Asteroid City

Asteroid City is set in Wes Anderson’s 1950s, as opposed to the ’50s he lived through. (He was born in 1969.) In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the filmmaker flipped through eras like lenses in an eye exam, putting the artist at a safe distance from his subject. The layering in this film does something else; it opens a conduit between past and present and their analogues: fiction and reality. Anderson seems self-possessed; he doesn’t hide behind his vision.

Perhaps the best way to get at it is to say that where Budapest was vertical, as in a monopoly, Asteroid City is horizontal. Anderson’s primary storyline, which involves gifted children, their parents, military brass, and scientific personnel encountering a U.F.O. in the Desert Southwest, and being placed under lockdown for it, is framed by its backstory, which casts that story as a play by a gay writer (Edward Norton) working with an austere ensemble that resembles the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, and this is framed by a making-of television documentary narrated by Bryan Cranston, doing his best Rod Serling—the voice of a cynical yet reassuring authority.

In effect, Anderson weaves together disparate strands of ’50s Americana, from highbrow (Method acting) to middle (anthology series) to low (flying saucers). He has explicitly set the story in the backyard of nuclear peril and in the same month (September 1955) as James Dean’s death: parallel truths that are stranger than fiction. All that makes these strands coherent is the very fact of his weaving. He salvages flotsam from a dream and the dream is collective nostalgia. The pieces fit together almost despite themselves.

If Moonrise Kingdom was about children on the cusp of adulthood, and Budapest was itself on the cusp of immersion in romanticism, Asteroid City is about something actually happening. It goes over the edge. And I think the Covid pandemic is what finally put Anderson over it. Have we had a better image of the lockdown in action than Scarlett Johansson in her window from the point of view of Jason Schwartzman in his? Their faces are yellow in the sun. They are as far apart as gunslingers at high noon. Their faces are their masks. But emotions do not get trapped beneath them; they leak out of the restless, unrequited repose.

Finally a thing has happened: humanity is not alone in the universe. But that is just a story within a story. Has life fundamentally changed? Augie, the widower and war photographer, has to comfort his family and accept his wife’s death: to move beyond seeing his feelings through a window or lens. His grief transcends the levels of artifice. The actor playing Augie on stage kisses the playwright during his audition; they fall in love. But the playwright later dies in a car accident, which takes place offscreen.

On a balcony between Broadway theaters, Schwartzman, playing the actor, psychs himself up for the role; he runs lines with Margot Robbie, who was to have played his dead wife in cut scenes but is now between curtain calls on another play. Snow falls in the alley between them in front of a blanket of city night. He’s physically far from Asteroid City, and yet the scenes with Robbie mirror the scenes with Johansson like a well reflecting his grief.

A few months after seeing the film, two lines of dialogue still stick with me. The first one is Schwartzman’s Augie putting his hand to a flame but saying he knows not why. The second is uttered by Adrien Brody, playing the mercurial director mounting the meta play. His ex-wife (Hong Chau), whom he cheated on, invites him to come home from the theater, but he turns her down; he doesn’t want to sleep in a place with real windows.

It’s telling, I think, that the sci-fi “play” we experience is purely cinematic and would never survive on stage. It implies an extra veil of imagination, stocked with figments from a dream, like Rupert Friend’s singing cowboy: a revamped troubadour. Mid-century nostalgia for 19th-century nostalgia for Europe’s Middle Ages. As with all the worlds Anderson constructs, wry susuration persists as a sign of life—or, at least, of intelligence. Finally a thing has happened in Asteroid City: and yet the world spins on. I suspect that Anderson, like many people coming out from under the pandemic, is dumbstruck by the degree to which he has emerged unchanged. He gives us room to ponder how much we can be changed, how much more clearly we would actually see if we were looking out real windows. He might be dumbstruck, in other words, by the persistence of his own vision.

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