Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
Imagine you’re a filmmaker and you’ve assembled a dream cast of top stars, top notch character actors and your usual stock company of famous faces. Your production design team brought you a set reminiscent of a 1950’s Southwest desert landscape, complete with vistas of Monument Valley and Route 66 iconography. The costume designer nailed period couture absolutely, from cowpoke denim-on-denim to aristocratic golf attire to gorgeous fitted dresses. The sun-kissed color palette is reminiscent of a faded postcard from bygone family vacations. A long-time friend and idiosyncratic fellow writer-director has helped you co-create a conceptual storyline that is about a Playhouse 90-style TV show that presents a three-act stage show, attended by various circumstances mixed-up people are involved. It fits perfectly with your own brand of meticulous, symmetrical or purposeful visual sense. There is also a UFO.
And then, when everything is stylistically in sync, ask yourself: Okay, how do I use all of these elements to express something? What have I to say – about the nation at a historic turning point, about the looming competition between strict conformity and a burgeoning counterculture, about the fears of the nuclear age meeting a brave new frontier of consumption? You wait for the answer. And wait. And wait…
Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, an all-star road trip to Nowheresville, USA, is unmistakably the work of one of the few modern directors who can truly be called writers: they know his camera movements, his characters, his compositions crammed with aesthetic bells and whistles -brac as soon as you see them. It’s also a jumble of ideas, colliding like particles in an accelerator, without any of them ever catching on or turning into anything resembling a coherent narrative. There’s so much wonderfully differentaphernalia to lose yourself on screen that you don’t mind the easy-going, strolling feel of its ensemble comedy and are content to just bask in the wild, wild world of it all. Eventually, however, you’ll become just as restless as the trapped tourists and reluctant visitors who are stuck in the Titelburg, scanning the horizon for a target – any target – and finding nothing.
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Actually, let’s correct ourselves: this isn’t so much a comedy as it is a “comedy,” to use scary quotes. As with much of Anderson’s earlier work, there’s a dry, comical rhythm tinged with a touch of melancholy, although the existential funk that hovers over Asteroid City is a heavier-than-usual haze. This tiny way station in old-fashioned Americana consists of a gas station with only one gas pump, a 10-room motel (technically nine rooms and a tent; one cabana recently burned down), a restaurant that seats dozens, and a population of 87 that runs through it a two lane highway. The main attraction is a crater where a meteorite hit millions of years ago. It is about to host a Junior Stargazers conference where the country’s best and brightest underage scientists, known as “brainiacs,” will have a chance to win an award.
In other words, Asteroid City is a little less than a dot on an AAA street map. It’s also not real, both in the off-screen sense and in the film sense. It is the setting of a play by noted Southern playwright and bon vivant Conrad Earp, played by Edward Norton as the amalgamation of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Colonel Sanders.
(Let’s pause and pay tribute to the fact that Anderson’s naming game, at least, remains 100 percent on point: In addition to Earp, Primo nicknames include Schubert Green, Saltzburg Keitel, Stanley Zak, Augie, Woodrow Steenbeck, and a Five -Star Army General blessed with the alliterative name Grif Gibson. May a thousand boss kisses be unleashed!)
A TV show host (Bryan Cranston rocking the Rod Serling vibe) presents this previously unproduced work for an evening’s black-and-white entertainment, taking us behind the scenes as the crew lines up and the New York cast play each role Prepare to get on stage. For every archetype we see in this immersive fake desert city, there’s a monochromatic Gotham thespian counterpoint that hits the boards and tears his hair out over the characters’ motivations. The gap between both sides of the mirror will soon become porous. But first, get to know the protagonists of the three acts (and one epilogue):
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[Cue whimsical narration from well-known voice actor, accompanied by the Les Paul and Mary Ford deep cut of your choice.]
– Augie Steenberg (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer using this trip to AC – his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) submitted his science project to the Stargazers competition – informs his children that their mother just passed away. His father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks pretends someone put thumbtacks in his shoes) finally hops in his Cadillac and drives into the desert to join them as well.
– Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson, who plays 1950s glamor so well you wish she hadn’t missed the Golden Age of Hollywood by decades), a movie star who is here with her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). Augie takes a picture of her eating waffles. You will fall in love. Or at least she lets him see him naked. Six of one.
– Several other parents of the Brainiacs, all neurotic about their genius prodigies, and some of them drinking martinis from crazy vending machines. (Other items you can buy at these instant gratification wonders: soda pop, candy bars, real estate deeds.) They are played by Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, and Steve Park. The chief brainiac leading this next generation to scientific glory? this is dr Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton).
Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks in Asteroid City Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features
Then there’s Jeffrey Wright’s zealous military man, Matt Dillon’s bubble-headed fat monkey, Steve Carell’s apologetic motel owner, Maya Hawke’s friendly schoolgirls, and Rupert Friends’ cowboy loverboy. Blink and you might miss Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, Bob Balaban and Jarvis Cocker (who sings as part of a Texan swing outfit). They show up to add to the silliness and sense of sadness that equally switch places. When a stop-motion alien shows up and steals the meteorite, the city is forced to quarantine and do a little peek. A small carnival-like atmosphere with a Ferris wheel and souvenirs develops before it fades away again.
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And yet we shuttle back and forth between New York and Asteroid City, the Method actors and the motorists stranded in Nowheresville, in the name of… anything? There are struggles with the notion of performance and the isolated world of creative hotbeds such as the Actors’ Studio, the dawn of mass media and the Eisenhower-era eccentrics who lived on the fringes, the military-industrial complex Watch the Skies! Science fiction pulps, the mythology of the open highway and the tyranny of the closed minds. Grief binds many of these wandering souls who have gathered in this area of first contact. What the film might have to say about all of this, however, lies beneath layers of whimsical, immaculately framed portraits of mid-century kitsch and the occasional country and western ditty, drawn profoundly from Anderson’s 78rpm album collection and on top of an antique Device is playing gramophone.
It’s very enjoyable to take in, even if you’re pulling your hair out by the roots looking for a point beyond the pretty pictures. Anderson is too talented and too unique a filmmaker to make insider baseball insider art for his own sake; He’s been doing it too long to simply rely on a style that’s now calcified into shtick as well. Asteroid City has already split the press corps at Cannes, prompting staunch haters to recant their earlier statements and inspiring longtime Wes Stans to rip up their carefully crafted Sons of Anderson membership cards. To me, that’s not a deal breaker – he’s done it way worse and way, way better. But to see this sui generis American star fall to earth with a loud bang, leaving only a stunningly crafted and carefully emptied hole is a cosmic disappointment.