'Asteroid City' banner
Wes Anderson is probably the most distinctive filmmaker working steadily in Hollywood today. Every two years or so, Anderson directs another production set in an idiosyncratic world of his own imagining, in places always slightly out of space and time even when the location and year are clearly identified.
Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City, ostensibly unrolls at a remote town in the desert Southwest, circa 1955. The locale and theme will remind B movie buffs of such ‘50s sci-fi flicks as Them. Anderson adds a meta dimension: his desert town tale is actually a play staged for ‘50s television, complete with a stiff-postured, stiff-voiced narrator (Bryan Cranston) and cut-away scenes dealing with the writing of and staging of this production. The TV studio scenes are in black and white—just like ‘50s television—but the play as it is enacted in the desert town is in color (as the cast would experience it). Again, Anderson is not about accurately reproducing the past. Cranston’s narrator says and shows things that were impossible on the era’s broadcast networks.
The play by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) concerns a resort town with tiny cabins and a communal shower. When a mushroom cloud rises on the horizon, a woman at the town’s lunch counter remarks with a shrug, “Another atom bomb test.” She’s seen many. The setting is deliberately fake, with buildings like plywood facades, cactuses made of rubber and most everything painted in shades of rust, including the passing freight train, the distant mountain range, the desert clay, the hulk of an abandoned car. The obvious unreality of the place, which is no place, is heavily underlined.
The artifice extends to the actors, an impressive cast told to play meaningful stick figures. Pipe-smoking “war photographer” Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) arrives with his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) for the Junior Stargazer celebration. It’s an annual science contest in the shadow of the White Sands Proving Ground, presided over by an Army general in comic opera khaki. Woodrow wins the White Dwarf Medal of Achievement for inventing a device capable of projecting the American flag onto the Moon. Woodrow’s grandad (Tom Hanks, a revolver tucked into his trousers) arrives only because Augie’s car breaks down. He dismisses his son-in-law as an idiot.
Encamped at the resort, and memorizing her lines for a noirish drama, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) pronounces herself as sick of playing tragic alcoholics. “Sad thing is, I’m a very gifted comedian,” she insists.
And the cast list scrolls on in one of the most impressive rosters of actors since 1963’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Tilda Swinton costars as Dr. Hickenlooper, the Stargazer’s science advisor; Adrian Brody as the teleplay’s director; Willem Dafoe as Method acting coach Saltzburg Keitel; Steve Carell as the resort’s manager; Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis and Stephen Park as parents of Stargazer contestants; and Jeff Goldblum as the Alien. That’s right, the science fair turns sci-fi with the arrival of an alien spacecraft.
So what’s it all about, really? As deliberately creaky as the stage sets and the acting, the plot is a framework for Anderson’s thoughts on the artifice of art and an opportunity to paint the picture with layer upon layer of sometimes droll, sometimes sophomoric humor. Poised for launch on a flat car of a passing freight train is a nuclear missile marked “10 Megatons. Do Not Detonate.” A vending machine sells notarized deeds to desert acres, a bleak and waterless landscape ready for development. The Junior Stargazers and their families are treated to a chili and frankfurter supper. The TV station broadcasting the play is WXYZ.
If you liked The French Dispatch (2021) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), you’ll chuckle along with Anderson’s latest set of visual and verbal gags. If not, Asteroid City won’t convince you to enjoy his filmmaking, but it might remind you that his work is admirably distinct. Nobody makes movies like Wes Anderson.
Asteroid City is screening at Marcus South Shore Cinema, the Oriental Theatre, AMC Mayfair, Marcus Ridge Cinema, Marcus North Shore Cinema, Marcus Majestic Cinema, Marcus Menomonee Falls Cinema, Marcus Renaissance Cinema and Cinemark Tinseltown USA Kenosha.
