His new film “Asteroid City” gives the meticulous director’s way of working the necessary madness and amounts to a masterpiece. Photo: Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
To the casual observer, Wes Anderson might seem like someone who either refuses to read his own press or is absurdly convinced of his press. Those finicky arrangements, symmetrical compositions, and precise tracking shots that have become the stuff of viral videos and scathing social media memes aren’t going away. While other filmmakers may respond to their critics by branching out and turning things upside down, Anderson, like Federico Fellini before him, emphasizes his stylistic peculiarities. My colleague Alison Willmore called his latest work, The French Dispatch, (correctly) “the Wes Anderson movie that Wes Anderson ever made.” The same could be said of any new Anderson movie, but it certainly is Asteroid City, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
All this enjoyment has its purpose. Anderson’s obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify, and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and uncertain. The regimented universe of Moonrise Kingdom is thrown into rapid decline by the madness of young love. The Central European candy-box milieu of the Grand Budapest Hotel is being destroyed by the creeping evil of authoritarianism. The French Dispatch’s romantic, continental allure is shaped by protest, injustice and violence. Asteroid City may be the purest expression of this dynamic, as it is about the unknown in all its forms. Death, the quest for God, the creation of art, the exuberance of love, the mysteries of the cosmos – in Anderson’s tale these are all facets of the same thing.
Asteroid City is set in September 1955, at a point in the mid-century when anything seemed possible. Though reality belied that optimism, World War II looms in the rearview mirror, but its traumas linger and the mushroom clouds in the distance portend a potentially more ominous future. These blasts come from a nuclear testing facility not far from Asteroid City of 83 residents, a town that is itself the very definition of an in-between place, a collection of motel bungalows built near a 100-foot-tall meteor crater, “halfway between.” Parched gorge and arid plains.”
Brave curiosity is in the air as this dead-end ghost town is overrun by Young Stargazers and Space Cadets, a group of teenagers and their families gathered for a competition hosted by the US military and the local observatory. The families include the Steenbecks, led by widowed war photographer father Augie (Jason Schwartzman), who has yet to tell his children their mother died a few weeks ago. (“The time is never right.”) As in so many Anderson films, the children are precocious introverts while the adults are comically haunted. When Augie’s teenage bright son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) falls in love with Dinah (Grace Edwards), a 15-year-old botanical wizard, Augie falls in love with her mother, Hollywood actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson). Showing off a black eye for research purposes, the actress warns the war photographer in advance that she is playing a “tragic, abused alcoholic” and that one day she will likely be found dead in a bathtub surrounded by pills.
Anderson’s films have become increasingly diffuse and dramatis personae over the years, a particularly apt term in this case as we are told that what we are seeing is actually a play directed by the legendary American playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). The film actually begins on a black and white television set with the story narrated by a Rod Serling-esque host played by Bryan Cranston. (So it’s actually a play within a play within a television production within a movie.) The presenter reminds us, “Asteroid City doesn’t exist. It is an imaginary drama created specifically for the purposes of this show. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal invention.” In other words, the story itself is phantom, unrecognizable.
At various points, Anderson draws on the “actors” who play several of the above roles. Not unlike the people they portray, they struggle with their own fears of the unknown. You are also in 1955, a time when the work of the Actors Studio was transforming Hollywood, eclipsing craft and discipline to the invigorating mysteries of the soul. The neurotic, fresh-faced Jones Hall (also played by Schwartzman, of course) struggles to accurately portray Augie’s grief. But in his forlornness, we learn, lies the actor’s genius.
The boldness and beauty of Asteroid City lies in the way it blends the mysteries of the human heart with the mysteries of science and the universe. When visitors to Asteroid City encounter a real alien, their world goes into a tailspin, both changing their perception of reality and pushing them even further into their previous assumptions. (It turns out we cling even more to our identities in the face of the unknown.) The visit also disrupts Anderson’s squiggly film world, as the film gets faster, weirder, funnier, warmer — almost as if the filmmaker himself were rummaging through his searches material and desperately searches for an explanation for the mysteries he has unearthed.
Towards the end of the film, Jones leaves the role of Augie and meets the actress (Margot Robbie) who was supposed to play his wife but was reportedly dropped from the finished play. As the two reminisce about the scene they would have had together, the Anderson mood fades away, revealing a perfect moment: two people who, through their memory of a scene that doesn’t exist from a play that never happened, communicate with the clutter of life. presented in a theatrical cinematic fiction pretending to be a TV show. I cried like a baby. Wes Anderson’s madness always had a method, but Asteroid City reminds you that there’s a madness to his method, too. And that ultimately makes him a great artist.
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