Writer and Director Wes Anderson has a new film out. “Asteroid City” is a movie about a TV show about a play, with the television footage shown as black and white and fitting in a square frame. The movie uses whimsical sub-headings and it cuts back and forth between events in the play and elsewhere.
Sound confusing? Well, Anderson is one of our half dozen best movie-makers. He’ll make sure you get the point. In fact, he’ll even handicap himself further by including a large cast of known actors in the movie’s several concurrent stories, and will still arrange things so that we still get what the movie is saying.
His cast includes Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Steve Carrell, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Matt Dillon, Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, and so on for three columns. Jeff Goldblum, who appears totally disguised as the alien, is partly controlled by a puppeteer.
Each of these actors appears in at least one of the movie’s concurrent stories. The events begin in 1955 when photographer Augie (Schwartzman) and his four children arrive in the small desert town so that his son, who is older than the trio of girls, can participate in the Junior Stargazer gathering with four other young teens. They have the childrens’ mother’s ashes in a Tupperware container.
Their wood paneled station wagon breaks down. Augie calls his father-in-law (Hanks) to come and take the girls away until the convention is over. With the other parents (including Johansson), Augie’s family checks into a small motel run by a bait-and-switch specialist (Carrell) who has, among his vending machines, one that sells partial land rights to nearby desert land.
The town is only there because of a local meteorite crater. With nothing else to do, the adults begin to pair off. Then, during a ceremony at the crater, they all see a space ship come down, and an alien come out and grab the meteorite. The government steps in, sending soldiers to guard the area and therapists to study the witnesses. But the alien comes back.
And about then Augie has a break before his next scene in the play. So he walks off the set and finds the play’s director, mean Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), and talks about his failure to understand his play character. That’s just one example of this highly self-conscious entertainment slipping out of what we would ordinarily think of as standard narrative form and going back to questions about creativity.
Questions the movie is unwilling to answer. What Anderson seems sure about here is that we expect too much of experts, perhaps especially scientists, who seem to be guiding us on the basis of tentative understandings. The elementary school teacher goes on with old lesson plans after her students have unanswerable questions about the alien, for example.
Nor does the government seem to have Anderson’s confidence. The general (Wright) closes the barn door after the horse is out, quarantining those who were in town at the time of the alien’s appearance. One of the soldiers is duped by the Junior Stargazers, who use his unwitting help to send Augie’s photo of the alien out to a newspaper.
So “Asteroid City,” a movie made in 2021, comments on some of our recent shared experiences. It is a little surprising that the usually gentle Anderson can have made something so close to a political statement. But the real question is, is this new film as rewarding for the audience as were his earlier movies “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel”?
