Wes Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City, tells a story about a small city that experiences an extraterrestrial event in the desert that connects Nevada, California, and Arizona. Within this story, you’ll find all of Anderson’s trademarks. Symmetrically composed frames within frames littered with identifiable faces and recognizable voices puppeteered around a massive sandbox. Unlike most of Wes Anderson’s features, Asteroid City feels less like a diorama or dollhouse and more like a playground. Although intimately tethered to the characters that inhabit the space he’s created, the camera is given the freedom to roam around the setting.
Starring a cast of Wes Anderson favorites: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, and Jeff Goldblum, Asteroid City welcomes the talents of Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, and Margot Robbie as additional sparklers alongside a cast of bottle rockets.
Wes’ symmetrical rule of threes is the exoskeleton of his style. The youthful woods of Moonrise Kingdom, a fascist avalanche in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and the page-turning ‘zine of The French Dispatch are worlds that could only come from his mind. These visual sets that defy so many American film standards allow Anderson to explore them as he sees fit because it exists as a physical backbone for the drama that is in the heart of his cast. Mileage may vary as his humor and emotional lobs can be airmailed from time to time, but Wes’ craftsmanship, ambition, and style are vividly rich and artistically complex at his most articulate and assembled in nearly a decade.
Framed through a meta-textual lens that posits Asteroid City as a stage play, Wes uses this as a doorway into three-dimensional storytelling. He observes the world in the vein of network television the likes of I Love Lucy. Here, he plants the seeds of the creative process and uses it to develop his story into the theatrical telling of Asteroid City. In an eye-popping edit, Wes transposes his film into a full-screen blast of color hooked to a train that cuts through the desert with food, cars, and a nuclear warhead in tow. This edit forces the audience to realign their expectations of the film through the framework that Wes has established as the context to the unknowing progression of events in a story where he makes contact with extraterrestrial life.
When in the pastel-coated interiors of Asteroid City, Wes moves the camera around the playground as if he had an infinite amount of space to discover the interior of his characters. It’s a less traditional choice within his filmography, but it gives the film a broad breath of room for the characters to live in as they work through their respective grief in the face of a spectacular event. How Anderson chooses to push their seemingly inconsolable grief forward is having them find peace in their passion.
“Use your grief,” Midge Campbell (Johansson) says to Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman) as they rehearse a scene together under quarantine. Augie, a three-week-old widower and war-time photographer, pauses, and for just a moment his eyes gloss over with a thin veil of tears as he tries to verbalize himself. Could it be the thought of his wife or the pictures from the war that washed over him? The answer can’t be solved, but what Anderson does provoke is the thought that the emotional distance that separates the famous actress and widowed photographer is a mutual understanding of their grief being the basis for trying to understand what is often misunderstood by others.
So that when something as spectacular as an unexpected visit from an alien interrupts their progression, their grief suddenly shrinks within the scope of the universe. This broadens the text of the film and Anderson can lather the film with a deeper meaning of finding an artistic release from experiencing a moment as powerful as that. The arrival of this alien inspires the creative cogs of children to share how this moment shapes their youth. For the adults, it stretches them to their limits and pounces on the metaphorical bearings of channeling uncertainty into their respective forms of artistic release.
As far as storytelling concepts go, the added breaks and novelized form should distract from Wes’ thesis but it is deeply informative of the images and people of “Asteroid City” we are trying to process. Their motivations provoke questions, and their existence equally so, but is that not an analog for the alien they’ve faced?
Despite how coordinated Wes Anderson’s images are, his characters often feel emotionally detached from the world. This disengagement allows Wes’ actors to discover the truth of their characters’ stories themselves. Wes creates a fascinating, rich connection to his films when the emotional lob lands with an explosive dunk. In Asteroid City, Wes articulates that the creators (storytellers) of the world visualize, harmonize, construct, and act their way through the uncertainty of grief by projecting their anxieties into the only world where it makes sense. Through this, we feel that connection between the observer and observed grow into an understanding that no longer feels ‘alien’ but is unbelievably human.
In the last few weeks, I’ve felt dissociated from my own world. Like I’m wandering through the Arizona desert in the dead heat trying to find a bypass that’ll get me to where I want to be, but it’s nothing for miles and miles. I spend most of my days with no answer about where I may be going. There’s an early beat in Asteroid City where a comedically short and incomplete highway is shut down, and the only way out of “Asteroid City” is to go through it. In the context that Wes built within the framework of his story, the stages of grief are a reassuring metaphor of multi-dimensional storytelling that tells me to continue working through the process of my uncertainty with what I’m trying to create. There isn’t always going to be a complete highway to avoid the reality of the situation.
Asteroid City is an immaculate film with an emotional crater and a heart the size of an asteroid that utilizes multiple forms of storytelling to contextualize why we seek to create and what we hope to get out of it. That thought is profoundly universal and uniquely tied to our respective experiences as an observer of cinematic surrogates that is incredibly respectful to our existence as humans on this rock with emotion that invades our processes with a validating burst of metaphorical melancholy.
Keep telling your story. You are a constellation with a name and a story behind it no matter how deep that crater goes.