Perhaps the most amazing thing about Asteroid City is that it actually exists. For the bean counters who fund the movies, eccentricity and experimentation are rarely inspiring motivators to open wallets, as evidenced by the Sisyphean career of Terry Gilliam.
But somehow, even though his projects have by no means been consistently successful, Wes Anderson has managed to crack the code. Production companies have once again showered him with cash to make another personal, insular confection: a $25 million metatextual meditation on creativity and the performing arts that is also an Art Deco sci-fi comedy about mourning. It has more layers than a Tor browser, from its story within a story to its fastidious, master-class approach to formalism.
Asteroid City’s target audience is a hip, college-educated sort with a working knowledge of negative space, Brechtian framing devices, UFO lore and Monument Valley Westerns. Having checked all these boxes myself, it’s hard not to champion Asteroid City as Anderson’s finest accomplishment to date — leaping and bounding past the episodic frivolity of The French Dispatch and rubbing shoulders with the sublime Moonrise Kingdom.
Shot entirely in Spain, with rear projections to mimic the red-sand deserts of the American Southwest, Asteroid City is primarily set in 1955 in the fictional town of the title — the creation of Conrad Earp, a Tennessee Williams-style playwright played by Edward Norton. Earp’s saga plays out in three acts and an epilogue, complete with Andersonian title cards for each suite of scenes. In the playwright’s telling, Asteroid City is so named for the giant asteroid crater in the town’s center, nearly the sole reason it welcomes any visitors, situated as it is between the towns of Parched Gulf and Arid Plains.
But this occasion is an exception: Asteroid City is playing host to a Junior Stargazer convention, where the brightest tweens and their dutiful parents have amassed for a few days of astronomical inquiry and an awards ceremony for their enterprising inventions. It’s not the sort of gathering that should make international news —until, that is, a spaceship descends on the scene, and an alien emerges for a cameo. A weeklong government quarantine follows, and sleepy Asteroid City becomes a Roswellian circus of UFO gazers.
Against this backdrop of lo-fi spectacle, a romance of sorts develops between Jason Schwartzman’s brooding war photographer Augie Steenbeck — who is grieving the recent loss of his wife, and struggling to deliver their four children the news — and Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress studying for a role and who, like Augie, has a child attending the convention.
Framing all of this widescreen, Technicolor action are occasional black-and-white sequences in the square Academy ratio, in which Bryan Cranston plays the host of a television documentary about the fabled history of the play Asteroid City, from its conception in the mind of Conrad Earp to its initial six-month run under the obsessive direction of Adrien Brody’s Schubert Green.
Why all of this monochrome backstage mishegoss? Why not just present the already busy happenings of Asteroid City as its own straightforward narrative? It’s a fair question. Anderson’s less charitable critics might denounce his nesting-doll structure as an escape hatch from fully embracing the messy verities of the moment. There is an inherent detachment in knowing that the world of Asteroid City is a stage, and that all of its characters merely players.
But if anything, Asteroid City — the movie, not the play — is anti-escapism. It may be Anderson’s most nakedly confessional film yet, one that autocritiques the ironized, grandly symmetrical vision that has defined his entire filmography. The movie revels in the construction of artifice, from the deliberate plasticity of its sets to the reminders that everyone is always acting: The U.S. armed forces garb that Schwartzman’s character dons when he auditions for the part of Augie is revealed, to the playwright Earp’s surprise, to be just a costume from a middling military musical that he has reappropriated from the wardrobe department. When Johansson’s Midge first removes her sunglasses to show a black eye, it’s revealed to be makeup — part of her immersion into a battered character she’s preparing to play.
And so, in the black-and-white “real” world, Brody’s Schubert Green, whom we’re told lived in the theater for the entire half-year run of Asteroid City at the expense of his marriage, can be read as a surrogate for Anderson, the embodiment of the exacting auteur. Anderson’s thematic obliqueness is also addressed in the colliding worlds of Asteroid City and its production. When Augie, following the script’s direction, places his hand on an oven burner for the umpteenth time in the midst of communing with Midge, Schwartzman has reached his limit. Unable to comprehend the character psychology of this inexplicable action, he exits the color world of the fiction and into the gray world of its making, only to be informed by Green that it doesn’t matter if he understands it.
Asteroid City, then, is ur-Anderson, the most primal and self-reflexive work of his career, and the most deceptively dense. Approached this way, with an eagle eye to the slippages between the diegetic and nondiegetic universes, the bulk of Asteroid City — the endless A-list supporting cast, the cowboy ballads, the kitschy signage and typefaces, and the Jacques Tati-like mise-en-scène, with its extravagant deep-focus folderol — is all extraordinary window dressing for a director that, finally, is letting us peek inside the usually closed shop of his mind. The result is his most quietly authentic picture to date, an honest account of the pervasive numbness of grief.
A first-contact scenario involving an ET played by Jeff Goldblum? That we can understand easily. The more difficult truth is that sometimes, to feel something real, we just need to put our hand on the burner.
ASTEROID CITY. Director: Wes Anderson; Cast: Jazon Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Live Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie; Rated PG-13; Distributor: Focus Features; Now playing at most area theaters