Take me down to ‘Asteroid City’
Wes Anderson once again fills the screen with a multitude of characters in an eye-popping color palette
At this point in his fabled career, you know more or less exactly what you’re going to get with every new Wes Anderson release: exquisite mise en scène, stunning stage craft, deeply literary, deadpan humor, a massive ensemble cast with a multitude of recognizable faces, all as filtered through Anderson’s well-honed whimsical sensibility. None of this really changes from film to film — in this way, he’s like a throwback to the days in Hollywood when a director might get pigeon-holed into only making one kind of picture his entire career — not that he likely would, but if Anderson ever wanted to pull a Hitchcock-like reverse pivot and make a horror film, his audience would be absolutely gobsmacked — so what matters are the details and the layers of narrative that he employs to differentiate his works.
For “Asteroid City,” which one critic has already specified is the “most” Wes Anderson movie he has ever made (a claim that honestly could have been said for each of his previous releases), he has certainly taken things to the near breaking point.
To wit, we begin as if on a 1950’s era soundstage. As explained to us in heavily stilted tones by the production’s host (Bryan Cranston, doing a credible Rod Serling impression), “Asteroid City” began as a play, that was then adapted for TV, where it suffered through various production problems, which we see theatrically enacted, now encased in the film which we are all watching, based on the original play.
It’s as if Christopher Nolan was inspired by Lewis Carroll — “Inception” meets the Mad Hatter. It’s challenging to wrap your head around (at least for this spatially challenged critic), such that it’s difficult to keep any of its distinct layers together. Instead of watching the film as one might a series of transparencies laid perfectly over one another, it’s more like a disparate collection of finely detailed dioramas strewn about on
a wonderfully antique table.
And those details! Anderson’s films have gotten more and more dense with intricacies as the director has become more expansive with his palette, but at this point, it’s as if looking at a Jackson Pollock through a kaleidoscope: So many nuances and etchings of ideas, it’s very easy to get flooded with information, leaving you spinning around in twirls (as our host intones, near the beginning, “It is an imaginary drama created expressly for the purposes of this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication”).
The story-within-a-storywithin-a-story-within-a-story (plus or minus a story or two) follows an assortment of characters all arriving at the tiny New Mexico town in which everything takes place: It is the anniversary of a meteor striking the desert nearby some 5,000 years ago, leaving a giant crater near the town’s minuscule “center” (consisting of a ramshackle diner, a filling station, a U.S. Government research facility, and a configuration of motel bungalows, festooned with a series of deeply specific vending machines — “Snacks,” “Drinks,” “Soup,” “Real Estate” — and little else.)
For the occasion, a scientific envoy of government officials, led by General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), has invited a panel of “Junior Stargazers,” comprised of a bevy of teen geniuses and their parents, including Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), son of famed war photographer, and newly widowered, Augie (Jason Schwartzman); Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards), daughter of movie siren Midge (Scarlett Johansson); Clifford (Aristou Meehan), who implores people to give him dares, along with his roughneck father, J.J. Kellogg (Liev Schreiber); and Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee), brilliant progeny of Roger (Steve Park).
Also invited, the “Space Cadets,” a group of elementary school children led by schoolmistress June (Maya Hawke), and a mysterious country band, led by lead singer Montana (Rupert Friend). Along with the regular townsfolk (including characters played by Matt Dillon, Steve Carrell and Deanna Dunagan), the embedded scientific community, led by Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), and various random odds and ends, and you have at least the basis of the film’s cast (the TV production group, and the behind-the-scenes team involve even more elaborate characters, including those portrayed by the likes of Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton and Margot Robbie — and we haven’t even gotten to the Tom Hanks character [he’s Augie’s father-in-law])!
During the ceremony celebrating the scientific achievements of the “Stargazers,” an actual alien ship appears, as luck would have it, lowering down a (completely adorable) creature with giant, darting eyes, who snatches the small remaining meteorite and takes it back up with them into their ship. This event throws everything into chaos, eventually requiring everyone present at the ceremony to go into government-issued quarantine, until the matter can be adequately resolved by the government.
Given more time, and very little else to do, Augie and Midge begin to get to know each other more intimately, and the kids figure out ways to keep busy, some of which work diametrically in opposition to what their government leaders might have preferred.
Along the way, between acts (with the scene numbers not-so-helpfully specified), we also get bits and pieces of the production story, involving the playwright (Norton), the director of the production (Adrien Brody), and the original acting ensemble, lead by Saltzberg Keitel (Dafoe), many of whom are featured in the principal movie cast.
Just what all of this means is, at best, opaque, but there are certain emotional through-lines (Augie has only just managed to tell his son and three young daughters about the death of their mother, even though it happened some weeks before), and willowy connections (parents and their genius children learning key elements about each other) such that the film has at least some emotional weight to counterbalance the baroque detritus swirling all around it.
It’s usually a pretty well measured equilibrium for Anderson, his resonating-if-faint emotional arcs that allow key reverberations to seep through his extremely intricate machinations, but here, amid a wide desert of over-saturated, ’50s style Panavision color, and a veritable avalanche of characters and multi-layers, they get a good deal more muddied, such that, at times, the film’s elaborate construction feels too diffuse to penetrate, like a brilliant coral reef in a dense swirl of sediment.
To be certain, there is still a lot to savor for Anderson fans — if not, perhaps, a bit too much, at least for one sitting — but with this film, he has reached a new level of complexity that might have plunged his already teetering emotional ratio into much less accessible territory. One gets the impression, if he keeps ascending these particular stairs, with each successive feature, he’ll be further entering the endless layers and angles of a set of mirrors pointed only toward each other.