Review: 'Asteroid City' shows the heartbreak under the whimsical surface of Wes Anderson's offbeat worlds
So much time and TikTok real estate has been spent lately mocking the director Wes Anderson for his whimsical, symmetrical visual esthetic — with parody sketches showing the Anderson versions of “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings,” among others — that it takes Anderson’s real work, like the melancholy “Asteroid City,” to remind viewers that it’s not the artifice that counts but what’s going on beneath it.
(Besides, TikTokers, “Saturday Night Live” beat you to it by 10 years, with their Anderson-style horror movie “The Midnight Coterie of Strange Intruders.”)
Asteroid City is a town in the Arizona desert, population 87 — as the sign leading into town informs us. It’s a place of pastel skies and red-rock formations, and Anderson lets us know he’s in on the visual joke by having an actual roadrunner dart past. Aside from the occasional cops-and-robbers chase speeding through town without stopping, not much happens here.
Something did happen some 5,000 years ago: A meteorite landed here, creating the crater in which the town sits. This summer, sometime in the Cold War-obsessed 1950s, the town is visited by a convention of junior stargazers, showing off their inventions in hopes of a scholarship, bankrolled by a defense contractor and handed out by an officious military man, Gen. Gibson (Jeffrey Wright). Meanwhile, the stargazers seek to impress a scientist, Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), who’s studying the meteorite.
During all this, war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) has brought his teen son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), a stargazer himself, and his three younger daughters, to the town. The family is still coming to grips with the death of Augie’s wife, the kids’ mother, and were supposed to meet the children’s grandfather, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), when their car broke down in Asteroid City. While the Steenbecks are stuck here, Augie makes a connection with an actress, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), whose daughter is also a stargazer.
Through all this, Anderson adds another layer. The story of Asteroid City, we are told early, is a Broadway play — and we’re viewing it through the lens of a TV documentary about the production, with Bryan Cranston as the TV anchor following the playwright (Edward Norton) through the steps from typewriter to auditions to rehearsal to stage.
As with any Anderson ensemble, there are more subplots and characters, and a sprawling cast that includes Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Live Schreiber, Matt Dillon, Adrien Brody and a few it’s best you not know about before watching.
It may feel overstuffed, as Anderson’s movies often do — about three of the five interlocking stories in “The French Dispatch” really came together — but it works. The pieces fit like a jigsaw, and Anderson’s toggling between the widescreen color vistas of Asteroid City and the boxy screen ratio of the black-and-white TV segments ensure that the foreground story and the background commentary never get confused.
And through the droll humor of Anderson’s surface details, he finds the ragged heart of the story. That heart is the shared grief of Augie, his kids, and Stanley, over the loss of Augie’s wife, seen only in a photograph — and how Augie, as a photographer in one plane of existence and as an actor in another, tries to come to terms with that loss in ways that no one on Earth, even the playwright, can answer for him.
“Asteroid City” may be Anderson’s most resonant work since the innocent preteen romance of “Moonrise Kingdom.” It’s a movie that disguises its seriousness within layers of playful humor — but the emotion is always hiding in plain sight.
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‘Asteroid City’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, June 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material. Running time: 104 minutes.