Aspen

ASPEN   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

1991

IDEA:  An in-depth look at Aspen, Colorado, from its popular recreation to its more mundane municipal life.

BLURB:  In the first few scenes of Aspen, we are presented with chanting monks, snowy Rocky Mountain vistas, and a couple exchanging marriage vows high in a hot air balloon. This braided emphasis on faith and spatial elevation immediately lends the film a tenor of reverence, a quality Wiseman will modulate and complicate for its duration. Peering at, but also behind, the tourist trappings of the titular destination, the filmmaker finds an unexpectedly ideal site to ground a theological and spiritual inquiry, where contrasts between upscale, leisure-focused commerce and working-class activity raise questions about the true value and purpose of life. As always, Wiseman creates provocative juxtapositions out of his bounteous footage, finding fascination and dialogical connections between things only related by geographical proximity: a plastic surgery sales pitch, an amateur art class, a meditation group, adult-ed seminars on Flaubert and the morality of divorce in the Bible. In one of his most pointed edits, Wiseman cuts from a guide’s explanation of animal conservation to the massive chateaus that line Aspen’s mountains, and then to a gaggle of women in the shopping district decked out in giant furs. There is a tension between the splendor of the natural world on display, captured by Wiseman in serene, painterly compositions, and the imposition of material human excesses upon it. But like all of the director’s work, Aspen doesn’t pass judgment, even when it seems to draw certain dichotomies. What is common among both the pleasure-seeking tourists and the residents is, in the end, the search for meaning in existence, the desire to find the elusive “good life.” This particular resort town may be Wiseman’s chosen microcosm, but we know its contradictions, its highs and lows, can be found anywhere.