Jason Schwartzman is Augie Steenbeck and Tom Hanks is Stanley Zak in a scene from "Asteroid City." Photo courtesy of Focus Features.
Leave it to Wes Anderson to turn a story about an alien encounter and turn it into a study of the human condition.
But that description makes “Asteroid City,” the “Grand Budapest Hotel” auteur's eleventh feature, sound stuffy and off-putting, much like the film's trailers came across as a by-the-numbers pastiche of his previous efforts. Rest assured, the finished product is nothing of the sort. It's playful, loopy, endlessly inventive, awash in the creative approach to cinema that has been the Texan filmmaker's signature from his early work in the 1990s.
Grace Edwards as Dinah Campbell and Scarlett Johansson is Midge Campbell in a scene from "Asteroid City." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
This time, Anderson turns back the clock to September 1955. The setting is the titular location, a desert town (population: 87) located where Nevada, California and Arizona come together, named for the crater where a meteor landed in 3007 B.C.E. The junior stargazers convention that celebrates this event gives the director a chance to explore a wide array of interpersonal relationships.
There's brooding, grieving Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), who stops by the local garage to see if the local mechanic (Matt Dillon) can fix his broken down station wagon. Oh, and, by the way, he hasn't gotten around to telling his children that their mom has died, much to the chagrin of his father-in-law Stanley (a silver-haired Tom Hanks). There's June Douglas (“Stranger Things'” Maya Hawke), the God-fearing schoolmarm tasked with supervising a group of students on a school trip. There's The Ranch Hands, a country band led by the dashing Montana (Rupert Friend), who injects some Western flavor and homespun wisdom into the proceedings.
Most mysterious in this film about the deep mysteries of the universe and the human psyche is the presence of Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a movie star with shades of Janet Leigh and Kim Novak, with her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) in tow.
The stacked cast also includes Tilda Swinton as a scientist who sees great potential in Woodrow (Jake Ryan), Augie's son, as well as Steve Carell as a motel manager who sees real estate opportunities in the stretch of desert surrounding the town, and Jeffrey Wright (so good in “The French Dispatch”) as an Army general who is truly weirded out by the strange turn of events that befalls these people whose lives intersect in expected and unexpected ways.
The breadth of the cast may seem overwhelming, but one of the pleasures of “Asteroid City” is seeing the actors deliver their lines with deadpan precision. Their rat-tat-tat delivery recalls the Golden Age comedies of Howard Hawks. Every breath, inflection and pause is expertly calibrated, which also brings to mind the films of Joel and Ethan Coen.
Anderson extends that calculated fastidiousness to the movie's meticulous design. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, shooting on film, has crafted a look that's at once bleached out and filled with rich, saturated hues. (Unlike Disney's live-action “Little Mermaid,” this is a very good use of pastels.) Part of the fun is watching the actors fill the screen in sunbaked widescreen compositions, as well as those rigorous camera pans that help map out the town. (Spain stands in for the American West.)
Bryan Cranston is The Host in a scene from "Asteroid City." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
But what truly brings “Asteroid City” to life is how Anderson juxtaposes the “movie” scenes with its framing device, revealing the scenes out in the desert to be the director's rendition of a stage play. The wraparound sequences, shot in black and white in a more compact aspect ratio, introduce us to a TV host (Bryan Cranston, channeling Rod Serling), Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the playwright who conjured “Asteroid City” into existence as a piece of theater, and Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), who is directing that piece of theater.
In perhaps the film's more beguiling scene, Schwartzman, playing the actor who would go on to play Augie on stage, reads for Earp, and an audition scene organically morphs into a discreetly rendered (and rather wholesome) seduction. Schwartzman, an Anderson regular since “Rushmore,” knocks it out of the park; he's never been better. How's that for a perfectly timed wink to moviegoers on Pride Month?
Fisher Stevens is Detective #1, Jeffrey Wright is General Grif Gibson and Tony Revolori is Aide-de-Camp in a scene from "Asteroid City." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
You usually feel Anderson's wheels spinning, but what sets “Asteroid City” is how relaxed and effortless the film feels, despite all the disparate elements, despite the parallel narratives, despite the meta dimensions shuttling between Anderson's curlicued aesthetic and his depiction of actorly strife at a time when Method acting is on the rise.
His mise en scene game is next-level, resulting in what I'm pretty sure is, if not his best film to date, most definitely my favorite live-action Anderson feature. (“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” his sublime foray into stop motion animation adapting Roald Dahl's children's book, is still sitting pretty on top.) Nowhere in sight is the mean violent streak that has marred some of his best-known work. (Who portrays a family dog's freak-accident death for dry laughs, anyway?)
Scarlett Johansson is Midge Campbell in a scene from "Asteroid City." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
With “Asteroid City,” Anderson has created a playground for his excellent ensemble cast, and in the process has delivered a gift for movie lovers, especially movie lovers who are tired of summertime's CGI onslaught. In this otherworldly Atomic Age setting, it's the characters' humanity — vulnerable, questioning, just looking for a close encounter, of any kind — that launches this winner into orbit. It makes you look up in wonder.
“Asteroid City” is now showing at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, and other South Florida movie theaters including Regal Cinemas South Beach, Silverspot Cinema in downtown Miami, Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas in Coconut Grove and Cinema Paradiso Hollywood.
