Asteroid City Is Wes Anderson at His Best
I am here, hat in hand, to admit that I underestimated Wes Anderson. I’ve enjoyed the filmmaker’s work for many years—his methodical aesthetic, the subject of a thousand weak parodies, might be the most recognizable in moviemaking right now. But in the past decade or so, I struggled to excavate much deeper meaning beneath Anderson’s fine-tuned flair, and began to worry that he was disappearing inside his own eccentricities. Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch, in particular, seemed like charming, flimsy confections. His new film, Asteroid City, is a vigorous rebuke to that very critique. It pairs his inimitable visual elegance with an impassioned argument about the power of storytelling. And it’s a reminder that Anderson remains one of cinema’s best.
Asteroid City is set at the dawn of the space age, in a mid-1950s American desert town built around an impact crater that doubles as a listening post to the stars. Anderson is usually fond of a large ensemble, and he assembles one here to play the many families attending a junior “Stargazer convention” for enterprising teenage inventors. The writer-director (who conceived the story with Roman Coppola) explores his go-to themes of parenting, grief, and love blossoming in strange circumstances by way of a recently widowed war photographer named Augie Steenbeck (played by Jason Schwartzman), who falls for a movie star named Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Their respective teen children have their own chaste affair.
The narrative twist, which Anderson establishes in the opening seconds, is that the entirety of the Stargazer storyline is a televised play, part of a hoary anthology show à la Playhouse 90, introduced by a cigarette-smoking announcer (Bryan Cranston) and presented in crisp black-and-white. The framing device initially feels superfluous to Asteroid City’s charming, Andersonian flow, in which adolescents deliver dialogue as droll and cutting as seasoned screwball comedians and every shot is gracefully arranged to the last pixel. The Stargazer plot alone might have sufficed. Why should the viewers also care that the story is apparently the conception of a dandy playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who typed it up in a mountain cabin while cloaked in a smoking jacket?
I pondered the conceit for much of the movie, but just as the tale-within-the-tale starts to grow chaotic, Anderson drops the much-needed expositional hammer. Asteroid City is about art’s ability to bridge emotional gaps, to offer language that even the creators or performers might not understand. The film is about being receptive to those unknowable elements, which in the Stargazer narrative are translated as a series of strange extraterrestrial events that lock the city’s inhabitants into a government-enforced quarantine. In the narrative about the play’s production, we see the show’s creative staff (writers, directors, actors) try to grasp a similarly mysterious phenomenon: the meaning of their vocations. Eventually, they develop the conviction that telling a story is what matters, even when the stakes aren’t immediately clear.
I could not help but detect a cri de coeur from Anderson, who may well be baffled to see his thoughtful projects get dismissed sometimes as elaborate yet trifling jewel boxes by critics such as myself. In Asteroid City, the filmmaker invites the audience to peek behind the curtain of one such production in order to remind us of the heart and vulnerability that is poured into a great tale and performance. Schwartzman, as both the romantic lead Augie and the actor playing Augie, does transfixing dual work; he switches between the stifled feelings of the character and the wilder, more sensual approach of the man behind him. Johansson, ideal as a fictional screen idol, also subtly embodies the tension of being a movie star, a role she knows well in real life.
Despite the head-spinning metaphorical implications of Asteroid City’s fictional characters, fictional actors, and actual movie cast, the story is also a breezy, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking epic. It’s immensely watchable and boasts a predictably stacked lineup; familiar members of the Anderson ensemble (Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody) rub shoulders with welcome new additions (Steve Carell, Maya Hawke, a deliciously gruff Tom Hanks). As the quarantine closes in more and more on the characters, Anderson delights in bouncing the actors off one another, like a particle accelerator filled with Oscar nominees.
Asteroid City is also undoubtedly Anderson’s COVID movie. It tackles the surprising ways that humanity reacts to being locked down, forced to live by new rules and confronted with the unknown and the frightening. Anderson abstracts and shuffles those themes in the context of a period piece, an approach that I hope more auteurs will take while reckoning with that unsettled recent history. Asteroid City’s 1950s backdrop reflects the same sense of panic that has characterized our pandemic years. But don’t worry about the uncertainty, the director-within-the-film assures his lead actor at one point: “Just keep telling the story.”