“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
The best scene of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City comes late in the film when an actor, played by Jason Schwartzman, walks off stage of a play he is appearing in to question the director, played by Adrien Brody, about his frustration of not understanding his character -whom it is notable he co-developed. The director simply tells him it doesn’t matter -"just keep telling the story". Seeking further guidance, he unexpectedly finds it from a former co-star, played by Margot Robbie, cast in the play as his character’s wife only to have her one scene cut. What that is I won’t spoil, but it sets things in perspective and allows him to finish the play, content in what he gleans of it.
That play is called Asteroid City, and it’s enacting comprises the bulk of this movie, interspersed occasionally with snippets of a television program chronicling its making from the conceptual stage by acclaimed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) through to its actual staging. It’s about what happens to the visitors of a mid-1950s small desert town hosting a Junior Stargazer’s convention when an alien arrives to retrieve the meteorite that left a crater there five thousand years earlier.
Wes Anderson as of late has been fond of nested stories -if you look only to The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch. I think stylistically, there’s something in the contrast that appeals to him -the two realities of this film composed in different aspect ratios and colour grades: with the behind-the-scenes bits in black-and-white academy ratio filmed on old-fashioned theatre sets and the play itself illustrated in vibrant widescreen with a palette seemingly inspired by 1950s commercial art and on sets more sophisticated but still artificial. Both of these dimensions are defined by some artificiality and yet there’s an additional, real layer to the movie you don’t have to look too hard to see.
If it’s not apparent by the claustrophobic nature of the frame, in both the primary storyline and its meta-text, it should be once the alien has left and the people at Asteroid City are placed under government quarantine. Anderson began writing this movie in late 2020 and it’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic informed not only the narrative but the principal ideas and mood of the piece. I’ve written about the melancholy in Anderson’s work before and it seems especially prevalent through this film where several lead characters struggle with emotional detachment. The play’s lead figure, war photographer Auggie Steenbeck (Schwartzman again) has avoided telling his children their mother died three weeks ago and is unable to bear the responsibility of being their sole guardian -and so he ropes in his father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) to help out. His son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) also seems unable to process the tragedy. And at this convention they each find a twin soul in the similarly dispassionate Hollywood actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). These characters in effect dictate the tenor of the camp, and on short glance it might not look too dissimilar from the general cadence and characterization Anderson has employed elsewhere. But it represents a far more pervasive kind of loneliness and unintelligible anxiety, especially through the prism of the nested narrative. We can resonate with that inability to make sense or respond to something so earth-shattering, be it the sudden death of a loved one, the confirmation of the existence of aliens… or a global pandemic. Auggie and his actor both pine for meaning in light of all this, but it is elusive. I imagine Anderson wrestling with this provocative uncertainty as he wrote this script under a lockdown, featuring several scenes of Auggie and Midge communicating through their windows, the barrier between their cabins a proverbial chasm.
And I think that’s also why there is this extra layer to the story, bridging reality and the deep fiction of the play Asteroid City. It exists as a device for Anderson to not only indulge in the process of inspiration and motivation, for actors especially, but to reckon with the very idea of storytelling as an exercise in pondering meaning itself. Anderson is a filmmaker who is very controlled and meticulous, and here he interrogates the notion of not being in control, not having a defined sense of direction. This is reflected in some of his more spontaneous choices of technique: camera movements more fluid than is his custom, including a couple tracking shots, and a series of Dutch angles at the most expressionistic point in the movie. All of the artists portrayed, the actor, lead actress, director, playwright, even the understudy who takes the part of Woodrow at the last minute, are just going along with things as they come, telling the story as they know it best -and wouldn’t you know it, that’s where the narrative of Asteroid City goes as well, albeit with some poignant sense of personal understanding achieved.
There’s a degree to which Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola also subvert their own methodology when it comes to characters. That deadpan monotone serves more of a conscious purpose here, particularly for Auggie and Midge, who Schwartzman and Johansson play with impeccable anti-chemistry. It’s curious too the relationship that is developed between the characters and their actors, who are extensions of each other but not one-to-one parallels. Midge is rehearsing scenes for a new movie, a kitchen-sink drama of sorts, in which her character is depressed and victimized; her actress, Mercedes Ford, also quite famous, seems to have gone through something similar with the director. While Auggie’s actor Jones Hall shares some of his character’s idiosyncrasies, but crucially again can’t find that connection psychologically -being particularly hung up on one spontaneous act Auggie apparently does for no reason, until he finds that connection through an unused scene. It’s notable that this moment referred to earlier is the only scene of meta-narrative not framed by Bryan Cranston’s TV host. Another layer of subjectivity opens up that provides new insight.
Though he was likely a last minute replacement for a sick Bill Murray (COVID, to make the metaphor even more immediate), Tom Hanks is excellent as the cantankerous yet caring grandfather figure. Newcomer Jake Ryan also stands out, grasping Anderson’s style of language and performance in a way reminiscent of Tony Revolori in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Revolori is here as well, alongside Anderson’s regular stable of reliable players, including Jeffrey Wright as a military general, Tilda Swinton as the local scientist, the aforementioned Edward Norton and Adrien Brody, and Willem Dafoe as an acting teacher. Additionally, the film features Maya Hawke as an elementary schoolteacher, Rupert Friend as the leader of a band of singing cowboys, Steve Carrell as the local innkeeper and real estate salesman, Matt Dillon as a mechanic, Hong Chau as the director’s wife, and Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, and Stephen Park as the parents of the other young space cadets played by Aristou Meehan, Sophia Lillis, and Ethan Josh Lee respectively -who with Woodrow and Dinah lead their own little thread about getting the word out about the alien. A big ensemble, but as usual Anderson knows how to employ every one of them, and several like Wright, Norton, Brody, Chau, and Friend get real outstanding moments.
Asteroid City is one of Anderson’s most visually captivating movies, owing in large part to its particular colour saturation designed to evoke 1950s art aesthetics. It’s bathed in these sandy, pastel hues that reflect that bright artificiality of the set around them -which is a traditional set against a pristine Spanish backdrop, laid out precisely so that individual shots have that painterly composition. The black and white sequences are no less stunning in their own way, visually inspired by old TV presentations and Hollywood movies -I particularly like the unfinished set of the director’s office. And for a movie that is so meditative and even gloomy, it’s still quite funny -Anderson and Coppola’s dialogue is as whip-smart as ever, combined with a sharp array of visual jokes and specific meta-humour that takes aim at the structure of the piece and even satirizes the occasional movie-making/theatrical convention. The alien is quite charming too.
This is a movie that probably improves on a second viewing, if for no other reason than the references seeded throughout to later moments of the narrative. But it’s plenty enjoyable on initial watch too. Lately, there’s been a bit of an annoying trend online of generated A.I. approximations of Anderson’s aesthetic -in the form of fake trailers for “Andersonian” renditions of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that tap into the mere surface-level attributes of his filmmaking. Asteroid City, one of his most soulful movies, is a reminder of just how shallow such impressions are. A computer may be able to draw the broad strokes of his style, but the real beauty and emotional complexity of a film like Asteroid City cannot be so easily replicated.
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