For all the gripes about Wes Anderson’s thematic vapidness, the filmmaker may actually be one of his generation’s most emotionally sensitive directors. His catharsis is often packaged within a dense collection of literary allusion, cinematic verbosity, and sophomoric humor. The monotone dialogue delivery, the perfectionist’s eye for framing, the intentional artificiality of the settings; these all create a meticulously crafted nesting doll for Anderson to place his innermost vulnerabilities. In his latest, Asteroid City, a nondescript desert town in the American Southwest is the site of a spectacular cosmic event. It’s also the official setting of a play written by brilliant conceptualist and directed by a virulent iconoclast. Yes, there is a story within a play within a movie. Anderson’s insularity has only increased over his career, making the excavation of his emotional core that much more rewarding.
Jason Schwartzman plays a photojournalist named Auggie Steenbeck whose wife recently passed. He’s traveling with his son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three young daughters (played with an adorable but chaotic synergy by Ella Faris, Gracie Faris and Willan Faris) to Asteroid City so Woodrow can participate in the town’s Junior Stargazer Convention. Upon arrival, their car breaks down irreparably, according to the local mechanic (Matt Dillon), and Auggie requests that his disgruntled father-in-law, Stanley (Tom Hanks) come pick up the girls. Upon learning that Auggie still hasn’t informed the children of their mother’s death, their strained relationship becomes even more so. The small town includes the gas station, a severely unfinished highway ramp, an observatory for star-gazing, and a motel run by an enterprising manager (Steve Carrell).
Other people staying at the hotel include beloved film actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter and fellow Junior Stargazer, Dinah (Grace Edwards). There are the other Stargazers (Ethan Josh Lee, Sophia Lillis, Aristou Meehan) and their respective parents (Randall Park, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber). A young school teacher (Maya Hawke) is chaperoning several young children and a cowboy (Rupert Friend) is traveling with a stable of troubadours. The convention is hosted by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), a self-serious military man ready to attribute all contributions to the convention to the United States government. There’s Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), an impish scientist who runs the observatory. When everyone gets together one night to kick off the festivities and witness a normal but exciting lunar event, they end up getting a visit from something they never expect.
From the very first scene, the story of Asteroid City is presented as a fictional play. A narrator (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to a playwright named Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a well-regarded genius of conceptual drama, who wishes to create his next big hit. He gathers actors, including the upstart Jones Hall (Schwartzman) and the regal Mercedes Ford (Johansson). There is the volatile but talented director (Adrien Brody) whose own bad behavior creates a slew of drama behind the story that we’re watching. There’s a committed dramaturg (Willem Defoe) hoping to help playwright, director, and cast out of a creative predicament. Anderson is a filmmaker who’s never shied away from showcasing the cinematic pretense of his stories – if anything this is the root of his storytelling ethic – but Asteroid City takes this to its most extreme point.
Earp’s Southern drawl and queerness will recall Tennessee Williams, while the familial drama of Asteroid City will remind some of Eugene O’Neill. Then there’s the meta-textuality of Cranston’s narrator, which is pure Thornton Wilder. Anderson’s last few films have been explicit in their literary influences (New Yorker travelogues for French Dispatch, Stefan Zweig short stories for Grand Budapest), and Asteroid City pays homage to Twentieth Century drama. This fits perfectly within Asteroid City‘s actual story of simultaneous loss and discovery. The adults in the room are besotted by cynicism, grief, lost opportunity, while the children experience their world with wonder and creativity. When the desert town gets a visit from an extra-terrestrial being, the adults seem barely fazed while the Stargazers see a window into an entirely different world.
Anderson developed the story with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola, though screenwriting credit is Anderson’s alone. The particularly heady construction of the narrative feels like a proper development among Wes’s evolution as a storyteller: the more films he makes, the more hermetically sealed his themes are. As immaculately constructed as one of Mendel’s candy boxes from Grand Budapest, Wes is still asking his audience to decode the equation that he’s put in front of them. Asteroid City is pretty transparent in its wanton melancholy, but Anderson still prefers to present that through several filters. In this film, those filters are actually part of what the story is trying to tell, a particularly ingenious wrinkle that proves the writer-director to be an even more creative filmmaker than we already imagined.
The privilege of his almost-always-white characters and the abject permanence of their ennui has made his films the subject of quite a bit of criticism, but Anderson’s skills don’t lie in socio-economic interpretation but in full-on deconstruction of his characters’s state of mind. What is the deal with all these white people and why can’t they ever be happy? That his films often make jokes out of the racial aloofness of his protagonists hasn’t won him any fans, but it may have confused some about where his sympathies truly lie. The emotional stuntedness of his characters is not some arch stylistic choice but actually a myopic viewfinder of how his characters often see the world. Emotionally infantile and clinically unhappy, Anderson’s films are closer to gallows humor than wry observation.
2007’s The Darjeeling Limited was the last time that Anderson tackled grief as directly as he does here, though that film is more unfiltered, and doesn’t give itself the coverage of so frequently calling itself a fictional story within itself (though, to be clear, it still does do that). The raw wounds of Auggie and his children are the heartbeat of Asteroid City, and even as that heartbeat is undercut by the film’s framing device, Anderson still argues brilliantly for fiction’s ability to evoke our most honest feelings. A small scene near the end featuring a cameo that I won’t spoil here illustrates this perfectly. Art imitating life, or vice versa, is the perpetual ouroboros of drama, a concept that Asteroud City literalizes while still managing to construct a serviceable story. This is one of Wes’s “weirder than you think!” movies, but it’s idea is very simple: the distinctions we make between fiction and reality are arbitrary, especially when, in the end, we all return to dust.
Directed by Wes Anderson