Review: 'Asteroid City' Is One of Wes Anderson's Very Best Movies

By Jason Adams | Film | June 22, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | June 22, 2023 |

Despite the typical busy-ness of its cast of one thousand capital-C characters and its telescopic meta structure and its Wile E. Coyote cartoon aesthetic, the mournful heart of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City feels akin to a lonesome cowpoke whistling a small, sad ditty into the great echoing canyon nothingness of a desert at sunset. Like so many of Anderson’s pictures, Asteroid City is steeped in a profound sorrow. And all the fireworks otherwise on display, both visual and performative, are simply the sleeves where the magician hides his magic. It is, to put it gently, one of Wes Anderson’s very best movies to date—rich, gorgeous, unforgettable.

Bridging the gap between this summer’s big tentpole contenders Barbie and Oppenheimer, Asteroid City has all the color and quirk of the former set against all of the atomic blasts of the latter. A town of several dozen somewhere in the American Southwest, Asteroid City is just close enough to the U.S. Government’s nuclear testing site so a vacationing war photographer can safely grab a cheeseburger at the local diner and snap a photo of a mushroom cloud at the exact same time. Five stars for Yelp!

And so it goes for Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a vacationing war photographer who’s rolled into town with his brainiac son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) for a small interstellar convention of Space Cadets who’ve won various ribbons and sashes for something special which they’ve invented. (Woodrow’s invention is an optical projector that can shoot images onto the surface of the Moon.) Named after a basketball-sized rock that fell from the stars several thousand years ago, the cranny called Asteroid City is basically five buildings situated around a large crater. But it’s perfect for this convention’s purposes.

Fortuitously Augie’s station wagon breaks down just as he, his son, and his three daughters—Andromeda, Pandora, and Cassiopeia, played by Ella, Gracie, and Willan Faris—make it to the local servicing station. It’s good news for the boys, as this was their final destination, but the girls are gonna need their grandpa Stanley (Tom Hanks) to come and get them. And then there’s the deal with their missing mother and the mystery of those ashes in the powder-blue tupperware container…

Of course those are just five of the many, many characters we meet—the convention is bringing in dozens more, including a movie star named Midge Campbell (Scarlet Johannson) and her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), and a schoolteacher June (Maya Hawke) with an entire busload of intrepid gingham-coordinated adolescents. Not to mention the tagalong singing cowboy named Montana (Rupert Friend), head-to-boot in denim, who keeps batting his fancy eyelashes in June’s general direction.

And there’s the many townsfolk too, led by Steve Carell as the motel manager and Matt Dillon as the confounded car mechanic. Plus one Tilda Swinton as Dr. Hickenlooper, a thick-browed serious-type in a lab-coat who heads the local science center and operates an enormous telescope that will come in handy once the stars start moving around seemingly of their own volition.

Steeped in a very particular sense of mid century Americana, the world of Asteroid City is Route 66 nostalgia run amok. Painted canyons and motor lodges, pop-caps and flying saucers and cowboys and Coca-Cola, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean—the film is set during September of 1955, the same month when Dean crashed his car and died, and there’s no way that’s coincidence. (Schwartzman actually reenacts a famous pose of Dean’s at one point.) Anderson and his as-ever top-tier collaborators again fashion the Platonic Ideal of every single thing that they turn their cameras upon—the fetishized details of a radio dial will make you weep with pleasure.

But the movie is so much more than that. Literally, as well as emotionally, since everything I just told you about the film’s story is only one layer of its being. Stepping a bit backward Asteroid City opens upon a TV stage, where a black-and-white Bryan Cranston explains to us that everything we’re about to witness is a televised play. And so, in moments interspersed among the main action, we keep returning to the “real” black-and-white world to meet the actors playing all of our characters; where we meet the writer (Edward Norton) of the play and the director (Adrien Brody) as well.

Asteroid City turns out to be boxes inside boxes inside boxes—at one point the characters of Asteroid City (the play) put cardboard boxes on their heads in order to witness an astronomical anomaly through pinholes and mirrors, and more of a wink wink nudge nudge as to Wes Anderson’s intentions we might never get. Indeed in many ways Asteroid City feels like a key text to understanding Anderson’s beautiful madness—the characters give several speeches about their inability to connect directly with the world in front of them, and actors desperately seek out the answers to motivations for their character’s irrational, and thereby deeply human, behaviors. To the point where they break the fourth wall, literally, and start stepping through a stage door that suddenly appears on the side of the crater. It’s Bergman-esque existential disorientation by way of Mel Brooks.

The yawning canyon between our outer and inner selves has never felt more cunning than it does in Anderson’s fingers here—we become so dizzied trying to keep track of these meta-textual layers of artifice that the very act of grasping for meaning through a miasma of inexplicable signs and cornball gags becomes paramount. Against an alien invasion and a militarized quarantine and a full-scale riot with laser guns, it’s ultimately the simple image of two lovers’ sets of initials projected onto the Moon amid the madness that gives us our meaning. A cacophony of goofiness sliced down its center by one grand act of sincerity and simple sentiment. To see nothing but superficial style in the world of Wes Anderson is to miss the stars, endless and eternal, that it’s all imperfectly etched upon.