Asteroid City (2023)
dir. Wes Anderson
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2023 Focus Features
The first time I saw Asteroid City, it was a disaster. I couldn’t connect with a single character. Each one felt like a collection of quirks hiding the fact that there was nothing below the surface. The story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure was too clever by half. After that first screening, I was ready to write off Wes Anderson’s latest effort as demonstrating a peak example of the idiosyncratic director’s style, but with none of those touching, emotionally charged moments from his previous works.
On the morning I was supposed to hammer my thoughts about the movie into a proper review, I decided to be lazy. A poor night of sleep and the siren song of the comfortable bed in the quiet early morning hours convinced me to bank more shuteye. It was the best decision I could have possibly made.
When I finally got up, Rae was concerned. I’m a machine when it comes to my review writing routine, and she wanted to know why I had abandoned the usual plan. She confessed that she was curious about Asteroid City. (The screening I had attended earlier in the week was for press only; no +1s allowed.) She investigated showtimes and we settled on a mid-morning screening at the Cedars Alamo; my mention of a possible brunch order to go with the movie sealed the deal.
On this second screening, the movie opened up in a way that shocked and delighted me. I saw so many things I had missed on the first go. It was like I was seeing a completely different movie.
My perception changed almost from the first shot. As the movie opens, we are ushered into Anderson’s world by way of a 1950s-era TV announcer. He tells us we are about to witness a television production of famed playwright Conrad Earp’s Asteroid City. In addition to the play, this TV anthology showcase – think CBS’s Playhouse 90, which ran from 1956 to 1960 – also stages significant events about the creation of the play, its casting, and its premiere performance on the stage.
In the whirlwind opening sequence, we are introduced to the cast of Asteroid City and told a little about the character that each will play. I’m sure there are roots for this sequence in the aforementioned Playhouse 90, but to me it felt like the famous movie trailer for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. In that trailer, Welles, through voiceover narration, tells us about his Mercury Theatre on the Air players as the actors he’s describing each mug for the camera.
In Anderson’s version, we see Tom Hanks, sitting in a director’s chair and smoking a cigarette, a hat cocked jauntily back on his head, as the television announcer tells us about him in voiceover. Hanks has a certain air of Clark Gable about him in the five or ten seconds we see him as the actor who will play a character in Asteroid City.
This was the moment during that second screening that unlocked Asteroid City for me. Since I had seen Anderson’s movie once before, I didn’t have to keep sharp focus on what was happening, and instead I let my mind wander for a few seconds about what I was seeing. Tom Hanks, an instantly recognizable celebrity, is playing what we are to assume is – again, from those five or ten seconds alone – a brash, cocky Gable or Joseph Cotton-like celebrity of the 1950s, whom we can also assume would have been instantly recognizable in his time.
Moments later, we see Hanks again, this time as Stanley Zak, his character within the play Asteroid City. His demeanor has completely changed, as he is now in character. As someone who struggles to articulate its nuances, this was a revelatory moment for me that vividly illustrated the craft of acting. As the audience, we are navigating our familiarity with Hanks as we see him portray another famous (fictional) actor who then transforms into his character in the story-within-a-story.
I was also completely off base in my initial assessment that Anderson’s signature moments of pathos were missing in Asteroid City. The heartfelt, emotional moments between characters here are subtle, often quiet conversations with an ocean of meaning underneath.
In Conrad Earp’s play, we follow a group of tourists who have all come to Asteroid City, a tiny desert town – pop. 87 – so named because of the giant crater at its center. Our motley cast of characters have assembled for a Junior Stargazers convention, where each of five adolescent Junior Stargazers are to be presented with an award for various scientific inventions. One of the funniest moments in the movie comes when several of the parents of these science wunderkinds confess that their children are very weird little people.
The capstone of the convention is a stargazing event. Anderson doesn’t miss the opportunity to put a cardboard box on all of his characters’ heads – like an eclipse, viewing this event with the naked eye can cause permanent vision damage – and it’s wonderfully evocative of the (imagined) tranquility and innocence of 1950s America.
During the event, a UFO hovers above the crater and our heroes. In an homage to stop motion of the era – and Anderson’s own affection for the animation style, which he’s employed in Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs – a bonkers looking (and adorable) alien exits the craft and inexplicably steals the meteorite that created the crater millions of years ago. The President of the United States orders a quarantine, trapping the Junior Stargazer attendees for they know not how long.
One of the trapped is Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer and father to Woodrow, one of the Junior Stargazer honorees. The original plan was for Augie to drop off Woodrow at the convention and then take his three young daughters to their maternal grandfather, Stanley Zak. Stanley also gets trapped in Asteroid City, because Augie’s car breaks down not long after arriving in town. After a phone call from Augie, Stanley comes to Asteroid City to pick up his granddaughters. (A tiny, 75 cent car part is the cause, and Anderson hilariously stages the car going kerflooey with a Gilliamesque level of absurdity.)
The fraught relationship between Augie and Stanley is the first of numerous heartfelt human connections within Asteroid City. Augie’s wife – Stanley’s daughter – has died. It’s made clear in the initial phone call that if it weren’t for her, the two men would have nothing in common. Stanley has always been cold towards Augie, and the feeling is mutual. They are each grieving in their own way, but each recognizes in the other how much they both have lost.
Augie also connects with Midge Campbell, a famous actor who is in town so that her daughter, Dinah, can collect her Junior Stargazers award. In echoes of Marilyn Monroe, Midge is a troubled soul who (only half-) jokes that her fate is to be found dead in a bathtub with pills splashed across the bathroom floor. Augie and Midge recognize the existential crisis dwelling within each other, and they form a meaningful bond over it.
The magnificent Scarlett Johansson, as Midge, is asked to add yet another meta layer beyond what I discussed above about Hanks. Johansson is playing an actor who plays a character who is also an actor. Midge is dealing with the trappings of fame and career disappointment and Johansson delivers an incredibly nuanced portrait of that. But Anderson asks her to go even deeper with the character. In the behind-the-story segments of the television dramatization of the play Asteroid City’s production, Anderson – who wrote the screenplay based on a story by himself and frequent collaborator Roman Coppola – includes a devastating scene focusing on Mercedes Ford, the actor playing Midge.
The scene involves an attempt by the play’s director, Schubert Green, to woo Mercedes back to the production after he treated her shabbily. The specifics are never divulged, but Anderson seems to be acknowledging how horribly women in Hollywood have been treated by powerful men throughout its history.
Anderson also pays homage to historically marginalized and erased groups in the character of Conrad Earp, the fictional author of the play Asteroid City. Earp is a thinly veiled version of Tennessee Williams, who is considered one of the most influential figures in mid-20th-century drama for both the stage and screen. It was an open secret that Williams was a gay man. Anderson, in a scene depicting Earp and one of the play’s actors meeting and becoming lovers, pays beautiful tribute to the innumerable artistic contributions of the LGBTQ+ community, especially in a time when that community’s lived experience was all but erased.
Considering the current disgusting rhetoric surrounding the LGBTQ+ community from troglodyte politicians of a certain American political party, this subtle but striking nod to a corner of LGBTQ+ history is both welcome and incredibly touching.
Even the periphery characters of Asteroid City are given fully formed backstories and love from their creator. General Grif Gibson, the host of the Junior Stargazers convention, details his life story with the aid of signature Wes Anderson blocking and camera movements. In what can’t be longer than a few minutes, Gibson shares the moments in his life that shaped him. It helps that the immensely talented Jeffrey Wright – with his signature Voice-of-God delivery – imbues a sense of gravitas on the character.
Tilda Swinton also shines as local scientist Dr. Hickenlooper in a sequence that mirrors the Gibson one. In her heartfelt telling of her own origin story, Dr. Hickenlooper’s specific life events take a back seat to science. She has dedicated herself to the pursuit of knowledge, so speaking about her life’s passion, instead of her actual life, takes prominence. It’s a delightful little moment that highlights one of Anderson’s prominent preoccupations: it really does take all kinds of people to make the world as endlessly fascinating as it is.
Asteroid City is peak Wes Anderson in terms of his visual aesthetic. All of the sequences detailing the behind-the-story portion of the television production are shot in black-and-white and in academy ratio – what you would expect to see if you flipped on a TV set in the mid-1950s. When we enter the world of the play, Anderson opens up the frame to a majestic widescreen ratio with a vivid and stunning color palette. The luxurious widescreen framing and intense, technicolor-style cinematography is the only thing that doesn’t make sense, since we are supposedly seeing it as part of a 1950s TV broadcast, but it’s simply too beautiful for me to care.
I’ve only scratched the surface here. Asteroid City, like most of Anderson’s work, is a deeply layered and complex work of crushing human emotion and connection. I barely mentioned the five kids, who hatch a Moonlight Kingdom-esque plan to get the word out to the public about what’s happening once the quarantine is put in place. There’s a love story there too, and it’s every bit as affecting as the one between Auggie and Midge.
We are also treated to a deleted scene from the play during the most self-aware moment of the whole movie. One character, frustrated by a lack of clarity, leaves the television production of the play – mid-performance – in order to seek answers.
The climax of the film, which turns on the repeated phrase “You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep,’’ is as mysterious and awe-inspiring as those cryptic words. Anderson’s latest work is one of his most profound, and I’m glad I gave it a second chance so that it’s beauty and complexity could blossom into full view.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Wes Anderson is at the height of his powers with Asteroid City. His film is emotionally resonant, visually arresting, and idiosyncratic in the way only Anderson can achieve.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- At two points during the movie, a police chase comes ripping through town, but only long enough to race down the single highway of Asteroid City. Both moments are fleeting, and I wondered if it was Anderson’s homage to the detective/crime shows (like Dragnet) that were popular in the ‘50s.
- I think one of my initial reasons for balking at the movie was because Jason Schwartzman’s character’s name is Augie Steenbeck. Using the name Steenbeck struck me as a little too inside-baseball for my tastes. IYKYK.
- Shout out to Schwartzman’s Augie being an unapologetic atheist!
- One of the best delivered lines (from Schwartzman to Johansson) of the movie: “Did I say, ‘Yes’?”
- Followed closely by the magnificent Bryan Cranston as the 1950s TV host: "Am…I not in this? Sorry.”
- The shot of the movie, and perhaps of 2023 so far, is a subtle camera dolly backwards as some of the characters take in a fireworks display. The ten-or-so seconds is pure movie magic.
- The UFO encounter is heavily riffing on the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
- One of the funniest and most heartbreaking moments comes when Hanks’s Stanley gets as close to losing his composure as he dares. It’s as close as his character can probably come to expressing his grief to anyone outside of his own head.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- The press members at the screening were all having a much better time than I was. The second screening was only a third full, and I seemed to be having the best time out of everyone in the room.