Here are a couple of new movies that we watched as a weekend double bill. The first was White Noise (2022). Ms. Spenser and I have read a few Don DeLillo novels, including White Noise. I've seen it called un-filmable, but I think it is one of his more accessible books. Noah Baumbach wrote and directed this attempt.
It stars Adam Driver as a small-time celebrity college professor, the founder of the Hitler studies program. His dirty secret is that he speaks no German - his private lesson show him as more than a beginner. His wife is Greta Gerwig, a beautiful bouncy mother of a brood that includes a teen boy and girl from one of Driver's previous marriages, a daughter from one of hers, and a toddler who is theirs.
The first act shows them in their happy life together - and how thoughts of death torment both of them. But Driver also needs to help out his co-worker Don Cheadle, head of the Elvis studies group. When he is lecturing on Evis, Driver comes in and starts delivering a contrapuntal lecture on Hitler: how each reacted to his mother's death, their love of animals, and so forth. This scene includes Driver swooping around in his academic robes like a great crow - very theatrical.
Meanwhile, outside town, a truckload of gas hits a train full of industrial something, leading to a fire, a feathery plume of smoke, then a black cloud, and finally an airborne toxic event. Driver and Gerwig try to avoid scaring the kids, or themselves, until it's time to panic and evacuate. They make it to the camp they are assigned to, manned by volunteers from SimulVac, who are using the real evacuation as a trial run for a simulation. And it's working well.
But Driver is exposed to the toxic event, and now fears death more than ever. When they get home, Gerwig is acting distant and distracted as well. Her daughter figures out that she's taking some kind of pills. I'll skip over how that all works out, but it is the most comic and absurdist section of the movie. Except, I guess, for the credits, which shows everyone at the supermarket, shopping in choreographed synchronicity.
After this piece of stylized silliness, I knew we had to watch Asteroid City (2023), Wes Anderson's latest. It's set as a series of framing devices: A 1950s TV show made of a play, about a playwright writing (and producing? or is that just in his imagination?) a play about Asteroid City.
Asteroid City is a small New Mexico town, with a diner, a gas station, an unfinished overpass and a meteor impact crater. The main character (maybe?) is Jason Schwartman, a war photographer, who's stationwagon breaks down leaving him and his three young daughters and teen son in Asteroid City. His father-in-law, Tom Hanks, is disgusted by Schwartzmann, largely because he hasn't told his children that their mother died several weeks ago.
But his son, Jake Ryan, is the reason for the trip. He is a Stargazer honoree for his invention. (I can't remember if it's a rocket belt, disintegrator or something else...). His nickname is Brainiac. The other honorees include Grace Edwards, daugher of filmstar Scarlett Johansson. Schwartzman and Johansson will form a bond, as will Ryan and Edwards, and sundry other visitors to town.
This all plays out in front of an obvious painted backdrop, in desert pastels, washed out in imitation of old color photography. Anderson managed to make many scenes look like live action versions of 50s illustrations, like Norman Rockwell. Just so that you remember that this is a play being written by a playwright in a play being shown on television in the 50s. Every now and then, we drop back to the frame play, so that you don't get too comfortable. And of course, there is an alien who lands to steal the asteroid.
So both of these movies are extremely stylized, high concept, and rather drily funny. I think Driver should do more straight-ahead comedy, because he's good at it (although he sometimes seemed to be channeling Jeff Goldblum.) Both movies have quarantines, which I guess is just zeitgeist. Both are interested in the children, more than a lot of movies with families. Baumbach and Wes Anderson seem to run in the same circles, so I guess it makes sense we'd see some similarities.
We really enjoyed both of these, and they worked really well as a double bill.
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