‘Asteroid City’ Review: Wes Anderson & His All-Stars Go Meta

In his latest film, Wes Anderson crafts a TV show about a theatrical play that, in turn, is about a small town.

Asteroid City, the latest from Wes Anderson, is filled with the assiduous visuals, mythic faces and charming curiosities that you expect from this singular film-maker. It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy.

It’s partly set in 1955 in a fictional Southwest town, a lonely four corners with a diner, gas station and motor inn. Palm trees and cactuses stipple the town, and reddish buttes rise in the distance. It looks like an ordinary pit stop save for the atomic cloud soon mushrooming in the sky.

Written by Anderson, the film is about desire and death, small mysteries and cosmic unknowns and the stories that we make of all the stuff called life. It opens in black-and-white on an unnamed television host (Bryan Cranston, severe and moustachioed) in a studio. Tightly encased by the boxy aspect ratio and speaking into the camera, he introduces the evening’s programme, a “backstage” look at the creation of a new play, Asteroid City, that’s been made “expressly for this broadcast.” He then presents the playwright (Edward Norton), who rises from his typewriter to stand on a bare stage and present the characters.

The suited television host and the broadcast studio with its ticking clock conjure up 1950s live anthology dramas like Studio One, and you may flash on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town when the host and playwright start speaking.

Anderson quickly fills up the stage and the film, too. A train chugs in under the opening credits carrying a bounty of goods: gravel, avocados, pecans, John Deere tractors, plump Pontiacs and a 10-megaton nuclear warhead. Jeffrey Wright enters to play a five-star general, while Tilda Swinton shows up as a scientist. Tom Hanks plays a dashing curmudgeon; Adrien Brody makes the muscular theatre director.

The drama starts soon after the playwright’s introductory remarks, except it doesn’t look anything like a theatre production. It looks like a film, a meticulous, detailed, visually balanced wide-screen Wes Anderson one. There’s no proscenium, no stage, no wings, no audience. The blue sky stretches over the town; the yellow desert extends into infinity. The characters enter by car and bus, and are shot in long view and intimate close-up, beautifully framed by the camera. The palette is an astonishment, a dusty rainbow of hues. It looks like this story was left to bleach in the sun before being wrapped in transparent yellowed plastic.

The colours are mesmerizing and ever-so-gently destabilizing. These pigments signal that you’ve entered a new fictional realm that, like the television studio, is at once immediately recognizable and somehow foreign. The interplay between the familiar and the strange, like that between the theatrical and the cinematic, is a foundational theme in Anderson’s films, which, like most movies, look a lot like life yet are always different.

Divided into acts, the play’s first section commences with the arrival of the newly widowed Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer played by a method-y actor, Jones Hall. (Jason Schwartzman plays both.) Augie, his brainy teenage son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), and three interchangeable young daughters are visiting for Asteroid Day, an event that commemorates the day (Sept. 23, 3007 B.C.!) a meteor crashed nearby, leaving a crater now overlooked by an observatory. More visitors appear, including a teacher with a flock of children, some singing cowboys and other parents with teens who — like Woodrow — are contestants in an Asteroid Day competition.

Together with Scarlett Johansson, Schwartzman fills out the film’s expressive centre with humour and perfect timing. Johansson also has dual roles as both an actor and a character. She’s Midge Campbell in the play, a sultry Hollywood star who rolls into town with her own whiz-kid and a bodyguard. Midge and Augie meet cute at the diner, but their relationship blooms while they’re in their respective rental cabins. There, framed by windows, they face each other and open up, talking in that somewhat deadpan, patently Anderson-screwball way that puts up a snappy, performative front which slowly gives way to deep feeling.

Anderson regularly switches back and forth between the television story and the drama in the town, gradually putting them into meaningful, dynamic and poignant play with each other. There are crises in both, along with self-doubt, confrontations, assignations and discussions about art and life.

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He’s crammed a great deal into this film, including cinematic allusions and theatrical lore. The play takes place in September 1955, the month that James Dean died in another parched Southwest wasteland; there’s an audition with Jones and the playwright that evokes Brando’s famous one for Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

If you know Streetcar, you may remember Blanche’s famous cry: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” It’s a heartbreaking and naked appeal, one that could be uttered (although with far more restraint) by Anderson. There’s so much yearning in Asteroid City. Over the years, he has refined his filmmaking, honing the way that he tells stories, how he organizes cinematic time and space. His visual style is so distinct and instantly recognizable that it’s spawned imitators and inspired an Instagram account (and now book) called Accidentally Wes Anderson, a compendium of Anderson-esque visuals that exist in real life.

An accidentally Wes Anderson world is an amusing idea, partly because his films can outwardly seem somehow removed from life despite their agonies, broken hearts, dashed dreams and nuclear weapons. Part of what makes his work memorable and often unexpectedly touching is that his filmmaking — the stylized way he orders the world with his richly populated cast of collaborators — expresses how he navigates the world’s confusions.

When Augie shows Midge a bald patch on his head where he was wounded by shrapnel while on assignment, he is sharing a reminder of the horrors that he’s seen. It’s an emblem of his pain, but it’s also an invitation to another person and to us — an appeal to our sympathies.

Rated: PG-13 for atom-bomb imagery and adult relations.

Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theatres in New Zealand August 10.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Manohla Dargis

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