In "Asteroid City," Wes Anderson Goes Meta

Wes Anderson's eleventh film peels back the layers of Andersonian artifice.

Jason Schwartzman in Asteroid City | Image via Focus Features

The films of Wes Anderson are detailed tapestries of metanarrative confusion, storybooks filled with candy-box images that belie honesty and depth. Yet with each new film, his complexity has reached further towards inscrutability. Where once we had the auteur who gave us the droll artistry of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, we now have the lunatic behind The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch—movies that shamelessly stack narrative upon narrative, frame upon frame to the point that it becomes impossible to tell just where the hell you are in these sprawling storyscapes. Whatever you may think of him, you can’t deny that Anderson has retained a singular sense of style—a style that has recently become more intricate, cluttered, and self-referentially jumbled than ever before.

Just like the train charging through its titular town, Asteroid City shows no signs of slowing down this era of Andersonian excess. It opens with a framing device that rivals the meta-ness of any of his previous films: Bryan Cranston, playing the host of an anthology television series centered on televised theater, introduces Asteroid City—not the film you’re watching, but a stage play written by the legendary playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). That play follows Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer travelling with his four children to the eponymous desert town to attend the Junior Stargazers Convention—a youth astronomy convention of which Augie’s son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is a part. If reading that description gave you a migraine, don’t feel bad. Asteroid City, like the rest of Anderson’s recent pictures, is a headache-inducing experience by its very construction.

This means that your enjoyment of the film will depend largely on whether you’ve been able to stomach Anderson’s recent works. I myself was largely ambivalent to The French Dispatch, his previous film. (I found some sections stronger than others; I sometimes felt that his intricate choreography was spiraling out of control.) Asteroid City is similarly absurd, yet somehow I found it more compelling. I found myself enjoying the act of piecing together its various meta layers into a cohesive whole, rather than being annoyed.

Part of this has to do with the film’s characters, each of whom are as immediately identifiable as the last. Augie, a widower, is a man filled with buttoned-up suppression. Case in point: for three weeks, he has neglected to tell his children that their mother has died. Augie’s son Woodrow is similarly buttoned-up, though not nearly as traumatized. He is a precocious young genius as excited at the possibilties of the stars as he is unable to connect with his fellow Junior Stargazers. The town of Asteroid City is filled with similarly traumatized adults and genius children, two of whom are the Marilyn Monroe-esque bombshell Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards). Augie’s stern father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks) also plays a key role.

The design of Asteroid City (and Asteroid City) is conspicuously constructed, presenting totemic images of blindingly caricatured 1950s Americana. The dust blowing through the town is dustier than a Sergio Leone Western, the coffee blacker than anything the Double R could ever offer; the town’s one empty road is somehow always filled with a lone police car chasing away a bank robber in a hot rod. Cowboys and aliens appear at various intervals in the film, as does a recurring image of a papier-mâché nuclear explosions that seems plucked out of a Chuck Jones cartoon. It all adds up to a palpable sense of memorialized history: an American epoch when science, reason, and good-hearted family values could solve all the world’s ills.

This sort of cartoonish nostalgia is true of all Anderson’s films. Whether it be the Ruritanian pastiche of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Jacques Cousteau memorialization of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, or the journalistic tribute of The French Dispatch, Anderson’s controlling eye creates cinematic re-imaginings of various historical epochs through his hyper-symmetrized shots. Yet where this style might have been worn-out just a movie or two ago, Asteroid City contains a freshness of purpose that kept me engaged. The cowboys and aliens aren’t just there for show: they serve as backdrop for newly profound ideas of loneliness and cosmic angst. It’s there in the relationship between Augie and Midge, two broken husks struggling with the seeming purposelessness of the universe. When an alien arrives in Asteroid City (itself a magnificent sequence involving some beautiful animation), Augie and Midge are sent spiraling into existential doubt. “I don’t like the way that guy looked at us—the alien,” says Augie to Midge. When she asks what he means, his response is indicative: “Like we’re doomed.”

These themes also play into the film’s framing device—a meta touch that is as confusing as it is transcendent. In Asteroid City, Augie Steenbeck is not Augie Steenbeck; he is also Jones Hall, an actor hired by Conrad Earp to play Augie onstage. And there is overlap between actor and character: Just as Augie doesn’t understand his purpose in the universe, so too does Jones fail to comprehend the meaning of the art. “I don’t understand the play,” Jones repeats many times throughout the film, and this precise lack of understanding, according to Asteroid City’s playwright (played by Adrien Brody), is just what makes him right for the role. “You didn’t just become Augie—he became you,” he says. Meta touches like these, beautiful and unexpected, are what make the film tick.

Asteroid City zips along with a frenetic energy that has been an Anderson standard since The Grand Budapest Hotel. The town’s cowboy-pastel backdrop is pleasant and quaint, as are the characters that populate it: an array of downtrodden American stereotypes played by a typically star-studded cast including Steve Carrell, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, and Margot Robbie—even Jeff Goldblum shows up for a one-line cameo. Each character is as well-drawn as the last, so much so that when Maya Hawke and Rupert Friend show up as a stern schoolteacher and a singing cowboy, you feel that there is enough material for a four-star romantic comedy. Speaking of singing cowboys: Asteroid City has a fantastic catalogue of 50s country and western tunes, and Anderson, ever the master of reappropriated pop music, knows just how to give these songs added emotional heft.

This, after all, is what makes Wes Anderson films what they are. The act of piecing together a confusing meta-story is all well and good, but Asteroid City also finds heft in moments of unexpected emotion. At one point in the story, Augie, failing to understand the meaning behind this story of grief and aliens, flees the set of the film. He becomes Jones Hall once again, and as he does, the artifice that had been holding Asteroid City together comes crashing down. This artifice is the same candy-box exterior that has been holding Anderson’s films together for so long. Seeing it peeled back in this way makes it feel all the more profound.