At this point in his career, Wes Anderson is too gifted a filmmaker to take for granted. But it’s also becoming a bit of a chore to take him on his own terms, which increasingly seem to be those of a perfectionist on autopilot. Either way, the director—who at 54 retains the precociousness that informed the brash, Salingerian cosplay of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums nearly three decades ago—is hovering over familiar territory. Following a pair of excursions to Europe in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch, Anderson’s precisely (of course) executed new comedy Asteroid City brings him back to his home turf of Texas—specifically a comically small and sparsely populated hamlet playing host to an annual “Junior Stargazers” convention wherein teen prodigies show off their latest contraptions to scientists and defense department representatives alike. (Prizes include “The White Dwarf Medal of Achievement.”) As ever, though, regardless of the actual geographic location, we’re in Wes World.
The sign outside Asteroid City reads “Pop. 87,” but the only full-time residents seem to be the proprietor of the town’s modest roadside motor court (Steve Carell) and his staff; everybody else is just passing through, and nobody stays long. Pensive young inventor Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is being chaperoned by his father, Augie (Jason Schwartzman), a recent widower ferrying his wife’s ashes cross-country in a Tupperware. “Let’s say she’s in heaven,” Augie tells his brood shortly after check-in. “Which doesn’t exist for me, of course, but you’re Episcopalian.” Meanwhile, when the other Stargazers aren’t eagerly nerding out with their professional mentors, they scarf down diner flapjacks, gaze at the ancient crater that doubles as the area’s only tourist attraction, and flirt chastely with one another—before, that is, an enigmatic extraterrestrial visitation turns their holiday into an extended quarantine mandated by no less than the White House itself.
Like its aforementioned Old World–set predecessors, Asteroid City, which takes place in 1955, is a period piece with a capital P, for Pastiche; its aesthetic reference points include the sun-baked Westerns of John Ford; the aloof, figures-in-a-landscape paintings of Alex Colville; the sight-gag caricatures of MAD magazine; the parched slapstick choreography of the original Roadrunner cartoons. (At one point, we see a cartoon mushroom cloud spiraling serenely into the faraway sky, an homage to Dr. Strangelove, perhaps, or a shot across Christopher Nolan’s bow.) Retro seems to be the default mode of auteurs these days: When Steven Soderbergh recently told Variety that cellphones were the worst thing to ever happen to movies, he drew a bead on the tendency of many of his peers to retreat into loving, lavish recreations of the past, which by their nature require a micromanagerial level of control. A certain vacuum-packed insularity has always been part of Anderson’s style and sensibility, and a late plot twist in Asteroid City about the characters being forcibly prohibited from communicating with the outside world tweaks its maker’s penchant for hermeticism, drawing out the story just long enough for a final series of reckonings and revelations. It also proves Soderbergh’s point.
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Just because we’ve grown used to Anderson’s brand of cozily bespoke nostalgia doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive on a technical level. And if the recent and obnoxious spate of computer-generated W.A. parodies on social media proves anything, it is, ironically, that you can’t fake truly inspired artificiality. Everything in Asteroid City, from the low-rise storefronts and balsa wood interiors to the spotless, beautifully creased costumes to the desert sand itself, has been so thoroughly stylized as to suggest a miraculously airbrushed physical realm; call it the Uncanny Moment Valley. The actors, who taken together comprise probably the most impressive and eclectic Hollywood ensemble since the last Anderson joint, hit their marks and deliver their dialogue with aplomb; when they volley lines back and forth in alternating close-ups, you can hear (and feel) the topspin on the words. There isn’t a single indecisive shot, cut, or music cue in the film’s two hours, and when Anderson hits upon a vivid, deeply deconstructable tableau—a tent erected in place of a demolished motel suite; the moon tattooed with the American flag; Scarlett Johansson reclining in mock-suicidal repose in a porcelain bathtub—it feels somehow fleeting and inevitable, like a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it magic trick.
The question is not whether Anderson knows what he’s doing, which he has since the first frames of Bottle Rocket, or even whether he’s working in good faith. Asteroid City orbits enough of the director’s established and obsessive pet themes—family, loneliness, theatricality, gadgetry, grief—that it surely comes from an honest, personal place. The Junior Stargazers, caught between genius and naivete as they toggle between rewiring the laws of physics and their own short-circuiting hormones, could be cousins to Max Fischer, or the fretful boy scouts of Moonrise Kingdom; the scenes between Schwartzman and his gruff father-in-law (Tom Hanks), who’s been forced in the wake of his daughter’s death to assist a younger man he never really liked, touch some of the same raw, exposed nerves as The Royal Tenenbaums. Even the alien, rendered via stop-motion special effects, evokes the mythical Jaguar Shark in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou—a potent symbol of cosmic mystery and indifference. What’s at stake amid all this familiarity is whether a movie calibrated for maximum deadpan can still get a rise out of an audience, or whether its mastery is ultimately as monotonous as the horizontal lines bisecting its frames into comic book panels.
Such elegant subdivision has become one of Anderson’s hallmarks: No American filmmaker is more adept or determined at compartmentalizing his images or ideas. As he’s gotten older, he’s grown increasingly fond of installing metafictional escape hatches into his fables: Think of The Grand Budapest Hotel and its flashbacks within flashbacks, or The French Dispatch, which was structured as a series of feature reports and essays within an issue of a New Yorker–style periodical. A cynic might suggest that Anderson tends to miniaturize and embroider his storytelling as a means of disguising his limitations as a dramatist—substituting surface breadth and detail for genuine depth—but it might be more fair to say that he’s become interested in storytelling as a subject and adjusted his approach accordingly. In Asteroid City, this fascination takes the form of a complexly—and, at times, convolutedly—conceived framing device wherein the rollicking, essentially goofy narrative is revealed as an elaborate Playhouse 90–style teleplay whose actors and creators exist in their own outer borough of reality. These passages, which occur at regular intervals in the action, have been shot in black-and-white and in a narrower aspect ratio, as if to suggest that art doesn’t just imitate life but expands and illuminates it.
The effect of all this careful dramaturgical jerry-rigging is twofold: It contextualizes the absurdist silliness of the material set in Asteroid City as an eccentric writer’s imaginative fantasy, and challenges the viewer to enjoy the story-within-the-story while picking out its connections—direct and tangential—to various behind-the-scenes dramas. These include implied twin romances between Asteroid City’s acclaimed, apparently closeted playwright, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), and Schwartzman’s leading man, as well as between the broadcast’s director, Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), and Johansson’s Midge Campbell, who is, like her Asteroid City character, a famous actress at a turning point in her career. (In the film-within-the-film, Midge and Augie are drawn to each other, meeting-cute through the windows of their adjacent motel rooms.)
If it’s hard to synopsize Asteroid City’s Matryoshka-doll structure, it should be said that it works a bit more intuitively onscreen, especially via the actors who are able to modulate their performances to suggest a certain duality. For instance, Johansson’s eternal mix of sensuality and stiltedness is perfect for a character buried in several strata of role-playing. But it’s hard to reconcile the strident, Method-ical manner of the up-and-coming actor Schwartzman is playing in the interstitial sequences with his quietly mournful comportment as the anxious, grieving Augie. And it doesn’t really work to say that this disparity is the point. For Anderson’s gambit to be successful, it needs to feel like the “real” angst of the (fictional) artists is being channeled in some significant way into their art, and with the exception of a late (and beautifully written) scene between Augie and an actress whose role as his character’s wife (Margot Robbie) was ultimately cut from the play, there’s precious little real resonance. Even allowing for the obvious playfulness of the entire enterprise, the film-within-the-film feels solely like an accomplished mid-century fantasia signed, at a whimsical and magisterial distance, by Wes Anderson, as opposed to any kind of plausible late-’50s stage play. As for the other stuff—including a detour to an acting class hosted by a grinning Willem Dafoe in Sanford Meisner mode—it never transcends its own deliberate marginality. Ideally, the vignettes showing the ache underneath the artifice would feel like the glue holding the whole teetering edifice of Asteroid City together. Instead, the impression is of immaculate spackle filling in the conceptual cracks.
A late scene set in Dafoe’s acting class—whose students make up the film’s entire ensemble as their “real” selves—hints at Anderson’s underlying aims. “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” exhorts Dafoe’s Saltzburg Keitel, echoing Conrad’s desire to write a scene in which all of his characters fall into a magical group slumber. In the past, Anderson has played with the technique of direct address, filming his actors head-on to make it seem like they’re interrogating us—or vice versa—but he’s never broken the fourth wall so brazenly, or spoken so clearly through one of his surrogates. The idea of art—specifically acting—as a willed trance state has a certain poetry, speaking to the conjoined sense of imagination and vulnerability that it takes to truly inhabit a fictional role; it also touches on the need for audiences—like, say, the one watching the movie at hand—to willingly suspend disbelief and let the work wash over them.
And there’s something exciting about having a filmmaker of Anderson’s pedigree put his cards on the table this way, effectively imploring us to think about how we engage with his work and why. At the same time, the scene, which builds to a realization of Conrad’s vision—and brings the inner story screeching to a halt in the process—unfortunately spotlights the sleepiness and weightlessness of the movie around it. There’s a difference between being drawn into a film so deeply that it feels like a waking dream and simply tuning out. Asteroid City, for all its formal brilliance, feels muted, unwilling to rouse itself from its own narcoleptic torpor. “The world will never be the same,” observes one character in the wake of the town’s close encounter with alien intelligence, but the line falls flat. Instead, you’ll leave Asteroid City secure in the knowledge—or perhaps a little frustrated—that Anderson’s cinematic universe remains fundamentally unchanged.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.