Wes Anderson’s nostalgic Asteroid City
Daniel Ross Goodman
An American filmmaker who is at once a genuine auteur but who can also attract mainstream audiences may sound like some fantasy creation you’d only find in, well, the films of some auteur moviemaker. But there was once a time when such directors were as abundant as Whole Foods stores in the suburbs. In the late ’60s and into the ’70s, it appeared as if these kinds of directors would be the predominant sort for the next several generations in American film. Today, they are an endangered species. The few filmmakers still committed to the cinematic high-wire act of making art movies for the masses stand out like snow leopards in the Sahara. Wes Anderson is one of these filmmakers and one of the few directors for whom the release of a new one of their films is still a capital-E cultural Event.
His newest movie, Asteroid City, deserves to be treated as such, even if it is far from one of his best. It plays at times like the studious culmination — and at other times like a loose agglomeration — of the major themes and minor motifs Anderson has been probing for the better part of the past 25 years: the complications and awkwardness of adolescent love, the follies of adults who are outshined by precociously mature children, the concomitant follies of children who try to act like adults, the search to discern a meaning behind the madness, and the undercurrent of loss that lurks beneath even the cheeriest of surfaces.
And, of course, because it is a Wes Anderson movie, all of these themes are portrayed in one of the most identifiable and unique styles in all of contemporary American film. While we contemplate the heavier and darker elements of the movie, our eyes can at least find a respite in the lighter and brighter Van Gogh-esque color palette of Robert Yeoman’s cinematography — endless spans of cacti-dotted desert tans that conjure the classic Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote Looney Tunes cartoons, then back again to livelier yellows and serene aquamarines that are redolent of Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). The movie’s production design is as meticulously crafted as most Anderson movies, though because of the minimal number of settings in Asteroid City, we do not get to experience as many of Anderson’s singular compositions as we did in, say, Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Suffused as Asteroid City is with movie stars, its story revolves less around them than it does around the earth-shaking cosmological occurrences at its core. These occurrences are embedded inside another story that exerts an even stronger gravitational pull. This frame story, shot in black and white, concerns the fictional playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton, looking eerily like Hitler in pajamas). Earp is one of America’s leading men of letters in the 1950s and by most accounts one of the time’s authoritative chroniclers of life west of the Rockies. His latest creation, brought to life by the peppy director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), takes place in a bare-bones desert town (population: 87) that contains little more than a diner, a gas station, a perpetually out-of-service highway ramp, and a couple of bungalow colony houses. Importantly, though, one of the few pieces of working infrastructure this tiny town called Asteroid City does boast is an observatory. And that is because once a year, like a kind of Comic-Con for geeks of a different sort, this Nowhere, USA, desert town becomes the gathering place for a convention of young stargazers who descend upon the city to receive recognitions for their various astronomical achievements in an annual ceremony, presided over by U.S. General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) and local astronomer Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), in which they commemorate the space rock that once upon a time crashed into the area and created a giant crater.
Everything is proceeding as usual at that year’s Asteroid Day when the unexpected, if not outright unimaginable, occurs: A UFO alights upon the town, out of which steps a cartoonish, Gumby-limbed alien (Jeff Goldblum, of course). Striding like the Pink Panther through the awestruck space cadet crowd that is too stunned to move or even speak, the alien collects the town’s famed meteorite, climbs back into his neon green hexagonal spaceship, and vanishes as suddenly as he arrives. This astonishing extraterrestrial event immediately provokes a panic among the authorities; the general, with orders from governmental higher-ups, imposes a lockdown upon the town, placing anyone who witnessed the incredible scene in an indefinite quarantine. When those who happen to be in the town complain about the interminable lockdown, their plaints fall on deaf ears. It’s an emergency, after all, and the government believes it is justified in doing whatever is necessary to “protect” those who have been placed at risk by what has happened.
Lockdowns. Quarantines. Sound familiar? Asteroid City was shot during COVID, whose effects appear to have left a craterlike impact of its own on the film. One of these effects is the unfortunate absence of Bill Murray, an Anderson regular ever since Rushmore (1998), due to Murray’s having tested positive for COVID shortly before Asteroid City began shooting. Anderson appears to have overcompensated for Murray’s absence, casting not only nearly all of his regulars (Norton, Brody, Swinton, Wright, Goldblum, Jason Schwartzman, Liev Schreiber, Bob Balaban, and Willem Dafoe) but also a whole host of newcomers to his cinematic universe: Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Bryan Cranston, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, and Steve Carell, among others. (Scarlett Johansson, who voiced a stop motion animated dog for Anderson in Isle of Dogs, appears here on camera for the first time in his works.) This kind of ensemble inflation may look impressive on movie posters, but in the movie itself, the addition of yet one more star after another can have a law-of-diminishing-returns effect. The movie would have already been good with just Anderson’s regulars and maybe with one or two of the newbies. But do we really need all of them? Is the movie really that much better because Margot Robbie and Steve Carell come in to say a few lines? Why squeeze in so many other stars if this has the effect of reducing Goldblum’s and Dafoe’s parts nearly to afterthoughts? Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should.
Beyond its surfeit of stars and its maybe-too-soon COVID parable, Asteroid City is above all a film about nostalgia: nostalgia for a time when typewriters, letter-writing, pre-digital photography, and real (non-CGI’d) special effects were all still commonly used; nostalgia for a time when Pluto was still considered a planet; nostalgia for flying saucers and other emblems of ’50s science fiction; nostalgia for a time when playwrights were cultural figures as significant as pop stars are today; nostalgia for a time when the U.S. armed forces “ain’t never lost a war yet.” One day, we too might look back with wistful nostalgia at the time when we awaited a new movie from one of our celebrated filmmakers the way people once were excited about the newest play from Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and an incoming postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.