Asteroid City plays like something of a manifesto, one that saves its most profound artist’s statement for its final minutes.
Photo: Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection/©Focus Features/Courtesy Everet
For much of his career, Wes Anderson has weathered accusations that he doesn’t so much make movies as dioramas — little dollhouse exhibits as precious as they are precise. His latest film, Asteroid City, which hit theaters in June and begins streaming on Peacock this Friday, is every bit as storybook stylized as the filmmaker’s other pastel creations, with a deliberately flattened atomic-age aesthetic that’s somewhere between roadside-attraction billboard and Road Runner cartoon. Yet this may also be the first time Anderson has implicitly addressed the (wrongheaded) criticism that his comedies are empty exercises in style, too archly artificial to mean anything. For whatever else it is, Asteroid City plays like something of a manifesto, one that saves its most profound artist’s statement for its final minutes, when all the metatextual layers fold into each other.
“Asteroid City does not exist,” announces a Rod Serling–like television host (Bryan Cranston) in the opening scene of the film, immediately foregrounding the fictionality of what we’re about to watch. Anderson has framed his stories as stories before, presenting them as chapters from a novel, passages from a memoir, and articles from a magazine. But Asteroid City is his most Brechtian effort yet, tucking one distancing device inside of another. If most of Anderson’s films deploy artificiality as a design principle, from the stylized costumes to the sets, this one draws constant attention to its own unreality to make a point about it.
Many of the movie’s scenes — the ones shot in color and widescreen, and set in the Southwest desert town of Asteroid — are framed as a play being performed for live television in the 1950s. So far so familiar in Wes World. But we also go behind the scenes of these scenes, through interludes from the lives of the show’s playwright (Edward Norton), director (Adrien Brody), and stars. (Much of Anderson’s cast is on double duty here, playing the characters in the play and the characters playing those characters.) These scenes, shot in black-and-white and Academy ratio, are a performance, too — they’re presented as dramatizations for the television program that’s broadcasting the live production of Asteroid City. During one moment, the meta dimensions multiply, and you realize you’re watching a real actor (Scarlett Johansson) play a fictional actor (Mercedes Ford) playing a fictional actor (Midge Campbell) rehearsing lines to play a different fictional person.
It’s all very playful and clever and, at times, complicated. Yet the movie, and its central play-within-a-broadcast-within-a-movie gimmick, gains a startling poignancy at the climax, when Anderson’s two narrative tracks converge. Just as one of his usual madcap finales commences (a close encounter, the film’s second, sends the whole ensemble of quarantined Asteroid City occupants into pent-up pandemonium), our nominal protagonist, played by Jason Schwartzman, breaks character — which is to say, it’s suddenly theater actor Jones Hall we’re seeing instead of his onstage persona, bereaved war photographer Auggie Steenbeck. Wandering offstage, Jones finds his director, Brody’s Schubert Green, to ask him a question that’s been nagging at him over the course of Asteroid City: “Am I doing it right?” As in, has he figured out who Auggie really is and is he hitting the proper notes?
In this moment, Anderson takes the nesting-doll structure he’s increasingly favored as a storyteller and extends it to the very act of watching his movies. Here, we’re encouraged to see beyond Auggie, a father and grieving husband searching for answers about the universe, to also see Jones, an actor seeking answers of his own … and maybe also to see Jason Schwartzman, the real man behind these fictional men, who surely experiences his own moments of “Am I doing this right?” doubt. Auggie, Jones, Jason — they’re all separate entities, but they occupy the same form. And seeing all of them at once allows us to understand Asteroid City as the story of each of them. It’s why — as Green tells Jones — it doesn’t really matter if he’s playing Auggie right. His struggle to do so is its own reward, for him and the audience.
In the entwined plights of these men, we can see the value of the distance Anderson regularly puts between his narratives and his audience, the way he rejects the immersive quality of realism. Asteroid City shows how emphasizing the artificiality of a story — allowing us to see that it is a story — allows us to appreciate it on two levels, both as a piece of fiction and as an expression of the artists who made it. The cartoon unreality of Anderson’s work isn’t an impediment to engaging with it; it’s an invitation to look past the framelines to those doing the framing, to square the story you’re being told with that of the people telling it. And that’s what’s so personal about Anderson’s work: Every artificial element is a plea to really see the artist who chose it. This is me, they all announce.
After that moving, revealing conversation between director and actor, Asteroid City makes one more remarkable case for its approach. Walking out onto a balcony of the studio, Jones runs into the actor who would have been his fictional wife had her part not been cut. The woman, played by Margot Robbie in a brief but crucial cameo, recites from memory the climactic scene she and Jones would have shared: a reunion in space, where Auggie gets another chance to say good-bye to the mother of his children and the love of his life. It’s the big tearjerker ending of Asteroid City, reduced to a deleted scene, performed by one actor doing all the lines.
What’s ingenious about this choice is how it simultaneously rewards and denies our desire for cornball catharsis. In a sense, Anderson is having his cake and eating it too: abstracting the maudlin ending filters out any cheap sentimentalism, while still preserving the emotional wallop; somehow, seeing this character we’ve just met perform the scene out of context, with one foot in reality and one in the material, only purifies its power. It opens a window into Anderson’s own creative wrestling, his version of “Am I doing it right?” And it reveals something about his relationship to his characters — hinting that even when Anderson doesn’t give his wounded neurotics like Auggie the closure they deserve, he still really wants to.
In the last few minutes, we return to the fictional world of Asteroid City. By this point, we’ve been reminded over and over again that the events of Asteroid City, the movie and the play within the movie, are not real. And yet that proves no barrier for reinvesting in the plight of Auggie and his family, getting one last moment in the desert before embarking together on the road to a new life. If anything, their melodrama now carries the full weight of the artists who created it — the fictional architects of the play, but also the very real director behind them, once more letting the seams of a story show in order to show himself.
