There’s a certain inevitability that, upon the arrival of a new Wes Anderson film, critics and viewers will start referring to it as the “Most” Wes Anderson movie ever made, and Asteroid City is no exception to this. In truth, Anderson hasn’t evolved much, at least stylistically, since Moonrise Kingdom took the aesthetics of Fantastic Mr. Fox and applied them to a live-action narrative. There are two distinct periods in Anderson’s career, with his best film, The Life Aquatic, acting as a bridge between them (I would argue the reason The Darjeeling Limited was so comparatively rough to the rest of his filmography was that it was the work of an evolved filmmaker trying to make a movie he was no longer really interested in making). He abandoned quirky portrayals of quasi-modern life (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums) in order to delve deep into the past. Perhaps it’s because there’s more there that’s thematically interesting for him, perhaps it’s because he became conscious of the cliché, or perhaps it’s the fact that the modern expressions of “style” are so far removed and comparatively austere that it paints his talents in a more negative light than is warranted, but Anderson’s live-action work has become a survey of various decades, at their supposed high-water marks and at the precipice of great change, using his exaggerated aestheticism to contrast his fictions with reality.
Asteroid City, then, is him presenting this to us in a paradoxical fashion: It’s the most obvious he’s been with regard to the intentions behind his generational catalogs, yet it may also be his most personal work, obscured behind its forked structure. On one side, you have Asteroid City, a perfectly rendered Wes Anderson film, full of vivid color, presented in widescreen, with its frames stacked with famous faces (after all, Anderson is the DJ Khaled of arthouse cast assembly, though he does his own producing), offering a tableau of precisely American feelings about a period in the U.S.’s history that is known for being one of the most iconic in its design. That portion of the film is presented to us as a fabulous fiction, a play penned by the central character at the heart of the other side of Asteroid City, which is an episode of a Golden Age of Television-era broadcast program, documenting the play’s production and the travails of its Tennessee Williams-like author.
The play-within-the-show functions similarly to Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance: representations of ‘50s Americana are gathered together in supposed isolation, with a catalyst forcing them to interact. There’s a Marilyn Monroe-type, played to perfection by Scarlett Johannson; a Douglas MacArthur wannabe general (Jeffery Wright, who remains the greatest addition to Anderson’s casts), a prim-and-proper schoolteacher (Maya Hawke), a grizzled mechanic (Matt Dillon) and a cowboy plucked straight from your average episode of Gunsmoke (Rupert Everett). Some are tangential figures, acting as era-appropriate role players to buffet your typical Anderson protagonists: a failing family unit dragged into conflict by a shared journey. The patriarch, a Robert Capa-style war photographer (Jason Schwarzman), has used his whiz-kid son’s science fair trip — held in the town of Asteroid City, in the middle of nowhere out in the Southwest — as a way of informing his son (and three witchy daughters, who essentially emerge from Baby Macbeth) that his mother, after a prolonged illness, died a few weeks before the events of the film. His grizzled father-in-law (Tom Hanks, slotting well into the kind of role Gene Hackman might have killed) resents him but is forced to join them out in the desert after the family’s car breaks down and strands them. And hey, everybody might check out what these kids have been up to, right?
Again, this is a fictional tale within the film itself: The “real” story is presented to us by Bryan Cranston, the Rod Serling-esque host of this black-and-white anthology program, documenting its inception and construction. We’re presented with canned vignettes from the life of Conrad Earp (Ed Norton, relishing a really good role after years of detritus), as he writes the play and begins to put it into production. It’s full of hinted struggles: The difficulties involved in bringing it to the stage are only hinted at; aside from Earp, his lead actors (Schwarzman and Johannson); his director (Adrian Brody) is a workaholic who has taken to living on the sets at the theater to distract him from his collapsing marriage; and the play itself is proving absurdly difficult to figure out. The scene at the heart of the whole thing — text and metatext — occurs when Earp visits a Stanislavski-esque acting teacher (Willem Dafoe) and his afternoon class and asks them to brainstorm with him a particular kind of situation: He wants his cast of characters to act as if they were emerging from a dark, dank sleep, in which they all share a kind of collective revelation.
I’m not going to reveal how this manifests in the play (though it may be one of the funniest bits that Anderson has ever put to film), but it is spectacular: An era-appropriate glimpse of the fantastic that forces one to reevaluate their priors as if it were a beam of light on the road to Tarsus. Earp and company, however, remain enigmatic: As the dream manifests in the play, the curtains begin to close in the “real” world. The realities never totally merge — that would be obvious in a way that Anderson wishes to avoid — but they do inform each other in a gorgeously tragic way. What we’re witnessing is a final product, with its self-contained narrative and open-ended hopes, that exists in opposition to the bleak melancholy that exists outside of it. The contrasts between the two form a kind of revelation about how Anderson sees himself and sees his films, perhaps in an even more obvious way than we witnessed in The French Dispatch, where the implication is that the stories we’re watching are the way they are because of their now-deceased editor’s involvement. They illustrate his talent and, to paraphrase James Jones, let us feel the lack of his presence. It takes a similar tact, but we’re confronted with the obviousness of it: The clean and delightful transcendence within “Asteroid City” is a comfort to its comparatively bleak counterpart. It is, to say the least, the least Wes Anderson way to interpret this, the most Wes Anderson of moments.
There’s a pervasive melancholy at the core of all of Anderson’s work, even in his films for children, which has gone somewhat unaddressed within each successive release until now. I don’t mean in the specific ways he’s crafted a kind of romantic depression in a given scene — as potent as a Nico or Elliott Smith needle-drop is in context, they’re only a part of the tonal composition of a localized moment of pain — but rather at the core of his whole ethos. Like a number of filmmakers, Anderson presents to us worlds that he wishes he could live in, informed by the real and represented by their analogs, and for the first time, he’s acknowledged the tragic burden at the heart of this type of creation. His fables and fantasies are aesthetic delights presented to us to dive deep into, to draw inspiration from, and to be moved by. But they are not reality. No matter how much one could wish they could hop into those frames, we cannot, and I think this helps to explain exactly why he journeyed into the past as a kind of insularity against realist cynicism. His work became explicitly fabulous so that his films could exist in a genuinely unrealistic form, letting them accumulate layers of pathos, even as they became more foreign to our present yet universal in their meaning. That’s why I see Owen Wilson’s death in Life Aquatic to be the pivot point: At that point, Anderson stopped making movies for “adults” and made them for the 12-and-a-half-year-olds within them so that they might fully comprehend the beauty and tragedy of something like Asteroid City with open, wanting hearts.