To Love, To See, and To Be Seen in the American West: Asteroid City
I tried to keep it spoiler-light and there's so much more I could say about Wes Anderson's fun new film
Every now and again, an auteur must remind the audience why they’ve got a reputation, why their quirky eye can get a big budget, why Oscar winners and people coming off long superhero movie contracts will work with them. In a year full of major releases from tremendous directors, as well as franchise sequels, road trip movies, throwback comedies, and inevitably dozens to hundreds of small independent films that won’t get wide theatrical releases or the attention they deserve, there’s no one doing it like Wes Anderson. As with most striking auteurs of the 20th and 21st century, his reputation has been reduced to kitsch and quirks and, in his case especially, the ‘twee’ as people with opposing taste or no taste at all disregard his work. As with any artist, you can take him or leave him. Asteroid City is a reminder that we ought to take as much as we can. No one else even really attempts to imitate his specific style except for people playing with AI prompts. But his always growing list of frequent collaborators show that he knows how to run a production. And in the end, as near always, he shows he’s worth the trouble, with a thoughtful, comedic, romantic, beauty of a film.
Asteroid City is not a film about filmmaking in the way of a Seven Psychopaths or Be Cool or more literally The Fabelmans or the upcoming Francis and the Godfather. But it is a film about writing and acting. It is a film about wonder and exploration. It’s a film about the stars and our place in them, the natural beauty of the American West, love and loss within and without family, entertainment, science, and art. It stars a stacked ensemble cast and even has the generosity to give the sort of front-loaded opening credits which I always imagine as invoking the early 20th century of Hollywood, and while doing that still manages to surprise in execution, like Tár. The closest thing to a main character might almost be Jason Schwartzman as conflict photographer Augie Steenbeck/actor Jones Hall, or Jake Ryan (who plays his son Woodrow “Brainiac” Steenbeck and Hall’s understudy), but Scarlett Johansson turns in a remarkable performance as one of Steenbeck’s major scene partners, while Margot Robbie and Hong Chau each star in singular scenes. Maya Hawke is a steady-handed mainstay as June Douglas, a teacher responsible for a bus full of children; Billy (Brrayden Frasure) starring among them; Rupert Friend as Montana, leader of the cowboy band The Ranch Hands. Anthony Wright compels humorously as General Grif Gibson. Brian Cranston plays the narrator and almost everyone plays double or triple duty because of layered fourth walls but only a few are credited as multiple characters. One of the film’s cores is around conversations between Schwartzman’s character war photographer Augie Steenbeck, his father-in-law Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), and the three young daughters of the family, Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia (real life sisters Ella, Gracie, and Willan Faris) which nearly bookend this truly lovely film.
The story – which alternates between box 16:9 and widescreen film dimensions, mostly splitting the black-and-white with the square and the color with the wider rectangle dimensions – begins with a narrator on a TV show introducing us to recently-deceased playwright Conrad Earp (played by Edward Norton). The story his television show is recounting is of the creation of a play, set in a fictionalized setting which hopes to, by the powers of dramaturgy, say something real and true about the world which we inhabit. Real actors we know are introduced to us by the names of fictional actors they’re encompassing, names which we’ll forget because they’re not frequently spoken. The characters they give us will be remembered, if not by name than by performance and their relation to each other. When we’re introduced to the full color world, it’s the sort of feast for the eyes that Anderson and his frequent collaborators (like but not limited to co-writer Roman Coppola, cinematographer Robert Yeoman and set decorator Kris Moran) are known for producing. The shot composition, the use of color, the full use of the frame, is beautifully displayed.
Asteroid City is a tiny fictional 1950s town, a motel near a military base, an applied science division led by General Grif Gibson, Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), with Fisher Stevens as a sort of government legal counsel. Steve Carrell runs the motel, which has vending machines of idealized atomic age technology – a cocktail machine that peels lemons for martinis, another that sells deeds to parcels of land for $10 in quarters. Here our many heroes meet – five brilliant children (Jake Ryan as Woodrow, Grace Edwards as Dinah Campbell, Aristou Meehan as the dare-addicted Clifford, Sophia Lillis as girl scout Shelly, and Ethan Josh Lee as Ricky Cho) and their more-or-less brilliant parents (Schwartzman, Johansson, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park), winners of Junior Stargazer awards for their super-scientific projects.
It's a film with a lot of heart which utilizes sight gags, brilliant dialogic wit, and plays with layers of fourth walls. After a fashion, it’s what I wish Beau is Afraid was; in any case, it’s the closest stylistic comparison for that film so far this year, in my estimation. After another, it’s a reminder that I need to see The French Dispatch and several other Wes Anderson films I’ve missed out on. It’s a colorful world of colorful characters and, as they’re all characters in a play depicted in recreation on a TV show by the film’s framing, it could be forgiven if they all spoke with the same voice. But they don’t. It’s, at its worst moments, similar. And the brilliance of the performances won’t allow flat uniformity anyway, though there are broad levels of tonal changes between the black-and-white “real” world and in-color “imagined” one.
The film has much to say, but one thing I want to hone-in on is diversity in the cast. The relative whiteness of his casts is something that Wes Anderson is occasionally off-handedly criticized for, despite that he’s had black and Asian and Latinx actors in his films since 1996’s Bottle Rocket and 1998’s Rushmore. This film plays with ideas of segregation and integration not through vocal declarations but in the deployment of a small sample of characters of color in a way that isn’t necessarily interrogated by the characters within the film, but whose borderline colorblindness enriches the unspoken implications of characters and their environments. This relates a vision of a plausible 1950s theatrical scene where some actors of color are quietly, perhaps notably, featured and translates to an imagined world within a play where their representation doesn’t need to be challenged or highlighted.
Seu Jorge, the black Brazilian musician from The Life Aquatic, playing a cowboy musician in this film, Jeffrey Wright as the general, Tony Revolori as his aide-de-camp, Stephen Park and Ethan Josh Lee as a father-son pair, even Tilda Swinton as the scientist leading the military-attached observatory all point to the perspective of the confirmed bachelor playwright, Conrad Earp (Norton), and director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). Even if those last two aren’t a split self-insert for Anderson and/or Coppola, it’s still a perspective he’s chosen to demonstrate in the work. This isn’t just about applauding that there’s representation on screen for the aspirational qualities it might defer to some – especially younger – audience members. It is rather about the aspirational qualities the writer and director of the play are showcasing in their version of the mid-1950s American West in all its hope and paranoia. It’s not about convincing black or Asian or Latinx kids they have a right to design weapons for the military, survey motel guests, or break world changing stories for their school newspapers.
It’s about the recognition and demonstration that all the stories being told, the character archetypes and arcs on display, are applicable to humanity at large. The specificities of American perspective on exploitation and the early-mid Cold War are in keeping with showing the simplicity and complexity of people. It’s a sort of romantic notion in the end – “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” You can’t bring your vision to bear on the world if you don’t dare dream it. You can’t share what matters to you if you never get lost, dear space cadet.
Asteroid City is not the self-serious type of movie which is certain of its own importance because of its premise before it even gets to theaters. It isn’t a corporate victory lap of one sort or another. It doesn’t try to make the enrichment of billionaires a feel-good story about labor power. It is not the culmination of a remake getting nearly a dozen sequels over two decades. It is not a tight action film with sprawling lore. It is a personal film by an artist and the other artists he works with, a shared cumulative vision of hope that can be melancholy and analytical but stops short of overwhelming cynicism. It’s tongue-in-cheek at times, earnest in others, the best-looking live action film I’ve seen so far this year, and in contention at the halfway point for my favorite of the year.