"Asteroid City" review — Wes Anderson brings grief, theatre, and aliens to the American desert
“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
This film was featured on my Best Films of 2023 list.
It’s 1955 and war photographer Augie Steenbeck and his four children arrive in Asteroid City for the Junior Stargazer convention. They meet a variety of characters who have come to the small town for the convention, including a famous actress, a stern army general, a quirky scientist, a religious school teacher, and a country music band. It’s 1955 and the actor Jones Hall is starring in the debut production of Asteroid City, a new play by acclaimed playwright Conrad Earp. The production is chaotic, with a massive cast and a director in the middle of a divorce. It’s 1955 and playwright Conrad Earp is working on completing his latest work, Asteroid City. He’s struggling to put the finishing touches on the play and find out what it really means. “Infinity, maybe,” or something else.
Metanarratives, shifting realities, and multiple layers of artifice abound in Asteroid City, the latest film by acclaimed American filmmaker Wes Anderson. Eleven films into his career, Anderson is one of the most distinctive and popular directors working today with a multitude of stand-out films under his belt, including The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and The French Dispatch (2021). Fans of Anderson’s style will be glad to know that Asteroid City is full of all of the director’s usual charms: ultra-specific framing and blocking, storybook sets, stylized colours, dry wit, and a love of mid-century music. But whenever Anderson seems to have reached the pinnacle of his stylistic flourishes, he keeps finding a way to one-up himself. This film is no exception. It is also one of the most melancholic and emotionally affecting films in his filmography with some of his most kooky storytelling yet. It’s tragedy, death, and a quest for the meaning of life under the relentless desert sun.
The primary action is set in the fictional Asteroid City, a one-gas pump town with a population of 87 in the middle of the California-Arizona-Nevada desert. Its highlights include the start of a highway overpass that abruptly stops mid-air, a tin-roofed motel, a diner, and, of course, the 5000-year-old crater and meteorite that the town is named after. Augie Steenbeck (played by Jason Schwartzman) is travelling to the town with his four children — his eldest, Woodrow (played by Jake Ryan) and three triplet daughters — to attend the Junior Stargazer convention in which his son will present his latest invention to the group. But Augie is harbouring a secret from his children that he doesn’t know how to tell them: their mother died three weeks ago. The Steenbeck family is not alone in Asteroid City. A plethora of transients and visitors have come to the town for the convention. There is Midge Campbell (played by Scarlett Johannson), a depressed actress and mother of one of the Junior Stargazers who strikes up a friendship with Auguie. There is General Grif Gibson (played by Jeffrey Wright), the representative of the US military at the convention. There is Dr. Hickenlooper, a scientist out to discover the secrets of the town’s meteorite and the signals she and her team have been discovering from space. And this is just to name a few of the faces the Steenbecks encounter. Things seem to be going well for the convention, until the otherwise orderly, ordinary proceedings are interrupted by the arrival of extraterrestrial life, sending the town into quarantine.
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| Fisher Stevens, Jeffrey Wright, and Tony Revolori in Asteroid City. Photo: Focus Features. |
The frame narrative, shot in 4:3 black-and-white, is about a televised production of the play Asteroid City and details its origin and highlights from the original Broadway run. The television program is narrated by Bryan Cranston, who channels Rod Serling and a variety of other television hosts of the era into his performance. We meet the writer Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) and director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody). Earp’s story is about him trying to find the emotional heart of the story, something he is still struggling to do by the film’s end. Meanwhile, Green is sorting through his own problems throughout the production of the play, which gives the frame narrative a strong emotional grounding.
The film is a very easy watch. Anderson’s directorial vision carefully pulls the viewer along with an endlessly entertaining story full of his signature humour and strange characters. Any fan of Anderson’s will be met with the usual delights the filmmaker is known for. But the narrative is clouded in difficult emotions. Each one of the characters, in and out of the play, is caught in emotional limbo. Each at a major crux in their lives and desperately seeking direction, they have to come together to tell their story of impossible events and the people whose lives have been changed forever.
Anderson is channelling a multitude of influences here. The story of Asteroid City is Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) by way of the work of Sam Shepard but with Anderson’s distinct visual flair. Anderson uses sci-fi in a similar way to Spielberg in Close Encounters. He tells a very widespread, almost sociological story of people who find themselves transformed by the impossible. The characters now have to confront the idea that they are not alone in the universe, which is somehow both scarier and more comforting than the alternative. Anderson has discussed quite openly the effects of Sam Shepard’s plays on the story of Asteroid City, especially taking inspiration from how the writer depicts the American West. The frame narrative grounds itself in the New York theatre scene of the mid-century, especially in the legacy of the Actors Studio.
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| Scarlett Johansson in Asteroid City. Photo: Focus Features. |
Like any good Anderson movie, the cast list of this film is full to the brim of some of the best living performers. Anderson is reuniting with many returning collaborators here. Jason Schwartzman leads the ensemble in the dual role of Jones Hall/Augie Steenbeck in what might be the best performance of his career. Jeffrey Wright is excellent as the stern General Gibson, who finds himself positively overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of extraterrestrial life. Tilda Swinton delivers a perfectly weird performance as Dr. Hickenlooper. Back in the real world, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody play Conrad Earp and Schubert Green, respectively. While Norton’s role is largely confined as this all-present but often impersonal force reigning over the play, Brody is particularly stunning as the broken and sad Green.
There are some new faces in Anderson’s troupe this time around, including Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks. Johansson shines as Midge Campbell, a rather laid-back part which compliments her style of performing quite well. She can add a lot of tragic depth as a character just coasting through life without taking much time to experience it. There’s a certain Merilyn Monroe energy that Johansson finds, although Johansson certainly has a less bubbly outward persona. Johansson is also excellent as Mercedes Ford, the actress playing Midge in the play. Hanks makes a wonderful turn as the gruff Stanley Zak, Augie’s father-in-law, who comes to Asteroid City to visit his grandkids. Hanks is going some wonderfully subtle and grounded character work here, making him one of the more naturalistic performances in the film. His best on-screen counterpart is not his relationship with Schwartzman’s character, although that is stellar, but with Augie’s three daughters.
Even the bit parts of this movie are filled in by a never-ending menagerie of star performers. Steve Carell plays the charismatic yet deceptive manager of Asteroid City’s singular motel. Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, and Stephen Park play a trio of squabbling scientists and parents of some of the Junior Stargazers. Hong Chau and Margot Robbie make big impressions with minimal screen time. Willem Dafoe plays an elderly acting teacher who leads the fiction equivalent of the Actors Studio. And Jeff Goldblum appears in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as the actor playing the alien.
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| Steve Carell and Liev Schreiber in Asteroid City. Photo: Focus Features. |
There is a lot of fabulous filmmaking on display here as well. Anderson brings his usual attention to detail to every shot of every scene. There is a very distinctive rhythm in how Anderson directs his scenes that are just so infectious and enjoyable. Robert Yeoman’s cinematography is, as always, top-notch. Not only is the individual framing of each shot excellent, but there are a variety of great camera movements that capture the film’s action playfully. There are also some great uses of stop-motion visual effects, giving all of the non-practical elements a surreal, storybook-esque charm. The set design of Asteroid City is particularly remarkable. The entire town was built practically in the middle of the Spanish desert. The set is made up of retro-futurist 1950s design, although made all the more stylized and exaggerated thanks to Anderson’s sensibilities. The exaggeration in everything from the cut-off highway on-ramp, the stylized buildings, and the cartoonish rocks give this film a distinctive, idiosyncratic charm that is in line with what Anderson has done before but also feels entirely new to this film’s environments and story. There’s a great behind-the-scenes featurette about the construction of the town available here. It is a beautiful experience to watch such a talented group of filmmakers and artists come together to create something so visually extraordinary.
Asteroid City is a tense balancing act at every level of its existence. It has to juggle its massive ensemble cast, which feels even more overwhelmingly large than The French Dispatch, multiple narrative levels, and a host of complicated emotional arcs that are often very separate from each other. How well this balancing act works is going to depend on your personal level of comfort with the unknown. Asteroid City doesn’t come to any easy answers, if it comes to any answers at all. The characters of the film are lost and disoriented by the end, maybe just as lost as the audience is in the sea of narrative shifts and emotional turbulence. They’re left wanting for some sort of an answer or a larger meaning to life, but those answers are difficult to find at best. For me, this sort of answer-less existential angst resonates on a very personal, very primal level. Anderson’s way of hiding emotions behind veils of artifice and quirky performance that betrays an emptiness and brokenness within the characters is so easy to connect to. And this film, thanks to its explicit use of theatre and performance in its story, highlights just how that artifice plays into our experience of emotions.
Towards the end of the movie, Jones Hall comes to a personal crisis when performing the play. He storms off stage, where he finds the director, Schubert Green, and throws all of his uncertainty about the part and the play on him. “Am I doing it right?” Hall says, entering Green’s make-shift room in the loading bay of the theatre. “Just keep telling the story,” says Green. Maybe if we just keep telling the story, we can find some peace. And, if we’re lucky, even some answers.
Asteroid City is now playing in theatres everywhere.
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