The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer convention is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.
“The French Dispatch” came to us early enough in the two years of the pandemic, there was no way Wes Anderson could’ve anticipated those life-altering events. His quirky anthology offered a bright repast from the darkened world around us; it worked significantly well but wasn’t meant to address the pandemic. “Asteroid City” feels like the film Anderson wrote in lockdown in his home. Directly addressing themes of loss, grief, and a world that can change instantly, Anderson seeks to assuage himself by telling this story and a second story about the creation of a play called “Asteroid City.” This super-meta story seeks to validate itself and encourage creators as they question their value in a crisis. In the end, Anderson pontificates a little too much, and the humor doesn’t hit as often as it should, but when it’s earnestly telling a story, it’s firing on all cylinders.
Oddly, Wes Anderson’s aesthetic blew up in the last ten years due to the spotlight social media emphasized on everything niche. Twee is the word I’m looking for. Some ride the Anderson train exclusively because of the sharp contrast Twee offers to mega-blockbusting. Amid a sea of Marvel movies, Anderson’s films feel even more novel, whereas his earlier works sat comfortably in a sea of indies. Some love the pastel color palettes, deadpan deliveries, and perfectly level cinematography. Some like to hold him up as an archetype auteur working in the industry today, still making movies other studios would pass on. Anderson, himself, only barely participates in the online discourse surrounding his own movies (bait that every filmmaker now has to ignore in pithy blog interviews) and stays in the festival-only limelight. Now, after the world underwent a fundamental change, Wes Anderson clearly seems to be interrogating his value as a creative.
Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer driving his four kids across the American desert, attempting to grieve the loss of his wife while keeping his household in order. When the Steenbeck household stops in Asteroid City for a junior stargazer convention for his genius prodigy son, they get waylaid in a government quarantine after an alien visits. Augie, his son, and a wide cast of characters try to survive the government quarantine and ponder a great many things. MEANWHILE, our narrator Bryan Cranston shares with us the creation of this stage play we’re watching (“Asteroid City”) and breaks up the play’s several acts with short scenes showing how the play got its director, its star, its lead, and its message.
Let me get this out of the way now: People looking for that Anderson style will get plenty of that. Everything’s dipped in pastel color palettes. Camera angles are perfectly framed. Every actor performs deadpan, even if the scene feels deeply emotional. He turns the ignominious parts of the American Southwest into a ’50s travel magazine. He evokes the kind of nostalgia a travel brochure can evoke much more than the place itself. His cast features a litany of A-list stars, some stalwarts of his work and others new to the fun: Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Maya Hawke, Liev Schreiber, Hong Chau, Adrien Brody, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori, and Margot Robbie to name a few. So, if you’re going to this movie because of what Anderson does, you will be happy.
Anderson’s film literally centers around a quarantine. In many ways, he directly grapples with the quarantine. How suddenly and rushed it came upon us—the incredulity. The escape attempts. The endless self-distraction. The unexpected waves of grief that washed over all of us. The story mechanics and themes are so clearly tied to the pandemic we have all processed Anderson’s grief by simply watching the film. Thankfully Anderson never directly calls it a pandemic or a lockdown, instead framing it far away from modern times. In that sense, it doesn’t jar us to watch this processing; instead, it offers a parallel track to reminisce about a time we’d all like to put behind us.
The film’s difficulty lies not with its main story but with the meta-story layered within itself. The black-and-white flashbacks of how the play “Asteroid City” got made stand in stark relief to the pastel tones Anderson typically offers. Most of the time, the story-within-a-story plays comfortably in the same realm as all of Anderson’s work. Deadpan deliveries. Heavily verbose narrators. Unique and comfortable pacing. The climax of this meta-story comes when Jason Schwartzman, the actor playing Augie Steenbeck, leaves the stage production and tells his director (Adrien Brody) he still doesn’t get the play. Brody tells him it doesn’t matter. He says, “Keep making the thing and let it simply wash over you.” The explanation doesn’t satisfy, but Brody, acting as a clear mouthpiece for Anderson himself, iterates: Art is liberating and therapeutic for the artist, and whether an audience appreciates the work or not is simply beyond their ability as an audience actor or even director to understand. Art is inherently valuable, even if its finer points feel inescapable. Wes Anderson’s telling himself his work means something, even if he doesn’t quite know what, and that’s a good thing.
The film has its moments of beauty and brilliance. It works best when it hones in on Jason Schwartzman’s grieving widower and Jake Ryan’s Woodrow Steenbeck. More than any character, Woodrow undergoes the most significant transformation, and his deadpan coming-of-age feels earned and authentic. From distrusting scientific wunderkind to regular ‘ol teenager Woodrow tracks the bizarre goings-on of Asteroid City with a fluidity of mind only a teenager could accept. His acceptance of his father after their afflicted grieving feels like the big emotional beat it should be.
There are moments of emotional clarity and greatness wrapped up in this introspective work. The larger monologues about art and success come across so lecture-y that it’s hard not to roll your eyes a little bit about one more creator feeling the need for validation and asking their audience to bear the brunt of it. Still, the government quarantine and Asteroid City’s denizens remind us of what we went through (albeit obliquely enough to soften the blow) and demonstrate only the greater highs of human behavior. Underneath all that pomp and fluff, Wes Anderson is a lurking optimist that sees great things in people despite the horrific circumstances surrounding them.
Focus Features will release “Asteroid City” exclusively in NY/LA on June 16th
and in theaters everywhere June 23rd
