NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“Living in Another World”: Film Review of Asteroid City
By Geoff Carter
There are only a few filmmakers working today whose style can be recognized within the first few frames of a film. This was possible with past artists like Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Tati, or Stanley Kubrick, but today—perhaps with the exceptions of Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino—there is no auteur with as distinctive a visual and thematic style as Wes Anderson.
The beautifully designed and calibrated color palettes, the wry and snappy dialogue, the carefully balanced framing, and the seamless integration of other media into his movies creates a cinematic universe unlike any other. FromThe Grand Budapest Hotel to The Royal Tenenbaums to Moonrise Kingdom, his characters have struggled in these wondrous landscapes with their needs for inclusion, acceptance, and emotional connection. Beneath the beautifully framed and colored veneers is a pervasive sense of longing and melancholy. Asteroid City, his latest work, is no different.
The film opens unexpectedly on what appears to be a 1950s television set. An unnamed host (Bryan Cranston), reminiscent of Rod Serling, introduces the play Asteroid City which is apparently being produced for the television program. He introduces the playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a pretentious man eminently conscious of his own importance who talks about the torturous process of creating the script. Then the host introduces the actors in the cast and the characters they will be portraying in the play as well as orienting the viewer to landmarks on the set.
This dual framing of a story within a story is complicated even more when the “play” starts. Instead of a production bound by three walls and a proscenium as the viewer was led to expect, the first shot follows a train loaded with everything from John Deere tractors to avocados charging through the vast emptiness of the Arizona desert. In typical Anderson stylings, the landscape is highly stylized and utterly charming. Reddish, almost cartoon-like buttes and mesas (Coyote and Roadrunner?) are tinged with saturated yellow hues that blanket the landscape. The train roars past the tiny town of Asteroid City (population 67) and the camera pans lovingly over the town: a 1950s café situated next to a motor court, an unfinished on-ramp to God knows where, a service station, the asteroid crater for which the town got its name, and, finally, the Asteroid City road sign. A tow truck rolls in bearing a station belonging to the Steenbeck family. Patriarch Auggie (Jason Schwartzman) is there to take his “braniac” son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), along with his three young daughters (the Faris sisters) to the Junior Stargazer Convention.
Hank (Matt Dillon) the mechanic, standing in his impossibly clean garage, informs them that the car is a goner. Auggie then calls Stanley (Tom Hanks), his dashing and wealthy father-in-law to come get them. It becomes apparent from their conversation that Auggie’s wife (Stan’s daughter) passed away three weeks ago, but that Auggie has yet to tell the children that the Tupperware container he’s been carrying around holds their mother’s ashes. Stan agrees to come and get them. Auggie sits the kids down and—in classic Anderson wryly dry style—tells them in his matter-of-fact way that their mother is dead. His deadpan and detached responses to his own children reveal not an uncaring father, but a husband struggling to conceal his own pain.
More junior stargazers and their parents arrive, including movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Campbell), manic Clifford Kellogg (Aristou Meehan) and his father J.J. (Live Schreiber) and others. All the stargazers are scientific wizards and—almost by definition—outsiders to their peers.
The motor court is run by the unnamed manager (Steve Carrell) who points out the facility’s vending machines that dispense everything from snacks to martinis to parcels of land. When the manager explains to one Stargazer family that their cabin burned down because of “improvements” and that they must stay in a tent, the humor and ambiance of the set is vintage Anderson. A bus rolls into town and disgorges June (Maya Hawke), a young schoolteacher with her class and a country western band led by Montana (Rupert Friend).
Everyone attends the Stargazer Ceremony presided over by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright). The young stargazers demonstrate their inventions that range from disintegrators to a jetpack to a new element and gather that night to watch the spectacle of an astronomical alignment but are spellbound when an unexpected visitor lands.
The narrative centers mostly around the growing relationship between Midge and Auggie, both wounded and emotionally exhausted souls who struggle to find a connection. Midge makes Auggie run lines for her next movie with her through the windows of their adjacent cabins. Through saying the lines of the fictional characters, the two are able to be open and honest—as honest as they can be about their feelings. Putting on the façade allows them to lower their guard.
The movie is split into acts which are interspersed with backstage drama and background—provided by the host—about the actors and creators of Asteroid City. This layering of realities begs the question of whether, and how, art imitates life or vice versa. The limitless vistas of the Asteroid City movie burst the boundaries of the theater and takes us into realms of imagination and vision that, like the stars, are infinite and limitless. The relationships between the actors with their characters, the playwright, the director, and the audience sometimes transcend the reality from which they sprang.
Near the end of the film, when the actor playing Auggie meets the actress (Margot Robbie) who portrayed his deceased wife, their conversation is not only a professional exchange but a sentimental and melancholy remembrance, as if the fictive relationship was real, which, on some level, it is. In one scene, the host of the television special, appears unexpectedly at the motor court and asks plaintively whether he is supposed to be there.
The consciousness and sensibility of the artist is molded by experience and imagination. Asteroid City is an exploration, or at least an examination, of that process, an examination which, like much of Anderson’s material, is held at arm’s length. The camera angles in the theater are mostly straight-on long shot. The television sequence is square format, as opposed to the wide-screen dimensions of the film, reflecting the dichotomy between imagination (dream) and reality, a dichotomy emphasized in the last sequence of the film during an acting class populated by the cast of them film when they chant, “you have to sleep to wake up.”
Asteroid City is a beautifully shot and conceived film. Like all of Anderson’s work, it is winsome, wry, and unexpected. And infinitely entertaining. He excels at simultaneously drawing both humor and pathos from a single moment. In nearly all Anderson films, the absurd walks hand in hand with the rational, and the beautiful pastiche of his exteriors and palettes cover the broken and bruised hearts of his characters. From Suzy in Moonlight Kingdom to the Tenenbaum children to Midge and Auggie, Anderson’s people are always looking for something to make them whole again.
After learning of her death and seeing her remains in a Tupperware container, Auggie’s daughters wonder whether their mother is in heaven among the stars. Woodrow cites the scientific data about the nearest star. Dinah tells Woodrow in an intimate moment that she’s felt more at home among the stars than on Earth. In Asteroid City, they are looking at the stars for an answer to their questions; of course, it being a Wes Anderson piece—they shouldn’t be surprised when they get an answer.