Theater space
Actually trying to talk about Asteroid City, on any level more involved than "I really liked it, best movie of 2023 so far, 4.5 stars out of 5" (which is, for the record, the short version of this review) feels like willfully stepping into the world's most obvious trap. There's a recurring plot point in the movie where an actor has been given a piece of blocking he doesn't understand (spontaneously and deliberately burning his hand on an electric griddle), and he keeps hoping to have someone explain What It Means, going so far as to briefly break character to talk about it. He never does get a straight answer, nor even really a crooked one, but the way his concerns are brushed off never get closer than to the answer "I dunno, it feels right". Maybe it's pat and dismissive, but I write this review as someone who has spent the last handful of years growing increasingly mad at films that think they have to mean something, and coming to believe that "I dunno, it feels right" is the only reliable way for artists to make actually good art, and having that be my takeaway from Asteroid City is incredibly satisfying. There are definitely a lot of different ways you could tease meaning and theme and character truth and emotional truth out of what is, by a decent margin, the most complicated screenplay in writer-director Wes Anderson's career (the story, but not the screenplay, is co-credited to his frequent collaborator Roman Coppola). But I also think that maybe the bizarre scaffolding and frameworks-within-frameworks that make up the screenplay to Asteroid City, for all that it serves as a treatise on American theater, 1950s visual culture, the artistic process as both singular act of will and collaborative act, quarantines, conspiracy theories, and the hope that science will save us from ourselves, maybe it really does take this form just because Anderson thought it felt right. Certainly it's a move that's easier to "explain" when you look at it as a whole object from a distance, while some of the specific choices make very little immediately obvious sense. To me. The damned thing is that they do, as a matter of fact, "feel right".
The movie has a similar three-part logic to Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, though where that film has a telescopic, backwards-in-time-structure (an interview in the 1980s about a chance meeting in the 1968s which involved the telling of a story set in the 1930s - there is a fourth part, technically, set in the 2010s, but it's bound up stylistically with the 1980s material), Asteroid City is wrapping layers of artifice around each other. And unlike Grand Budapest, the layers here interact more. We start with the grave baritone and authoritative presence of the host (Bryan Cranston) of some manner of Playhouse 90-style '50s "Serious Drama for Serious Adults" type of program, and he informs us that we will be watching a filmed production of the play Asteroid City, written by the acclaimed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a sort of Tennessee Williams of the mountain states. Moreover, we will be watching a dramatic presentation about a filmed production of the play, or perhaps a documentary, which discusses the play's inspiration, composition, and staging all out of order, motivated either by what happens backstage during certain moments of the play (which is presented in the correct order), or what events in its prehistory fed into the creation of certain moments, as we see them. To help us keep track of where we are, ever three or four scenes, a title card appears explaining where in the play's three-act structure we are, by grouping scenes within acts according to their rough narrative function.
This is to say, the bulk of the movie's plot is the events of Asteroid City (the play) - a story set in a fictional town in the California-Nevada-Arizona desert, where an annual government-sponsored high school science competition is held near the site of a tourist-trap asteroid crater, and what happens when the visiting oddballs and colorful locals are put under quarantine after an extraterrestrial arrives to steal the remains of the asteroid right in the middle of the competition - but the function of the movie is to keep Asteroid City (the play) firmly removed in some abstract zone, where it's more the film's object than its subject. I've read some smart attempts to grapple with what seems to be happening within the play, as a story of expressing grief and trauma and the like, and I confess to feeling a little bit bad that I cannot imagine caring about the content of the play. To me, it's basically just candy, something to be enjoyed for its deadpan humor and gorgeous color design while the film is doing the actual work that matters someplace else. If I can go for a literary reference pretentious enough that I think Wes Anderson himself might make it, thinking that Asteroid City (the movie) is first and foremost about Asteroid City (the play) would be like thinking that Pale Fire (the 1962 Vladimir Nabokov novel) is first and foremost about "Pale Fire" (the 999-line poem that is the ostensible centerpiece of the novel). In other words, at a certain point something can be formally convoluted enough that the convolutions themselves are what matter, and grappling with the way the content has been structured matters more than grappling with the content itself.
The structure, in this case, is loosely about the way that theater works, which makes this Anderson's third live-action film in a row that is "about" the narrative strategies of a non-cinematic media that were all more intellectually prestigious than cinema in the middle of the 20th Century (The Grand Budapest Hotel is about novels - more to the point, memoirs - and The French Dispatch is about short-form essays and stories in glossy literary magazines). But it's "about" this in a way that is mostly about translating that medium into cinema, and if necessary breaking it. There is absolutely no way in which the play Asteroid City that we watch could conceivably have been staged in the manner suggested by the backstage sequences of the movie, and the film is calling attention to it as directly as it can: I think the literal first shot "within" the play is a massive long shot that sits down in the middle of the Asteroid City sets and looks every possible direction, rotating very precisely by either 45º or 90º at a time, with the camera only moving when it's 90º to main axes of the set (so not only is the film giving us the setting, it's giving us the full range of available angles from which to view that setting, as though the rest of the movie will just be variations on the content of this one shot. It is among the most Wes Andersony things to ever happen in a Wes Anderson film). It's simultaneously setting the scene and making it very clear that we are not watching any play staged in 1955 or any other moment, while also adding yet another layer of distancing artifice, since the camera is so extremely present in this moment that you almost feel like if you glanced towards your peripheral vision, you'd see the camera crew. One of the film's best jokes is based on the impossibility of a man in an alien suit playing the gangly-limbed stop-motion animated alien we actually see. Things like that.
None of this is to say that the "play itself" is disposable or arbitrary. On the contrary, I think that the material within Asteroid City is some tremendously pleasurable stuff, with an incredibly dense cast of major actors doing almost uniformly superb work in delivering some of the best deadpan humor in Anderson's inordinately deadpan filmography - I think it's his funniest movie since the 2000s, before he began turning to nostalgic melancholy (Asteroid City has this, but I think the layers of meaning between the viewer and the melancholy keeps it from actually being very sad). While I don't know if any single performance here is quite up to the level of the very best in any Anderson film (Bill Murray and Olivia Williams in Rushmore, Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel), the cast as a whole is, I think, the best one he's ever worked with, with only one performance that stands out for being uniquely tinny (Steve Carell, who joined the project later after Murray came down with COVID-19), and a great many that are at or near the best work done by some very gifted actors. It's especially lucky to have Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson excelling in the more-or-less lead roles, playing two characters inside Asteroid City who are united in their stuffed-up inability to express painful feelings, and making this come across as terrifically funny in their clipped, precise movements and line deliveries; they also get the best chances of anyone in the cast to draw interesting distinctions between the performances-in-the-play and performances-as-the-actors-backstage, letting us see how the stage performance is inflected by the "real" character, but never coterminous with them. And Johansson gets to do this while trotting out three different accents, all of them fake: the actress's manicured transatlantic accent that is invisible behind the play character's studious mid-America flatness, which itself is briefly turned to a working-class twang when she's rehearsing a part (that character is, in the reality of Asteroid City, herself a beloved film actress).
The Asteroid City material is also where the film trots out the most stylistic flourishes. The backstage material is relatively straightforward: a rich spectrum of low-contrast black-and-white in Academy ratio, and the TV show is just copying it. The "play" is presented in anamorphic widescreen that has been color corrected to look grimy and soft, with a reliance on bright blues and oranges cut with milky yellows that feels very much in the spirit of midcentury modernism and Googie style, though ill-preserved and blasted to pieces by the desert wind. It's the same basic visual concept as was used in Moonrise Kingdom (late-'50s / early-'60s cultural ephemera that has faded a bit from being preserved in your grandparents' attic), but honed even more precisely than in that film, and it's absolutely gorgeous to look at. It's also in this section where Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman are up to their usual game of ruthlessly precise camera angles, pointing straight at their subjects, moving in impeccable lines and right-angle turns. In the particular case of Asteroid City, their standard visual aesthetic has been shaped into part of the overall structure of humor: there are running gags and callbacks baked into the film's very form, such that some of its funniest jokes have nothing at all to do with what is said or what is happening, but with how the visual language connects and echoes and inverts moments.
The point being: the play-within-the-movie is fun, delightful, beautiful, phenomenally well-acted. But the meat of the film is in the edges, in the way we understand the play as the end result of the composition and staging processes we see in little glimmers in the framework narratives. It is a film about the actors wondering what they hell they're creating, versus a director and a writer who don't seem to care, as long as a creative act is occurring, and how what results from that is something beautiful and funny, in its weird, brittle way. In probably the biggest tell that the framework is the actual heart of the movie, the climax of Asteroid City (the film) is a scene that was cut from Asteroid City (the play), and which is delivered as a monologue by a character who appears nowhere else in the film; she gives both halves of a conversation, and the editing mimics a shot-reverse shot exchange as though it were actually dialogue, cinematic form reinstating meaning on theatrical content that has been deprived of its meaning. Because the joke is that this most emotional moment of the film is an orphan, connecting to absolutely nothing: it's a moment whose emotional resonance is pretty much solely because it slots into the position where an emotionally resonant moment would go, and because it "feels right". So very, very right, indeed.
The movie has a similar three-part logic to Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, though where that film has a telescopic, backwards-in-time-structure (an interview in the 1980s about a chance meeting in the 1968s which involved the telling of a story set in the 1930s - there is a fourth part, technically, set in the 2010s, but it's bound up stylistically with the 1980s material), Asteroid City is wrapping layers of artifice around each other. And unlike Grand Budapest, the layers here interact more. We start with the grave baritone and authoritative presence of the host (Bryan Cranston) of some manner of Playhouse 90-style '50s "Serious Drama for Serious Adults" type of program, and he informs us that we will be watching a filmed production of the play Asteroid City, written by the acclaimed playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), a sort of Tennessee Williams of the mountain states. Moreover, we will be watching a dramatic presentation about a filmed production of the play, or perhaps a documentary, which discusses the play's inspiration, composition, and staging all out of order, motivated either by what happens backstage during certain moments of the play (which is presented in the correct order), or what events in its prehistory fed into the creation of certain moments, as we see them. To help us keep track of where we are, ever three or four scenes, a title card appears explaining where in the play's three-act structure we are, by grouping scenes within acts according to their rough narrative function.
This is to say, the bulk of the movie's plot is the events of Asteroid City (the play) - a story set in a fictional town in the California-Nevada-Arizona desert, where an annual government-sponsored high school science competition is held near the site of a tourist-trap asteroid crater, and what happens when the visiting oddballs and colorful locals are put under quarantine after an extraterrestrial arrives to steal the remains of the asteroid right in the middle of the competition - but the function of the movie is to keep Asteroid City (the play) firmly removed in some abstract zone, where it's more the film's object than its subject. I've read some smart attempts to grapple with what seems to be happening within the play, as a story of expressing grief and trauma and the like, and I confess to feeling a little bit bad that I cannot imagine caring about the content of the play. To me, it's basically just candy, something to be enjoyed for its deadpan humor and gorgeous color design while the film is doing the actual work that matters someplace else. If I can go for a literary reference pretentious enough that I think Wes Anderson himself might make it, thinking that Asteroid City (the movie) is first and foremost about Asteroid City (the play) would be like thinking that Pale Fire (the 1962 Vladimir Nabokov novel) is first and foremost about "Pale Fire" (the 999-line poem that is the ostensible centerpiece of the novel). In other words, at a certain point something can be formally convoluted enough that the convolutions themselves are what matter, and grappling with the way the content has been structured matters more than grappling with the content itself.
The structure, in this case, is loosely about the way that theater works, which makes this Anderson's third live-action film in a row that is "about" the narrative strategies of a non-cinematic media that were all more intellectually prestigious than cinema in the middle of the 20th Century (The Grand Budapest Hotel is about novels - more to the point, memoirs - and The French Dispatch is about short-form essays and stories in glossy literary magazines). But it's "about" this in a way that is mostly about translating that medium into cinema, and if necessary breaking it. There is absolutely no way in which the play Asteroid City that we watch could conceivably have been staged in the manner suggested by the backstage sequences of the movie, and the film is calling attention to it as directly as it can: I think the literal first shot "within" the play is a massive long shot that sits down in the middle of the Asteroid City sets and looks every possible direction, rotating very precisely by either 45º or 90º at a time, with the camera only moving when it's 90º to main axes of the set (so not only is the film giving us the setting, it's giving us the full range of available angles from which to view that setting, as though the rest of the movie will just be variations on the content of this one shot. It is among the most Wes Andersony things to ever happen in a Wes Anderson film). It's simultaneously setting the scene and making it very clear that we are not watching any play staged in 1955 or any other moment, while also adding yet another layer of distancing artifice, since the camera is so extremely present in this moment that you almost feel like if you glanced towards your peripheral vision, you'd see the camera crew. One of the film's best jokes is based on the impossibility of a man in an alien suit playing the gangly-limbed stop-motion animated alien we actually see. Things like that.
None of this is to say that the "play itself" is disposable or arbitrary. On the contrary, I think that the material within Asteroid City is some tremendously pleasurable stuff, with an incredibly dense cast of major actors doing almost uniformly superb work in delivering some of the best deadpan humor in Anderson's inordinately deadpan filmography - I think it's his funniest movie since the 2000s, before he began turning to nostalgic melancholy (Asteroid City has this, but I think the layers of meaning between the viewer and the melancholy keeps it from actually being very sad). While I don't know if any single performance here is quite up to the level of the very best in any Anderson film (Bill Murray and Olivia Williams in Rushmore, Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel), the cast as a whole is, I think, the best one he's ever worked with, with only one performance that stands out for being uniquely tinny (Steve Carell, who joined the project later after Murray came down with COVID-19), and a great many that are at or near the best work done by some very gifted actors. It's especially lucky to have Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson excelling in the more-or-less lead roles, playing two characters inside Asteroid City who are united in their stuffed-up inability to express painful feelings, and making this come across as terrifically funny in their clipped, precise movements and line deliveries; they also get the best chances of anyone in the cast to draw interesting distinctions between the performances-in-the-play and performances-as-the-actors-backstage, letting us see how the stage performance is inflected by the "real" character, but never coterminous with them. And Johansson gets to do this while trotting out three different accents, all of them fake: the actress's manicured transatlantic accent that is invisible behind the play character's studious mid-America flatness, which itself is briefly turned to a working-class twang when she's rehearsing a part (that character is, in the reality of Asteroid City, herself a beloved film actress).
The Asteroid City material is also where the film trots out the most stylistic flourishes. The backstage material is relatively straightforward: a rich spectrum of low-contrast black-and-white in Academy ratio, and the TV show is just copying it. The "play" is presented in anamorphic widescreen that has been color corrected to look grimy and soft, with a reliance on bright blues and oranges cut with milky yellows that feels very much in the spirit of midcentury modernism and Googie style, though ill-preserved and blasted to pieces by the desert wind. It's the same basic visual concept as was used in Moonrise Kingdom (late-'50s / early-'60s cultural ephemera that has faded a bit from being preserved in your grandparents' attic), but honed even more precisely than in that film, and it's absolutely gorgeous to look at. It's also in this section where Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman are up to their usual game of ruthlessly precise camera angles, pointing straight at their subjects, moving in impeccable lines and right-angle turns. In the particular case of Asteroid City, their standard visual aesthetic has been shaped into part of the overall structure of humor: there are running gags and callbacks baked into the film's very form, such that some of its funniest jokes have nothing at all to do with what is said or what is happening, but with how the visual language connects and echoes and inverts moments.
The point being: the play-within-the-movie is fun, delightful, beautiful, phenomenally well-acted. But the meat of the film is in the edges, in the way we understand the play as the end result of the composition and staging processes we see in little glimmers in the framework narratives. It is a film about the actors wondering what they hell they're creating, versus a director and a writer who don't seem to care, as long as a creative act is occurring, and how what results from that is something beautiful and funny, in its weird, brittle way. In probably the biggest tell that the framework is the actual heart of the movie, the climax of Asteroid City (the film) is a scene that was cut from Asteroid City (the play), and which is delivered as a monologue by a character who appears nowhere else in the film; she gives both halves of a conversation, and the editing mimics a shot-reverse shot exchange as though it were actually dialogue, cinematic form reinstating meaning on theatrical content that has been deprived of its meaning. Because the joke is that this most emotional moment of the film is an orphan, connecting to absolutely nothing: it's a moment whose emotional resonance is pretty much solely because it slots into the position where an emotionally resonant moment would go, and because it "feels right". So very, very right, indeed.
