Thoughts on Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City”
Beyond the aesthetic choices, one of the most recognizable features of a Wes Anderson film is the precocious children and the immature adults that surround them. This maturity switch is as much a joke as it is a legitimate pillar of Anderson’s work; the adults, lost in their so-called wisdom and "experience" that cripple their logic to irrational dogma are put in direct contrast with the children in his films — naïveté transformed into a skilled openness for new ideas, possibilities, and experiences. They are the problem solvers, the geniuses, the brainiacs. Precocious kids are as much a hallmark of Anderson’s work as the pastels and the ever-necessary shootout. This leads to a certain potential for a certain coldness that feels unique to his work (an issue that plagued the otherwise fantastic “The French Dispatch”). While “Asteroid City" is as neurotic and detached as the rest of his oeuvre, it somehow redefines what a Wes Anderson film is and breathes a welcome new life into a filmography that didn’t necessarily need it. It is, resoundingly, his most “American” film to date and quite possibly the one with the most to say.
It would be a shame to analyze Asteroid City and come out of it with a single meaning. That is to say, there's too much going on and too many layers to say it's solely about one specific thing. It's as much about Americana and our nonchalant comfortability with war and violence as it is about grief and processing that grief. It, too, is about what it means to be a talented individual in your craft surrounded by people who simply cannot understand that level of genius — as much as it is a denouncement of the idea of genius altogether. And due to its wide-reaching and complexly woven plot, it is paradoxically Wes Anderson's most personal film to date — a bonafide therapy session where the things we're too afraid to say are said out loud and ultimately give reason to his so-called "cold" and "detached" style.
Wes Anderson meticulously crafts worlds and then stuffs them full of characters that are too self-obsessed to see the beauty around them, the main contradiction present in many of the adult characters in his previous work. Here, this still rings true, but the reason for this choice is stated plainly — "We’re just two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of our pain because ... we don’t want to.” This line, being the now obvious emotional backbone to so much of Anderson's work, is not an easily discernible one without the added context of "Asteroid City." Through this, the widely celebrated and regularly critiqued cavalier-ness, that has become so quintessential to the success of his films from "Bottle Rocket" to "Dispatch," morphs from snobbery into a densely veiled defense mechanism that might have been as much a part of Anderson's real-life world as it was (and is) part of his fantasized ones.
The film opens as an anthology, a black and white 4:3 TV show, a-la Twilight Zone, or maybe more accurately PBS Masterpiece. Point is, Asteroid City — the real-life film — is nested from the very first moment. We are quickly told by the host that we're about to watch the behind-the-scenes creation of the fictional and titular play, Asteroid City. While it seems convoluted at first glance, the idea it communicates is simple — what you are about to embark on is a fiction, but an inspired one; this story does not, and cannot, live in or arise from a vacuum. From there, we are welcomed into the technicolor theater set of Asteroid City.
We're first introduced to Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck/Jones Hall and his kids. Schwartzman is a veritable hallmark of Anderson's filmography, an important detail that is leveraged as a directing choice in "Asteroid City." In Act I, he shares much of his screen time trading lines with his onscreen son Woodrow. Woodrow has aesthetic and personality traits that feel as though Rushmore's Max Fisher (played by none other than Jason Schwartzman) was plucked right out of 1998 and dropped straight into 1955, glasses and all. Throughout the film, much of the dialogue they share outlines the aforementioned contradiction — defocusing a bit from the specifics, Augie is a father who cannot love his kids the way he wants to, and the initial love that brought them there is gone by the time the film begins. What's left is a man who communicates nearly exclusively with cold and precise language, able to speak clinically on the logic behind his emotions without ever being able to feel them. This is reflected in how Woodrow interfaces with the world, initially afraid to even sit with the other young geniuses or acknowledge the emotions he has dealing with the recent passing of his mom. This theme is repeated by nearly every main character. Act II and Act III show this same dichotomy present in the relationship between Midge Campbell and her daughter, Dina, with Midge at one point blatantly admitting to Augie that while she loves her daughter she can never be a priority because her first priority will always be stardom. In Asteroid City, everyone is truthful about their experiences but dishonest with how their feeling — masking the pain and meaninglessness of life with an ever present air of detachment. That is, until, the aliens come.
The arrival of the aliens doesn't ever really signify a general switch to science fiction. If anything, it makes the story even more human. The aliens serve simply as the great equalizer — sure you can call yourself a genius but if an alien shows up in your backyard, would you know how to react? Would you know what to do? You can find the logic in every emotion but how can you possibly conceptualize how to react to such an earth-shattering moment? Anderson posits that you probably don't know, and further challenges you to think that you'd react just like everyone else — shock, awe, disbelief, and eventual chaos as reality sets in. This contextualizes the haunting chant present later in the movie — “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” You can’t experience life if you’re not willing to let go, another paradoxical statement from a director who is famously controlling over every aspect of a film’s creation.
During the second alien visitation, in what could've been Asteroid City's most chaotic and overstimulating moment, Augie steps out of the play and breaks character — transforming back into the meta-layer actor Jones Hall as he exits to a door center stage. Here, he meets the director and in one of the most painfully emotional moments in any Wes Anderson movie, he asks the director simply — "Am I doing it right?" To which Anderson all but replies, "It doesn’t matter, just keep telling your story.”