The Remarkable Power of Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Lies In the Intimidating Weight of Grief

About 5,000 years ago, a small asteroid impacted a part of the United States useful mainly for driving through and testing nuclear weapons, creating an impact crater large enough to hold small assemblies. It was just another roadside attraction, around which grew a diner, gas station/mechanic, phone booth and a motor inn. “Asteroid City,” it’s called, but it’s not much of a city. Once a year, a science fair is held there, the winner of which receives a scholarship check for $5,000. Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) is on his way to that science fair with his eldest Woodrow (Jake Ryan) who has invented a device that allows him to project small phrases and images onto the surface of the moon. Augie has a secret he’s keeping from his kids: his wife, their mother, has died, three weeks previous from a terrible and protracted illness, and he hasn’t found the right time to tell them. There is no good time. 

Woodrow has three little sisters, triplets each named after a Greek mythological figure and their celestial counterpart: Pandora, Cassiopeia and Andromeda (Grace, Willan and Ella Faris). When the kindly waitress at the diner calls them “princesses,” they object that they are, respectively, a vampire, an Egyptian mummy who’s had their head chopped off and has now returned to life, and a fairy. They’re that kind of family, the kind J.D. Salinger would have essayed, well-educated and bourgeois, geniuses perhaps, and fallen on hard times, emotionally closed off, frozen in an amber extruded from their grief and their own unmet expectations. They’re the Tenenbaums of my favorite of Wes Anderson’s films The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), essentially. Maybe it’s no accident, then, how Asteroid City, Anderson’s latest, is my favorite film of his since, a film that’s helping me give shape to my grief for my mother’s recent death the way The Royal Tenenbaums helped me to contextualize my father’s death in 2003. 

I haven’t connected with many of Anderson’s films after The Darjeeling Limited (2007), the last of his films dealing with difficult relationships with estranged or dead fathers in a way that pierced me so truly, formulated my sense of loss so precisely, that I’ve found myself emptied out to the point of exhaustion after watching them. I think my disappointment with his subsequent films was enhanced by my hope to find more of the cathartic release I used to find in Anderson — that allowed me to see his meticulous artifice as a means of delivery of a shocking emotional payload rather than a distraction or, worse, some hollow indulgence serving only an arcane solipsistic purpose. I admired their craft, but I didn’t get it. Sometimes, as was the case with The French Dispatch, I liked some of it without feeling like there was a coherent emotional impulse driving it. Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough. Maybe I hadn’t experienced enough. Asteroid City hit me at exactly the right place in my life, a year after my mom died on Mother’s Day, following a long and terrible illness. 

I had an awful relationship with her. I know I was a bad son to her. My family, my wife and kids, tended to her at the end when I found myself paralyzed at the thought of being rejected by her at the end of this journey together. It was the defining element of our relationship, repeated at key moments in my life, and I didn’t have the courage to take another hit. I am held together with duct tape and chicken wire. I don’t have any excuses. She died and I didn’t say goodbye. I feel like I’ve been mourning her for most of my life, but the first time I have cried for her was about thirty minutes into Asteroid City when a movie actress named Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) takes off her dark sunglasses to reveal a bad shiner. “Who hit you?” Augie asks her. “Nobody,” she says, it’s not real, she’s painted it on with greasepaint to better understand what a character she’s rehearsing is feeling. “How did she get a black eye, in the story?” Augie asks, and Midge says “she doesn’t in the story… it’s on the inside.” She pauses and Anderson starts to move his camera away from this small scene when she says, under her breath, “supposed to be, anyway.”

Johansson is my favorite American actor working today, and performances like this one are the reason why. She knows what she looks like and she takes roles in films like Her where she never appears, or Under the Skin where her appearance is a literal shell, to challenge the expectations burdening her because of her physical appearance. Her Midge is viscerally sad and lonesome and years after our estrangement, I’m just now beginning to understand why my mom and I couldn’t heal. How do you heal wounds that aren’t… “real?”, wounds that are “on the inside” — even if they manifest in physical ways for everyone else to see? I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question.

How do you heal wounds that aren’t… “real?”, wounds that are “on the inside” — even if they manifest in physical ways for everyone else to see? I don’t even know how to begin to answer that question.

Augie and Midge are just players themselves in a live television play-within-the-film of Asteroid City, a production like the late lamented “Playhouse 90” or “Kraft Television Theater,” written by gay playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). At a point near the end, Augie steps off stage to find his director Schubert Green (Adrien Brody) to express a sudden panicked fit of self-doubt. He says “I feel lost… he’s such a wounded guy, I feel like my heart is getting broken, my own personal heart, every night. Do I just keep doing it?” Green says he should. “Without knowing anything?” Green says yes. “Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of answer… I still don’t understand the play.” Green tells him it doesn’t matter. He says “Just keep telling the story.”

This is the second time I cried for the loss of my mother in the fourteen months since her death, in the years since the mortal diagnosis of her disease and her refusal of treatment, in the decades of misunderstanding and distance and abuse. This is the beginning of my ability to grieve for us, this diseased and pathetic thing that shadowed us from when she stopped telling me she loved me to when I believed she stopped feeling it, too. I know she had her own monster, the one where she felt her little boy go away. I keep doing the same things every day from memory. I have lost the reasons I started doing them in the first place. I need reassurance I’m a good person. My heart is broken. Asteroid City is about how at a certain point, telling our story is the last and the best thing anyone can do. We are all ancient mariners, stopping guests on their way into the rest of their lives to tell them dire stories we don’t understand ourselves.

What does matter, though, in the catalog of my personal tragedies, the warehouses of my shortcomings, the museums of the people and places I’ve lost on display in my memory and gathering dust, is how great, often oblique, always beautiful pieces of personal art can contextualize my failures into a familiar experience rather than a personal one. The Royal Tenenbaums is a farce on its surface, a clockwork of curated needle drops and metered performances that mysteriously coalesce into real empathy and connections that destroy me still. “I’ve had a tough year,” one of the grown sons of that piece tells his new stepfather and, with great seriousness and tenderness, his stepfather tells him he knows. In Asteroid City, Augie says to Midge that he doesn’t like the way a stranger has looked at them as though they were doomed. Midge, who has just performed a scene where her character kills herself, thinks about it for a second and says “maybe we are.” Augie burns his hand, then, on purpose on a little stove and Midge says “You really did it. That actually happened!” and looks around for a stage manager to intervene with first aid for this actor whose real heart is being broken. Augie had asked the playwright Earp why his character does that earlier in the picture and then answers his own question by saying that maybe his heart is beating so fast for no reason that he does it so that he has a reason for it. But now it’s not clear if it’s the character in the play doing it, or the actor playing him. There really isn’t a difference, you know. Sometimes I hurt myself so there’s a reason I can point to for the sad state of my heart. 

If Anderson had only made The Royal Tenenbaums and then, 20 years later, returned to make Asteroid City, he would have somehow framed the exact span between my father’s death and my mother’s. One of Augie’s daughters, after she finally is told of her mother’s death, asks if the children are now orphans and Augie, laughing uneasily, says no because he’s still alive. But it doesn’t seem like he’s alive. I was orphaned last year and if everything works out exactly how we hope it will, everyone’s parents will one day orphan their children. If the world is merciful, I will break my children’s heart. The hope is your parents don’t orphan you before they die.

There are other great moments in Asteroid City, and characters, too, like the scientist Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton) who meets a brilliant child who gives her insight into her studies and realizes for the first time that she regrets not having had children of her own. Or the Motel Manager (Steve Carell) who explains how one of the vending machines lining his business dispenses deeds to half-a-tennis-court sized plots of arid land stretching between them and the nuclear testing grounds visible by their mushroom clouds off against the horizon. We’re doomed. Our time is short.

But for all the strong moments in the piece, the remarkable power of Asteroid City is the intimidating weight of its grief that reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s poem talking about “a certain Slant of light,/Winter Afternoons – /That oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral tunes – /Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -/We can find no scar,/But internal difference -/Where the Meanings, are -” One thread to pull in the film is its notion of time and how it’s always “wrong” or “bad” and ultimately meaningless. “Look,” says Woodrow when the play is almost done, “it’s the same time again.” Time is supposed to heal all wounds but Augie rejects that notion, so does his dead wife’s father (Tom Hanks) who puts aside his dislike for Augie for a moment in Asteroid City to ask him if he’s alright. Augie’s not and tells him so. Later, the father says that he’s not alright, either. There’s an exchange in The Darjeeling Limited where a widow says something to the same effect about the eternity of grief to her boys about how the father is dead and they’ll never be okay again, but they do have to keep on. And so we do, even when our real hearts are broken and we don’t understand the play. You keep telling the story. That’s what we do.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.