The Best Movies of the Year: Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese Used the Same Trick in 2023

By Jesse Hassenger  |  December 27, 2023 | 12:30pm
Movies Features Wes Anderson
The Best Movies of the Year: Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese Used the Same Trick in 2023
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“I think she should do more radio,” says Dinah (Grace Edwards), about her mother Midge (Scarlett Johansson), a Marilyn-ish movie star, in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. She’s conveying a certain respectful ambivalence about seeing her famous mom’s face everywhere, a more personal (and less superficial) version of the old face-for-radio line, while shouting out just about the only 1955-compatible media that Asteroid City doesn’t demonstrate in detail. Elsewhere, this movie reframes itself as a television broadcast, a play about a play, a play within one of those plays, and (via widescreen, blazingly colorful compositions) a movie of that play, which, through the identity of Johansson’s character, refers to other (fictional) movies, while also recalling Peanuts comics and old Looney Tunes, among others. There are so many narrative layers to the film that “meta” doesn’t begin to cover it; that’s become shorthand for a few winky in-jokes or lazy lampshading, and Asteroid City is, like all Wes Anderson movies, immaculately constructed – perhaps to a fault, if you’re inclined to find fault with that sort of thing.

Some certainly are. Over at Variety, Owen Gleiberman, presumably emerging from a stew of his own discontent, called the movie one of the year’s worst. “Anderson triples down on his fetishistic yet oppressive way of engineering a story, even as his most ardent fans triple down on their devotion to the idea that he’s somehow expressing an arch humanity,” Gleiberman blurbs. He’s put off by what he calls the “four-tier diorama of artifice” – the distance Anderson creates, in other words, between his subjects and his audience, who, in Gleiberman’s view, do all the emotional heavy lifting for him via their trust.

His implication isn’t wrong, even if his presumptions are. There is a distance to Asteroid City that Anderson carefully builds into the movie, perhaps moreso than any of his others, even those with similarly nested narratives, or framed by the unfurling of pages. The film literally begins with Bryan Cranston announcing that “Asteroid City isn’t real,” and while he could be referring to the movie’s setting – a tiny desert town where the movie’s ensemble converges for a celebration of young scientific minds – he seems to be describing the play-within-the-play-within-the-movie itself, suggesting that even within this meta-framing, the story is itself more of an outline than a full production, despite much physical (and, eventually, emotional) evidence to the contrary.

The magic of cinema is that it’s easy enough to get lost in Asteroid City anyway – to believe the action up on screen that we’ve been repeatedly told is fake. Auggie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), the character at the center of this fake narrative, has recently lost his wife and despite (or maybe because of) his Wes Anderson-y affectations – a pipe accessory, a deadpan expression, a buttoned-up way of expressing his grief (we see him break the news to his children – three weeks after the fact), and the repeated implications that he’s just an actor playing a part – his pain is nonetheless moving, recognizable, human. There are people, apparently unfamiliar to Gleiberman, who really do restrain themselves from demonstrative emotional outbursts, and not as an affectation, or at least not only that. Auggie, fictional as he may be, is most likely a member of the Greatest Generation (and explicitly an injured war photographer), so it’s hard to read his stoicism purely as a vehicle for Andersonian deadpan dialogue. At the same time, Anderson seems to reason, that’s no reason we can’t also find his halting, sometimes brusque way of relating to his children – for example: “Let’s say she’s in heaven,” he offhands, “which doesn’t exist for me, but you’re Episcopalian” – quite funny.

And yet there are limits, too. All of us have them, whether as writers or viewers or fathers or actors. Remarkably, Anderson wrings further and less expected emotion out of Auggie’s character by taking another step back, outside the action we’ve come to think of as central to the story. The movie has prepared us for this technique with periodic cutaways to black-and-white footage of the TV broadcast framing the production of Asteroid City, so it’s not immediately jarring or confusing when it happens again late in the film, during a climactic scene of slapstick unrest. But there’s something more intimate and raw about the lines that blur when Schwartzman, suddenly becoming the actor playing Auggie rather than Auggie himself, steps out of one Asteroid City and into another – behind the scenes of the play for a scene that itself might be staged, but doesn’t feel it. He goes to the director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) with questions: repeating one that has come up earlier in the film (“why does Auggie burn his hand on the Quickie Griddle?”) and asking something bigger: “Am I doing it right?”

Schubert makes meta-references to the “business with the pipe” and Auggie’s beard, casually calling out Anderson’s signature details of caricature-style character-dressing. Mostly, though, he encourages the actor to push through, reassures him he’s “doing him right” (note the conspicuous change in pronouns; the actor can only really be expected to do right by the character, not the bigger picture), tells him: “Keep telling the story.” Moments later, the actor version of Auggie is acting out a placeholder scene with the woman who was cast as his wife (Margot Robbie), then cut from the production. They are standing outside of the text while the audience is locked right in. As instructed, they keep telling the story, even if it’s not gussied up so elaborately.

It’s an astonishing sequence – and one I thought of, months later, in a very different context, during the final scene of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese and Anderson don’t have much immediate, obvious kinship, but they’re more bonded than they initially seem; Scorsese once wrote a short piece for Esquire in a series asking various figures who they considered the next potential, well, Scorsese. (Hard to feel like anyone but Anderson won that unofficial competition.) From there, you can tease out odd little connections between the two – like the way Scorsese, as it happens, does use the antiquated medium of radio in Killers of the Flower Moon, with startling and bold effectiveness. As the story of the Osage murders begins to wind down, with Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) turning on his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) and confronted by his wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whose family he has helped to slaughter, Scorsese leaps a couple of decades ahead into the future. Rather than a series of photographs and informational cards, the film explains what happens next through a late-’40s true-crime radio play, reducing the vastness of the story’s pain and violence to a series of glib info-drops, racist vocal caricatures, and cartoony sound effects. It’s darkly funny in its audacious undermining of solemn pre-credits info-dumps – and then, in a moment that made me gasp the first time I saw the film, Scorsese himself appears as one of the radio-show players to note Mollie’s eventual death and obituary, which omitted the Osage murders.

I don’t know that Scorsese is implicating himself, as many have shorthanded, in this moment. If that were case, I can see how that would come across as a kind of mealy-mouthed non-apology, making a 210-minute epic about a historical tragedy involving another culture, and then appending a white man’s footnote about what an inadequate job he did (and also didn’t refuse to do). What I take from this moment, what so deeply moves me about it, has less faux-outrage, and is less apologetic. It is Scorsese openly wondering about the limits of storytelling – his own, sure, but more broadly, the power of cinema that he’s put so much trust in. Can any movie capture this real-life tragedy without reducing it to sound effects and caricature? I don’t think Scorsese is lamenting his failure; I think he’s stepping back from his material with concerns similar to Auggie, and without the same faith that Anderson displays when he encourages a character to “keep telling the story.” That’s what Scorsese wants to do, of course. Is it working, though? Is he doing it right?

It’s tempting to, at this point, invoke the phrase “who gets to tell what stories and why,” which has become a near-meaningless catch-all, barely a step up from praising a movie’s “thematics.” What Anderson and Scorsese are both getting at, from strikingly different angles, is a less score-keeping version of why than how we attempt to process unspeakable evil or unknowable grief or anything else that’s not a snug fit into three-act hero’s journeys.

This question, in turn, winds up answering another over-asked one, about the tendency of so many top-level directors to explore period stories, rather than explicitly contemporary ones. Think of Paul Thomas Anderson, who hasn’t made a non-period piece since 2002, or Quentin Tarantino’s fixation on Westerns (whether in the Civil War era or a century later, when at least they made Westerns on television). Or, for 2023, think of Alexander Payne, who has previously specialized in contemporaneous films, breaking out the ’70s fonts and film stock to make sure The Holdovers had a just-so 1970 vibe which, for me, registered as slightly affected; and Christopher Nolan, who has now oriented two of his past three movies around World War II.

Anderson and Scorsese are both primarily making period pictures these days, too – and in the wake of Asteroid City and Killers of the Flower Moon, it’s harder than ever to object. Their settings enable the remove that both of their films utilize so gracefully, a doorway for their “artifice,” as Gleiberman calls it. It’s possible to create that audience-shifting remove in contemporary-set films, too, of course. The Killer, from David Fincher, has a passage in its opening sequence where the lead character is listening to The Smiths on his earphones, and the movie repeatedly toggles between full-speaker sound of what he’s hearing and the tinny version that you’d hear if you were in the room with him, especially cutting back and forth from diegetic to non-diegetic sound, calling attention to the construction of both the scene (that we are watching a scene that has been scored to “How Soon Is Now?”) and to the affectation of the character (he’s the one scoring his own scene to “How Soon is Now?”). It’s very much a movie about the remove our present moment makes possible, with an unnamed assassin’s rise-and-grind philosophizing creating intentional distance between himself and an evil profession.

Yet there’s still something particular stirring about how Scorsese and Anderson step back from the meticulous process of recreating the past (or, in Anderson’s case, a dreamlike evocation of it), and their willingness to potentially undermine all of the work that goes into it. In a sense, all movies are both contemporary and period pieces, capturing the immediate moment they were made, which instantly begins to recede into the past. To call attention to this quality is to walk on a tightrope of reality. Asteroid City and Killers of the Flower Moon diverge aesthetically, tonally, and structurally. But they both drew me out of myself and risked shattering the exact reverie the filmmakers create for a moment or two of transcendence. I’ve rarely felt so transported. This, as over-many people say, is cinema. Half circus, half miracle.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.

 
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