s costar from Death Proof—give off a despairing sense of empathy for the opponents they have little choice but to pummel. Anyway, while I found the first two-thirds of Raze more grueling than fun, it doesn’t seem fair to censure a movie for making hideous violence seem hideous.

Based on this description, your own tastes should tell you if Raze is for you. I wouldn’t quite call it torture porn, but it carries some of that genre’s dismal stink. In any case, on its own terms, it’s effective. When (spoiler alert!) Sabrina at last gets around to some vengeance against her captors, I can’t claim I’m sufficiently pure-hearted not to have enjoyed it.

THE MOON ALSO RISES

As much as any Tolkien geek or Star Trek nut, Wes Anderson delights in invented worlds of immersive detail. At times he’s like a little kid, showing you the pictures he’s drawn in a spiral-bound notebook. The difference is that his invented worlds aren’t fairy-tale domains or distant planets, they’re embellishments on twee upper-middle-class Boomer-era culture, especially as experienced by adolescents, and by the eternal adolescents that this culture produced.

The conceit of Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums (2001) was that we were seeing enacted a Salinger-esque midcentury Manhattan novel. In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) he went so far as to invent marine species, like the “Sugar Crab” or the “Jaguar Shark” (charmingly stop-motion animated by Henry Selick), for his titular TV star/explorer hero to chronicle.

His latest, co-written with Roman Coppola, is Moonrise Kingdom, a pubescent star-crossed love story set on fictitious New England coastal islands in 1965, and it’s as obsessively imagined as the rest. Anderson gives us maps, fake meteorological history delivered by an authoritative-sounding Chorus (Bob Balaban), a warren-like house with an intricate floor-plan, a made-up scouting organization for boys called the “Khaki Scouts”—with its own magazine, Indian Corn—and a series of “young reader” novels pored over by the heroine that truly look like the sort of thing you’d have found on a Bookmobile in that era. The movie is a ‘60s childhood as it should have been, but also, specifics aside, as it sort of was.

Said heroine is twelve-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward), whose cold-fish Dad (Bill Murray) and repressed Mom (Frances McDormand) are both lawyers. At first the stonefaced Suzy is a little creepy, peering through binoculars out the windows of her handsome home, but even though she’s capable of violent outbursts she’s no bad seed. She’s a romantic, keeping vigil for her beloved.

He arrives in the form of Sam (Jared Gilman) a runaway from a Khaki Scout camp on the island. A year earlier, he saw her as The Raven in a local production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, and knew immediately he’d found the meaning of life. They talked only once, but she invited him to correspond, and he did not shirk.

The two of them run away together. Sam, an orphaned foster child, tries to impress her with his woodcraft, unaware that his ardor has already won her heart. They camp out, and she reads to him from her favorite books as he smokes a corn-cob pipe. Needless to say, their idyll drives the rest of the island into a tizzy.

Besides Suzy’s parents, the worriers include the earnest Khaki Scoutmaster (Edward Norton) and the slow-spoken, sad-sack Police Captain (Bruce Willis). The other Khaki Scouts treat the operation not as a search for two missing children but as a manhunt for potentially dangerous fugitives; they fan out, armed to the teeth.

More complications arise, including a Deus ex machina storm, and eventually a Social Services representative (Tilda Swinton in striking blue) and a Khaki Scout bigwig (Harvey Keitel) enter the action as well. Willis gives one of those performances that he’ll be remembered for after most of his action roles are likely forgotten, Norton is touching, the kids are excellent, and Murray and McDormand are effective even if they get less than usual to do here. Robert Yeoman’s water-color-ish cinematography is ravishing—there’s a shot of Willis crossing a church roof that has the austere devotional beauty of an image from Dreyer—and so is the music, by composers ranging from Alexander Desplat to Mark Mothersbaugh to Britten.

For me, Anderson has never topped his first two features, Bottle Rocket and especially Rushmore—one of my favorite movies—but Moonrise Kingdom, despite some clunky missteps toward the end, falls only a little short of these. Some parents may be uncomfortable with the (non-graphic) scenes of Suzy and Sam’s physical intimacy, and with the period-realistic tobacco habits of both Sam and the Scoutmaster, and in the course of the story an animal meets a jarringly awful (and gratuitous) fate that might be a deal-breaker for some kids (and some adults). But with these caveats duly noted, Moonrise Kingdom borders on the sublime.