Aspen (Frederick Wiseman, 1991)

 

Frederick Wiseman’s 1991 Aspen differs from comparable studies like the Boston-set City Hall and Monrovia, Indiana in spending little time on the community apparatus: there’s nothing here of council meetings or ski resort management discussions, and the de rigueur aspects of the project (ski slopes, ski lifts, skiers) are dispensed with fairly cursorily. Instead, Wiseman’s emphasis is on spiritual questioning and searching, taking us into several extended discussions and lectures on such topics on reconciling oneself to divorce from a religious perspective, or on whether capitalism can be reconciled with religious teachings on justice (inevitably, the contributions to these discussions occasionally carry a note of anxious self-interest). Some of what we’re shown is unseemly or borderline absurd, such as a rather ridiculously mentored art class in an over-the-top house, or a plastic surgery presentation seeming to disproportionately focus on undesirable “ethnic” features; others, like a lively discussion of a Flaubert short story, are sincere and committed, if disproportionately populated by seemingly well-to-do retirees with ample time on their hands. In contrast, a fortieth wedding anniversary party held in an apparently much more low-budget and functional location reverberates with genuine human warmth and spontaneity, whereas a group of immigrants worries even about the availability of basic housing (and, again, about the relative advantages of having paler skin). The film’s final sequence, an eloquently conceived and delivered sermon about the building of religious community, provides a note of hope that these disparate outlooks and circumstances might somehow find common purpose (an optimism unfortunately not much borne out by subsequent decades). In a tiny concession to Aspen celebrity-spotting, the film includes a brief shot of CBS newsman Ed Bradley amid others in a local gym, and (I think) British newsman Jon Snow among those playing a cozy (and somewhat ribald) game of charades.