TV REVIEW : Exploring the Bizarre, Banal in ‘Aspen’

What? You didn’t get invited to Don Henley’s New Year’s party in Aspen? Guess you’ll have to settle for an evening at home with the Frederick Wiseman documentary “Aspen” at 9 p.m. on Channel 28, which has a more populist, less glitzy slant on the not-so-sleepy mountain town. At 2 1/2 hours, it’s an awfully demanding sit for non-Aspenians; on the other hand, given the large overlap between the population of Aspen on any given winter weekend and the permanent population of L.A., there could be a significant local tune-in for the show’s PBS premiere tonight.

As is his custom, award-winner Wiseman’s style--or lack of it--in his 25th documentary is verite all the way, with no narration or structure, no narrative momentum, no discernible point of view in the editing even, just 146 minutes of seemingly random snapshots of Colorado resort life. The bizarre (homeopathic medical treatments, “A Course in Miracles” groups) and the banal (a blue-collar 40th wedding anniversary party, a game of charades) get equal dispassionate weight from Wiseman. If it’s all supposed to mean something, surely it’s the idea of Aspen as a symbolic microcosm for America--town and country of art, agriculture, religion, conspicuous consumption, recreation, intellectual debate and pockets of wealth all out of proportion to the surrounding world.

But Wiseman seems so determined to make Aspen a representative American city that he bypasses much of what makes it indisputably unique. Couldn’t he get his crew into a celebrity shindig, or was star consciousness not part of his design? The contrasting shots of historic buildings and gaudy modern shopping strips speaks volumes, true, but wasn’t any of the perpetual debate in town over preservation and growth issues worth capturing? And there’s only a passing reference to the fact that most folks who work in Aspen can’t afford to live there, a pretty unusual defining characteristic.

Still, he’s on to something about the essential incongruities of modern life exemplified here. Of his two focuses, the holy and the hedonistic, only the former will come as a surprise given the glamorous setting. You expect scenes like the plastic surgeons’ convention (“How often have we heard ‘Grow old gracefully?’ asks the pitchman. “Well, I’m here to tell you that the way to grow old gracefully is through cosmetic surgery!”).

But rather than paint Aspen as Sodom or Gomorrah, Wiseman makes a case that this playground for the rich also has, among its locals at least, a healthy, diverse spiritual life--from a church men’s group debating Jesus’ words on divorce to a glassy-eyed New Ager expounding on “a oneness that makes us all one somehow,” to the moving Protestant sermon that closes the piece.

Perhaps it’s fitting that a documentary on a resort for folks with too much leisure time should unfold at such an, ahem, leisurely pace.

Probably a little too much like mundane life lived in real time for most tastes, “Aspen” will still have an appeal to those who don’t mind their allegories being anecdotal in the extreme. And for us jealous souls whose holiday party invitations got lost in the mail.