ASTEROID CITY - Mark Reviews Movies

Asteroid City, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 15, 2023

The narrative of Asteroid City becomes more about how and why its story is being told than the story itself. It's a film that's constantly looking inward as it tells the story of an alternative version of the United States in 1955, filled with fantastical scientific wonders that are mere science fair projects from a group of kids and revolving around an encounter with an alien life form that comes across as a timid child trying to sneak a snack from the cookie jar. On the surface, writer/director Wes Anderson's film offers plenty of cheeky fun.

From the very start, though, Anderson announces that the story of Asteroid City, populated by tourists and the military and some folks associated with a couple small businesses, isn't intended to be perceived as real or particularly important. We're introduced to that story by way of a black-and-white television broadcast, presented by a TV host (played by Bryan Cranston) with a dry delivery and whose existence, with his entire body or just his head appearing to float along the edges of the frame, almost seems unmoored from time and space.

At the start of the broadcast, we learn that Asteroid City is the setting of a play, written by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), and the title of said drama, while what we're watching is a combination of both the play itself and some background information about the writing, production, and performance of the playwright's work. The play's the thing here—not only in what we see on screen or on various stages behind the scenes on the screen within the screen, but also in trying to find some meaning within the tale of the drama and the drama happening before and while that tale is performed.

If this makes little to no sense, that might be an advantage in trying to grasp Anderson's bigger points about the purpose of storytelling as a means of finding and/or condensing some greater meaning in life, as well as the folly of expecting a piece of art to do so much heavy lifting. Sometimes, the absence of such straightforward answers to such age-old questions is an answer unto itself.

Anderson's ambitions might get the better of him here, both in terms of the film's overarching, multi-layered narrative and simply because the dramatized story within the bigger-picture story is such a wealth of characters, ideas, jokes, and craftsmanship. We have come to expect all of this from the filmmaker over the course of a career that, like this film, has taken a turn toward looking inward into Anderson's personal interests, style, and focus on eccentric personalities and scenarios. For better and worse (mostly for the better), this film feels like Anderson's most overtly personal one in the realm of his filmmaking, in terms of investigating and commenting upon how and why he makes movies—as well as addressing and, to some degree, rejecting our expectations of them.

Again, it's a lot, and we haven't even discussed the story within the narrative that takes up so much of the film's attention. It is that play, unfolding in what looks to be a real, if fictional, location in the desert. The main event, bringing together people from various walks of life, is a children's science competition, where one kid brings a functioning jetpack, another displays technology that can project an image on the moon, and yet another child blasts some plates with an honest-to-goodness death ray. This is all before the alien arrives, steals the town's eponymous space rock, and forces the President to put the town under quarantine.

To list all of the characters in the play-within-the-broadcast-within-the-film would a fool's errand, since most of them—from a school teacher (played by Maya Hawke), to a musical cowboy (played by Rupert Friend), to a motel owner (played by Steve Carell) with larger real-estate ambitions that he sells from a vending machine—are extraneous, only adding more personality to matters. Then again, that might make them necessary, since so much of the main story is about the odd personalities and off-kilter humor on display.

The central characters, though, can be whittled down to Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer and recent widower who only tells his four children that their mother has died after Stanley (Tom Hanks), his father-in-law, suggests it might be a good idea to do so. The now-grieving-all-together family has come to Asteroid City, bright and richly colored like a painted panoramic postcard, so that teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) can participate in the science competition.

While the kid makes friends with other genius-level teenagers, Augie starts regular conversations and an affair with his motel neighbor Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a famous actress. By the way, Midge, in the play, is played by an actress who has a tumultuous relationship with the play's director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), who lives backstage while his marriage collapses.

There's really no avoiding how much the making of the play comes to figure into all of this. That's especially so when Conrad's relationship with the actor playing Augie and the playwright's ultimate fate, while the show is in the middle of its run, add a layer of melancholy and existential confusion to the on-stage tale. It goes beyond that, in fact, since the climax of the film has one character breaking at least two fourth walls because the climax of the play seems so insignificant compared to the real-life issues surrounding the production.

All of this does add up to something, although putting that idea in plain terms might risk making it come across as trite. One can feel it, though, by the end of Asteroid City, and that's an accomplishment, considering how many of the film's little stories are shortchanged by Anderson's more significant ambitions.

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