Though Aspen opens and closes in a church, the 2 1/2-hour film, which airs on PBS Dec. 30, explores a lot of territory. As always, Wiseman is fascinated by contrast and contradiction. You know that from his first outdoor shots. As cows graze in an ancient, mountain-rimmed meadow, a hot-air balloon wafts by carrying a couple of trendies exchanging New Age marrige vows. No it’s not Melanie and Don.) From then on, Wiseman pulls us straight into Aspen’s dichotomous heart. There are few towns on earth so wrenched between nature and human artifice, between Old West values and the whims of the superrich at play. Some carefully juxtaposed moments: elderly fiddlers playing for money in front of pricey boutiques; begrimed miners gouging for silver ore as tonily garbed skiers schuss the pristine slopes. It’s the same with the culture scene. A local reading group engages in a lively, perceptive debate about a short story by Flaubert. Down the road, an artgallery show unveils paintings of a pay phone, a fire hose and a Diet Pepsi vending machine. “Everything is authentic,” boasts their creator, who is solemnly assured by one Aspenite: “It’s the kind of thing that will do very well here.”
In Wiseman’s viewfinder, at least, Aspen throbs with spiritual yearning: maybe it’s the altitude. Sipping wine in the cathedralesque living room of a glitzy chalet, a group that might have stepped out of Cyra McFadden’s unforgettable satire of Marin County reverently prattles about the “oneness of being” and arrives at such cosmic insights as, “We are all like holograms.” Yet there’s something basic and genuine at work, too. In the film’s most affecting sequences, an ecumenical gathering of divorced males bare their pain and confusion. Cut to a middle-aged couple, both longtime locals, celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. Amid the long, loving testimonials of children and grandchildren, the best of the human spirit glows like a full Aspen moon.
As with much of Wiseman’s work, the film hits tedious patches, especially when it keeps switching back to those fluorescent streams of skiers. But as TV’s most incisive recorder of contemporary existence, Wiseman’s entitled. In “Aspen’s” last act, an engagingly earnest seminar professor concludes a lecture on “God and the Global Economy” with a pointed moral: “Without an eternal perspective, everything is meaningless.” Any other documentarian would have ended there, but Wiseman is too devilish to go preachy. His finale shows a Jimmy Swaggartish minister directing a plea to the Almighty above the bowed heads of his flock: “May the world know that You are here as surely as the Denver Broncos are present at a football game.” God bless them . . . every one.
