Wes Anderson, "Asteroid City," and the Magic of the Moving Image

The genius of Wes Anderson lies in his ability to transport is us to strange and beautiful new cinematic worlds.

I’ve long loved the work of Wes Anderson, ever since I saw The Royal Tenenbaums as an undergraduate. Since then, I’ve dipped into his oeuvre every few years and, while I have by no means seen all of his features, I’ve seen enough that I have a good sense of his idiosyncratic (but undoubtedly meticulous) visual style. I’ve also seen enough to know that, with some notable exceptions–The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel among them–I don’t usually feel a great deal of emotional investment in his stories or his characters. 

This isn’t to say that I don’t love the Wes Anderson experience. I always look forward to seeing his films, and I find myself laughing out loud at his unique wit. However, for me the greatest appeal of the Anderson style is its ability to craft a world that I would want to spend some more time in, one that isn’t free from the emotional and physical burdens of reality–people die, struggle with grief and ennui and depression, and see their lives fall apart in sometimes spectacular fashion–but that is still far enough removed from our own that I don’t feel like I’m watching these things happen to people that I actually know. I do care about them, of course, but in general I watch Anderson’s films with a more abstracted air than is usual for me.  

Which brings us to Asteroid City. 

The film is, unsurprisingly, a nesting doll. On the one hand there’s the story about the composition of a famous play, which is displayed in boxy black-and-white. On the other is the play itself, which is shown in widescreen and beautiful, enchanting color. In both cases the are the requisite Anderson weirdos, whether it’s the idiosyncratic playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the mourning war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), or the group of nerds who gather together for the science camp that is the setting for the play’s action. 

As with every other Anderson film, Asteroid City is quite simply gorgeous to look at. There is a slickness to the black-and-white sequences that reminds of you the best that classical Hollywood had to offer (it is shot in Academy ratio), after all, and there’s a nervous energy to many of its sequences that keep you riveted. Adrien Brody particularly excels in these moments, portraying Schubert Green, the director of the play. What’s more, there is also a powerful sense of elegy to these sequences, and I think that the scene on the balcony–in which Jones Hall, the actor portraying Augie, chats briefly with the actress originally slated to play his wife before the scene was ultimately excised–is one of the most beautifully staged and emotionally authentic moment in the entire film. 

It’s in the make-believe world of the play, however, that we are truly immersed in a phantasmagoric world of color and beauty. Like Dorothy swept away from the sepia-toned Kansas to the Technicolor fantasy world of Oz, we’re invited to sit back and enjoy the exquisite visual artistry that Wes Anderson has commanded for our visual benefit. Just as in classical Hollywood, color here is meant to convey the power of escapism, of leaving behind the mundane world of the everyday–and of the black-and-white television special–and going somewhere (and somewhen) else. The world of Asteroid City the play is one in which the imagination can have free rein and where anything, even a visitation by a strange alien, can happen. 

Beneath all of the quippy dialogue and confectionary visuals, however, there’s a deep well of sadness. This finds its most poignant expression in Scarlett Johansson’s Midge Campbell, who has what critic Glenn Kenny has referred to as a “free-floating melancholy,” who seems more than a little adrift. For all that she has clearly attained significant fame as an actress, she seems unmoored from the world around her. This makes her perfect for Augie who, as we learn very early on, is grappling with the death of his wife and the fact that he has to relate this knowledge to his children. The two find a sort of bond in their ennui and borderline despair, though it seems that it means more to Augie than it does to Midge. As so often in Anderson’s film, human connection is a fleeting and ephemeral thing, as prone to dissolution and as the fictional worlds he creates.

And then, of course, there’s the alien itself. Even now, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this particular interlude in the film, except to say that it is yet another facet of Anderson’s career-long concern with the absurdities of our lives. Its two appearances are remarkably brief, but they are staged in such a way that you can’t help but laugh, both at the ridiculousness of the moment or at the responses of all of those who have gathered to see a rare celestial event but instead find themselves confronting the wonder of extraterrestrial life.

Asteroid City is, to be sure, one of the more meta of Anderson’s films, constantly calling attention to its own identity as a construct and a contrivance. It moves frequently between the act of the play and the circumstances of its creation, and this serves as yet another means by which viewers can lose themselves in this strange world. Rather than trying to figure out where one begins and the other ends, Anderson constantly asks us to just let go of our preconceived notions of narrative and logic and embrace the madness that can only come from the moving image.

All in all, I very much enjoyed Asteroid City. At first when I walked out of the theater I wasn’t sure that I was going to have much to say about it other than that I wasn’t bored. The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to realize that the real magic of Wes Anderson lies in his ability to capture that elusive quality which I can only call, somewhat banally, “the magic of the movies.” When you watch an Anderson film you can, for a brief time at least, simply let go and stare at those beautiful people up there on the screen and sometimes, that’s really all you need.